STOP THE PRESSES -- IT'S ABOUT MYRON

As the story goes, a baseball groupie boarded the New York Yankees' team bus in Chicago following a game with the White Sox.

Before too long players were signing their names to her bare ass.

The incident was hushed up but the Page Six gossip column writers for the New York Post found out about it. An item was set to run in the paper. That would have gotten the Yanks' publicist fired as he was being blamed for the shenanigans.

But the publicist had a childhood friend who worked for the Post, who saved his ass.

It was Myron Rushetzky, who went to the managing editor and asked that the item be pulled. It was. The publicist went on to a job with the Oakland Athletics and to this day, Myron gets elite seats at Yankee Stadium behind the visitor team’s dugout whenever the A’s are in town.

Myron (left) with college chum and former N.Y. Daily News reporter Sal Arena enjoying free seats at Yankee Stadium

That's how much influence Myron had at the tabloid that's owned by Australian Rupert Murdoch.

But he wasn't a reporter, a feature writer, an award-winning columnist or any kind of editor. He was the guy who answered the phones for the Post's city desk.

For nearly 40 years, handling untold thousands of calls, Myron dealt with winos and weirdoes and all the other creatures in New York City who thought they'd give the Post a piece of their mind. He meticulously took down details of solid news tips. He dealt with fake bomb threats and awakened reporters and editors when a big story was breaking. And he was no rat. He'd told angry partners of philandering Posties that they were unavailable right now.

It was a very important job. You had to get through Myron to get through to anyone.

And so, when former Page Sixers Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo penned a recently-published book about the Post, their dedication page read:

I know Myron. I worked for the Post's rival tabloid, the New York Daily News, and really, anyone who worked for the media from the mid-70s on, probably knows Myron.

When I described him to my wife, she said he sounds like a sort of Forrest Gump, seemingly an underling but really at the center of everything.

That's sort of true.

At a bash thrown at Tavern-on-the-Green in Central Park by public relations mogul Howard  Rubenstein, there was Myron being introduced to Chelsea Clinton, one of the guests.

He was wearing a cherished tie that has the logo of Murdoch's media company, News Corp. Chelsea thought it looked like a bank symbol and then happily posed with Myron.

A dummy front-page gift to Myron.  

When I called Mr. Rushetzky to congratulate him on the book dedication, he told me he would regularly wear that tie to honor the boss on Rupert's birthday.

And birthdays are important in Myron's world.

While at the Post and still doing it today at 72, Myron has sent birthday wishes, Christmas greetings, promotion announcements, the location of book events, and, sadly, death notices to many of his contacts. He's got 2,408 in his file, most of them former and current New York Post employees,

Before email came along, this soft-spoken gentleman -- who was truly meant to work for a newspaper -- bought greeting cards to send out his well-wishes to what became known as the "Post Nation."

He'd lay down a hundred bucks on many of his trips to a bunch of Hallmark stores where employees knew him on sight. And he's a VIP in the company's frequent buyer Hall of Fame.

When he sent out his cards, Myron had a knack of tracking down members of Post Nation who had moved.

Former Post reporter Charlie Carillo recalled that after he left the paper and kept moving to new addresses, Myron always found him.

"Then I moved to London," said Charlie. "No way he finds me here, I told myself.  On my birthday, a British postal worker pulled up to the house on his red bicycle and handed me a card. The handwriting was unmistakable. Myron had done it again."

I got to know him when the Post and Daily News crowd drank together back in the 1980s at the Lion's Head, a now-shuttered West Village gin mill where  journalists and other writer types hung out.

One of Myron's drinking pals was Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson and a birthday card he sent him sits in Wilson's archive at the University of Missouri.

For a long time now, the Brooklyn-born moustache-wearing, not-so-tall  Myron has lived in a flat in Queens, N.Y., with the ashes of his cats, Isabelle and Haley and a ton of Post memorabilia.

He's still Myron, a detailed individual. An example. I asked him why he named his cats Isabelle and Haley.

"I'm looking at the urns with their ashes right now," he said.

And then, for the next 15 minutes or so, he gave me the specific reasons of why they were so named. I don't have the room to go into it here.

But it had to do with a Post reporter, a niece, a nephew  and the Olympics when figure skater Nancy Kerrigan had been whacked on the knee by Tonya Harding's people.

The bottom line. The cats came with those names and he didn't want to confuse them by changing them.

That's Myron. He can overwhelm you with details. He would have made a great reporter. His memory of the inside stories and anecdotes about the characters who worked at the New York Post is remarkable.

Case in point -- the death of John Lennon.

"A month or two before (his murder), Steve McQueen had died in Mexico (Nov. 7, 1980). The Post ran a photo of him in the mortuary," said Myron.

