Online Values, Friendships And The Wisdom Of Walter Winchell

When it comes to learning the value of something nowadays, the easiest way is to travel the path of the lax and lazy: list it on eBay, or some other online marketplace, and watch what happens.

For one thing, you can do it from home and in your pajamas, which should be enough to recommend it. Additionally, there’s no gas spent on a trip to some place where you’ll stand with hopeful eyes as you try to decipher the expression of some expert after he breaks out his loupe for the crucial appraisal.

Of course, as an online seller who wants to know what something is worth and is willing to let unseen bidders set the price, it helps if you’re not in a particularly big hurry. Ordinarily, instant gratification is not part of the learning process.

However, after a while, maybe a week, you’ll have your answer in the form of a final bid. Much like the verdict handed down by a jury on “Law & Order,” you might not agree with the decision, but at least you’ll find out what others think about the value of something that belongs to you.

This works with varying degrees of success when the item is something that would be appropriate for a yard sale -- i.e., just about anything a stranger can lift or point to and ask, “How much will you take for it?” -- but the matter becomes a bit more complicated with items that aren’t so tangible.

Friendship is one of them. I got to thinking about this after seeing a spot on the local news, as presented on WABC-TV, about Facebook users who have been “un-friending” others over postings that express the contrariness of their political views.

On Facebook and other social networking sites, people can stockpile their fellow users as “friends” through the simple process of invitation and acceptance called “friending,” which increases access to information about those users. But it’s also an ego boost, depending on the value one places on such a gain.

Personally, I can’t think of stronger proof that after “genius,” no word in the English language has been assaulted by cheapening blows more than the root word of “friendship.” I’ll leave it to others to decide why this is so, as there may be some deep psychological reason for it --- or, at least, one too deep for the likes of me.

But I do know that if my car breaks down while I’m driving on Long Island’s Robert Moses Causeway at 2 a.m., without counting anyone at AAA, I’m going to have a small pool of people to call and I won’t need a social networking site to identify them. As for their value, well, some things in this life are simply known.

Possibly, it’s because I spent more than two decades writing for a newspaper and have a bend in me because of the experience, but with all due respect to Facebook, I prefer the rule of thumb attributed to an old New York newspaperman named Walter Winchell.

Winchell was the country’s first syndicated gossip columnist and he wrote for the New York Daily Mirror, my grandfather’s favorite newspaper, from 1929 until that tabloid closed in 1963.

In his heyday, Walter Winchell was also a big deal as a radio personality, wielding power and influence through his broadcasts for more than 20 years. But that kind of fame belonged to his popularity with a generation that preceded baby boomers like me.

As a kid who watched a lot of television, I mostly knew of Walter Winchell as the narrator of “The Untouchables,” the popular (albeit highly fictionalized) crime drama starring Robert Stack that ran from 1959 to 1963. It was loosely based on federal agent Eliot Ness and his team as they battled Prohibition-era gangsters. Winchell’s speedy staccato made him an ideal choice as narrator.

Much later, when I was reporting on the perpetrators of murder and mayhem, I learned about Winchell’s role in the surrender of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who remains one of the more notorious criminals in New York City’s history.

For all that, however, it’s Winchell’s view on friendship -- given to me years ago on a glazed slab of stone for use as a paperweight -- that has stuck with me.

“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out,” he observed.

Walter Winchell died in 1972, which means he’s been gone longer than the combined years that eBay and Facebook have been in existence. Since he's credited with having created enough slang -- with examples such as "scram" and "pushover" -- to fill a small dictionary, I figure that the same guy who came up with "infanticipating" (for expecting a child) would have approved of "friending" as a word.

But I can only guess whether he would have accepted my Facebook invitation --- or dumped me later on for the crime of posting a contrary opinion.