Our Newsroom Doesn’t Have a Poet Laureate. But This Guy Is Pretty Close.
Tim Torkildson is a retired clown who got the attention of New York Times journalists when he began emailing original limericks to the newsroom several times a week.
Tim Torkildson’s limericks — he calls them “Timericks” — are a familiar sight in the email inboxes of New York Times journalists.
Several times a week, he sends them to 22 journalists, including eight at The Times.
When The Times reported in May that China’s president, Xi Jinping, stood to benefit most from a proposal to cancel sanctions between the United States and North Korea, Mr. Torkildson took to his computer to send his readers this limerick:
The poem is one of approximately 1,000 that Mr. Torkildson estimates he has written for Times reporters over the past four years.
ADVERTISEMENT
“He is often clever and on point regarding human foibles, the press and our current national situation,” said Dennis Overbye, a science reporter at The Times who regularly receives Mr. Torkildson’s poems. Often, Mr. Overbye said, they relate to articles that he has written.
Over the years, Mr. Torkildson has struck up email conversations with several of the journalists he’s written.
“Any acknowledgment from a reporter, even if it's just 'thanks,' makes me feel wonderful,” he said in a phone interview with The Times. “I feel like I've accomplished my goal in life, at least for one day.”
ADVERTISEMENT
At 64, Mr. Torkildson is retired from clowning and lives in Provo, Utah. “I was born different,” he said. “I truly believe I was born to make people laugh.” He was born in Minneapolis; his father was a bartender and his mother a homemaker.
“To them, the best thing in the world was to have a good steady job, even if it was boring,” Mr. Torkildson said.
During his senior year of high school, he applied to and was accepted by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. He said that after his mother called the Better Business Bureau to determine if the school was legitimate, she gave him her blessing.
Then Mr. Torkildson hitchhiked to Venice, Fla., in 1970 to begin what he called “boot camp for funnymen.”
He did not expect to end up with a job. “I was the worst, least funny student they’d ever seen,” he said. “I couldn’t juggle, couldn’t ride a unicycle, my makeup was horrible. I never expected that they’d hire me.”
He did not expect to end up with a job. “I was the worst, least funny student they’d ever seen,” he said. “I couldn’t juggle, couldn’t ride a unicycle, my makeup was horrible. I never expected that they’d hire me.”
But after an audition in front of Irvin Feld, the circus’s owner at the time, in which he accidentally sprayed Mr. Feld with caustic chemicals from a fire extinguisher, he learned that he had been hired.
In 1974, he left the circus to serve as a Mormon missionary. He worked in Thailand under the auspices of the Red Cross, performing his clown show in schools, prisons and other venues.
ADVERTISEMENT
Upon completing his two-year mission, he briefly performed again with Ringling Brothers.
He said he was fired in the late 1970s after an encounter with Michu Meszaros, the so-called World’s Smallest Man, who later went on to portray the title alien in the 1980s sitcom “ALF.” Mr. Meszaros died in 2016.
One morning before Mr. Torkildson went to church, Mr. Meszaros poured beer on his Book of Mormon. Angry, Mr. Torkildson locked Mr. Meszaros in his wardrobe trunk and headed to church.
“In the circus,” he said, “there’s an unwritten rule that you never touch or abuse the little people. I’d crossed the line.” Mr. Meszaros was rescued from the trunk, “madder than a wet hen,” Mr. Torkildson said.
So Mr. Torkildson found himself back in Minneapolis, in urgent need of a new career. He took a vocational course in radio broadcasting that sowed some of the seeds for his unique brand of news poetry.
The course helped him land a job in 1981 as a radio news DJ at KGCX in Williston, N.D., where he met his former wife, Amy.
ADVERTISEMENT
The couple married in the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City and had eight children while Mr. Torkildson tried to adjust to the serious business of being a newscaster. “When I’d try to make my newscasts funny,” he said, “I’d get in trouble, and a couple of times I lost my job.”
For the next decade, Mr. Torkildson worked on and off as a traveling clown and ringleader, and in temp jobs. But his family began to fall apart under the stress of his work schedule. He got divorced and fell behind on his child support, and his mother died.
For the next decade, Mr. Torkildson worked on and off as a traveling clown and ringleader, and in temp jobs. But his family began to fall apart under the stress of his work schedule. He got divorced and fell behind on his child support, and his mother died.
After paying off his child support debt, he moved to Provo, near several of his children, in an effort to see them more often and “see if I could mend some fences,” he said.
“I’m the perfect grandpa,” he said, referring to his clowning abilities. “It’s been slow and it hasn’t been easy, but I am making reconnections with my children.” He said that one way he connects with them is by researching his family’s genealogy through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mr. Torkildson began composing and emailing his limericks in 2014.
One of his early recipients was Lizette Alvarez, a former New York Times Miami bureau chief. She shared some of his poems with her husband, Don Van Natta, Jr., the editor of The Sunday Long Read and a former Times correspondent.
“Tim was sending her limericks off Florida news stories; Lizette thought they were fun and funny and she’d share some with me,” Mr. Van Natta said in an email. “He has a particularly sharp eye for stories that skew writers and editors.”
Mr. Torkildson now serves as senior limerick editor for the online edition of The Sunday Long Read. To craft his news poetry, he reads four newspapers online daily and, depending on what stories strike his fancy, constructs a limerick or two.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I usually choose my stories by first going to Google news and entering keywords of current interest to me,” Mr. Torkildson said.
“I don’t have a TV, I don’t watch local news, don’t listen to radio news. My news comes from newspapers — the last best defense against tyranny and against falsehood,” he said.