Angry readers, disgusted by the decision, flooded the Post with calls and Myron had to deal with them.

When Lennon was shot dead four weeks later on Dec. 8, 1980, the Daily News landed a photo exclusive: the shooter, Mark David Chapman, with Lennon, getting the singer's autograph hours before the murder.

Myron said that the lensman who took the photo had first called the Post but an editor couldn't make a deal with him. The shutterbug promised to call back but didn't. Myron gave the impression that the editor fucked up.

The powers-at-be at the Post were pissed by the News' scoop and when the paper acquired a photo of Lennon in the morgue, they ran it.

Myron still says it was a bad idea.

"There were those negative calls about McQueen and he was a big movie star but he wasn't a Beatle," said Myron.  "That led to a couple of pages of me threatening to quit."

In days past, there was a longtime tradition of New York Post and New York Daily News reporters, columnists and editors switching from one paper to the other and sometimes back again.

When Post reporter David Ng showed up to land a job at the News, I remarked, "Hey, they're up to the N's."

Myron told me a David story. Ng, of Chinese descent, didn't know how to speak or read the language but on his first trip to China, decided to have special business cards printed .

One side was in English and the printer was told to print the other side in Chinese.

"When David came back. He said he was getting much more respect than he thought he deserved from the Chinese people he gave cards to," said Myron.

"He gave one to (Post staffer) Tommy Ko, who does speak Chinese and he translated the back of the card. It did not say the New York Post. The printer had messed up. It said the New York Times."

Myron, by the way, had special access to secret Manhattan haunts. He recalled how I would chant "Zodiac, Zodiac, Zodiac" at last call in the Lion's Head. It meant I wanted to go to an after-hours club with that name and needed him to get in because he had a membership.

During out chit-chat, it was clear to me that Myron didn't really want to accept a buyout when it was offered in 2013 as circulation dipped and the Post was cutting staff. He thought the four thank-you messages he'd gotten -- and still has -- from Murdoch for his birthday greetings would save him. It didn't.

"I was even wearing the News Corp tie that day," he said.

June 16, 2013, Myron’s last day at the Post. He’s wearing his Murdoch company tie. Payroll department’s Susan Cordero (l) and copy desk slotman Barry Gross examine Post page one tributes to the phone guy. Photo was taken for a New Yorker (Yes, the New Yorker) story on the Post legend.

The announcement that Myron was headed out the door shook the rafters at the Post.  

Writer Mary Papenfuss sent out a mass email, declaring, "It’s the end of life as we know it. Guardian of the community, keeper of the flame, birthday card sender extraordinaire. Myron Rushetzky is leaving. . ."

 “The Post will never be the same,” wrote Vincent  Musetto, a Post headline writer and author of the classic “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline.

A few of the Post’s notable “Woods” as the Page 1 headlines were called.

Post vet Jim Norman called Myron "the one force we could all always count on to keep an unruly gang more or less together."

And they were an unruly gang. I knew many of them.

There was the reporter who backed up traffic on the always congested Gowanus Parkway in Brooklyn by falling asleep at the wheel in the middle lane after a night of drinking.

There was one Post émigré to the News who stole a naked baby picture of me that my mom sent me and ran around my city room showing it off.

There was a Post city editor who broke a bone, if memory serves, screwing some woman on the hood of a car in a snowstorm.

Another scribe drank most of a bottle of bourbon staking out the apartment of Bernie Goetz, the notorious subway vigilante.

A Post columnist and I shared the same girlfriend one summer. Not together, but separately.

That same columnist, Myton noted, was rumored to regularly take women into a Post building stairwell at the annual Christmas parties and have his way with them.

 Yes, the new book about the Post has an apropos title:  "Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media."

A Post gathering from back when. That’s Myron (on the right), City Editor Steve Dunleavy with the Heineken, court reporter great Mike Pearl (who has made it to age 94) and bleary-eyed reporter Cynthia Fagan.

When the rough draft of their 500-plus page tome was ready, the authors didn't send it to an editor, they sent it for fact-checking to Myron.

That's when he learned about the dedication page.

He was speechless, he told me, but he went to the book launch and other book events, where former Post colleagues asked for his autograph.

"It was good for my ego," he said modestly.

These days, Myron sits on the board of governors of the Society of the Silurians, a press club that came to be in 1924 and is comprised of distinguished journalist veterans dedicated to excellence and integrity.

The fellow who answered the phones for a living is in good company. Silurian members have included William Randolph Hearst, Pulitzer Prize winner Herbert Bayard Swope and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck.

Last month, on my birthday, I got Myron's well-wish email. I've been on his list for decades and I am honored.

He always adds this quote from Pulitzer Prize winner Mary McGrory to the end of his emails.

“I should confess, I have always felt a little sorry for people who didn’t work for newspapers."

Me too.