I am still waiting to be bribed.

Despite 50-some years of news writing, I have yet to be slipped the magical plain white envelope stuffed with crisp new bills.

No, wait. Way, way back when my now-grown sons were teenage newspaper carriers, they had to collect cash from customers. Today’s customers prepay at the office, a sad commentary on the vulnerability of young boys and girls carrying cash along delivery routes.

Those sons were supposed to go to the newspaper office, preferably on Saturdays, and pay their bills.

I worked every day at that same newspaper office.

So on occasion, a son would hand me an envelope crammed with wrinkled dollar bills and clinking with quarters, asking me to carry it upstairs to the circulation department and pay that child’s bill.

But I have no recollection of having been offered substantial sums of money in exchange for writing something in the newspaper or, more likely, for keeping something out of the newspaper.

I was once offered an erotic tour de force if I would agree to kill the accident story that involved Mr. Married A and Mrs. Married B. Yes, yes, smart-alecks; Mrs. Married B, not Mr. Married A, made the offer. The offer was enticing, because Mrs. Married B was stunning and statuesque. But the accident had happened on Route 62, the main highway between Warren and Jamestown, similar to the stretch of Route 219 between DuBois and Brockway. The crash involved two other vehicles and four other people besides the presumably adulterous couple returning from a tete-a-tete. Both vehicles were destroyed. Four ambulances and two fire departments were at the scene, in addition to a couple of state police officers, fire police and perhaps 250 gawkers and passers-by.

The proverbial “half the town” had seen the scene or heard about it by the time that Mrs. Married B made her offer.

So if I had kept the story out of the newspaper, the “Why didn’t you write anything about this?” calls would have come in within hours, to me and to my bosses. With five kids to support, a steady job trumps an erotic interlude.

When Mrs. Married B showed up at my front door, I gulped, blinked, and frantically insisted that Mrs. Married B take her spectacularly statuesque body off my front porch before my wife came back home and saw her there in … umm … dishabille.

The result, I later learned, was that Mr. Married A and Mrs. Married B became Mr. Unmarried A and Mrs. Unmarried B. C’est la vie. I would wager that their spouses had heard rumblings of the Saturday night crash well before our Monday morning edition hit the streets, especially when Mr. A returned home without his car and Mrs. B had a brightly colored ridge of purplish green below her eye.

In small towns, the newspaper story is often simply a fleshing out of a “Did you hear …?” rumor.

Journalists have regularly been asked to keep stories about someone’s misfortune out of the newspaper. Drunk drivers are the usual petitioners. We decline, politely if possible, firmly if necessary.

Even for the victims, there is value to a news story. People do learn that Mr. Married A was keeping company with Mrs. Married B. But they also learn, by omission, that Mr. Married A had not been driving with an entire carload of … umm … “working girls,” or that Mrs. Married B had been totally naked when the collision occurred. (What journalist would omit that enticing detail?)

Without a news story, a commonly read chunk of information, the rumor mill kicks into high gear. Rumors invariably blow up to be even juicier, and worse, than what really had happened.

I did once have a “prominent” industrialist call and insist that we contact a police agency and print the report of how his car had hit a utility pole on the town’s main street in the wee hours.

It seems that another well-known person had been led out of a bar in handcuffs at about the same time, the result of a nasty bar fight. Somehow, the report of the industrialist’s accident had never gotten into the newspaper. Maybe the police were slow in releasing it. Maybe the newspaper had been slow in reporting it.

Either way, he really wanted to have us print that he had driven his car into a pole, so that readers would “get” that it was someone else who had been led out of a nearby bar in handcuffs. We obliged.

In small towns, the reality is that stories can be garbled, twisted or messed up by rumors. Whether or not they appear in print, interesting stories that happen in public cannot be totally hushed.

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.