Banned by the Associated Press, the ultimate
man on the street aims to bull his way back from
Long Island to page one.
by brad cope / photography by peter yang

The beefy man with the woolly mustache looks up Broadway from his spot behind a police barricade near the Hard Rock Café. A frigid wind whips around him, pushing the temperature on this New York November morning down to 36 degrees. Wearing a lightweight coat and a Hershey’s Chocolate World hoodie, the man ignores the cold. On the busy sidewalk behind him, office workers rush to the warmth of their buildings. He ignores them, too. Eventually, a rumble drowns out the hum of rush-hour traffic. The man leans over the now-tilting barricade and peers north. He finally sees what he has been waiting three hours for: a line of race cars rolling toward him through Times Square.

Holding a souvenir checkered flag in each fist, Greg Packer waves to the first car to cruise by: Jimmie Johnson, 2007 NASCAR champion. Jeff Gordon gets a furious wave, Clint Bowyer a vigorous one, and Matt Kenseth just a halfhearted flip of a flag. Then Packer jumps on the bottom rung of the barrier to gain a few inches of elevation. While the crowd around him looks down the street at the drivers, Packer looks up the street, in the opposite direction. He is not after the celebs. After all, he is something of a minor—very minor—celebrity himself.

A few minutes later, Packer spots his target. She stands about 30 feet away in a blue coat and tweedy pants, a pen and a notepad in her chapped hands and a press pass around her neck that reads “Julia Dahl, New York Post.” The reporter threads her way between the barricades and the line of parked cars, interviewing fans as she goes.

“Come on down!” Packer shouts. Dahl looks over. Everybody looks over. Packer’s voice drowns out the midtown street noise. Dahl picks her way toward Packer and smiles up at him on the curb. If he feels tired after standing for hours, it doesn’t show. He beams down at Dahl and waits for the question he knows will come.

“So, you like NASCAR?” she asks, putting pen to pad.

“I saw it mostly on TV,” he says in a viscous Noo Yawk accent. “Now I’ve seen it live.”

“You like the smells?”

“I like the smells—everything. But we need a track in New York.”

Dahl cocks an eyebrow. “Where would you put it?”

“Since they don’t want it on Staten Island, I’d put it in Calverton.”

“What’s your name?”

“Greg Packer.”

Dahl doesn’t blink. She doesn’t know who he is.

Dahl wraps up the interview, and Packer watches her work her way toward Johnson’s car.

“Got one,” he says.

If the Post runs the interview, it will be the 159th time the press has quoted him. Packer, a 44-year-old, never-married, retired highway repairman from Long Island, has shared the orbit of the rich and the famous and the powerful. He has met three American presidents, bonded with NFL royalty, and once even received a shout-out from Garth Brooks. That sort of accomplishment doesn’t just happen to a guy. In fact, Greg Packer spends more of his time trying to get his name in the paper—or his face on TV—than probably any other amateur, self-made minor celebrity in America. The media are his medium, and he keeps the messages coming.

Packer’s success with the press depends on equal parts luck and skill. Luck, because sometimes reporters skip events. Other times they show up but get the quotes and photos they need before bumping into him. Still other times the two parties do connect, but editors cut Packer out of the stories for space. And sometimes reporters get all the way to the key question (“What’s your name?”) before realizing that they’re interviewing a ringer. Skill, Packer has in spades.

Landing on the front page begins with great position, which means showing up first in line. He knows the media must interview the first person, because Americans want to know about the guy crazy enough to stand in line for X hours (or days) to see (or do) Y. Packer was the first to sign the condolence book for Princess Diana at the British consulate, the first to visit the observation deck at ground zero, and the first to buy an Apple iPhone. His hobby raises interesting questions about America’s celebrity-obsessed culture. It also makes him public enemy No. 1 for much of the media. The Associated Press, taking the lead in the anti-Packer movement, warned reporters in 2003 not to quote him. Though the news service will print the rants of dictators, the confessions of serial killers, and the punditry of movie stars, the AP will not quote Greg Packer. Unless he outwits them today. He likes the odds. “They’re just trying to slow me down,” he says.

The AP is up against a formidable opponent; Packer is rarely at a loss for words. Ask him about anything, and out come the quotes. Take pop music: Packer failed to score one of the free tickets to a 1999 Sheryl Crow concert in New York but wound up in the front row anyway by showing up at 3 a.m. He also landed a spot in the Post. (“I took a nap. I can bide my time with all my new friends here.”)

Or pro baseball: Packer is Jewish and couldn’t go to a 1998 Yankees playoff game because of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. But he still got into the New York Daily News (“There’s no way the Yankees will lose, but if they do, they’ll certainly have something to atone for”).

Or pro football: When legendary Giants owner Wellington Mara died in 2005, Packer shared his reminiscences with the Post. (“I was in the stands when the Giants beat the Vikings 41-0 in the NFC championship game, and he came up to me and said, ‘If it wasn’t for you fans, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.’”)

Or the iPhone: Packer camped out for five days last year at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue to make sure he would own the first unit sold. He got the phone—and the coverage. The pro line-sitter wound up in USA Today (“Beautiful”) and the Los Angeles Times (“it sounds really cool”). MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann mentioned him on Countdown, and photos of him appeared in The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, New York Newsday, and The News and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Back in Times Square, Packer tallies media hits like a gunfighter adding notches to his pistol. He scores the Post as a “get.” (The newspaper had other plans; Packer didn’t make the story about the midtown NASCAR rally. Then again, neither did any other fan.) But the rally wasn’t even the main event for the day: He’s on his way to the annual lighting of the Christmas tree.

When the Post reporter leaves, Packer sets off at a pace so furious that he walks at a 70-degree angle. As he walks, he talks—or issues quotes. “The AP will be there,” he says. “Everybody will be there.” He rounds a corner into Rockefeller Center and then pauses to get the lay of the land. An 84-foot Norway spruce towers over the plaza. On the same level and off to one side sits a bare stage. The whole setup is bounded by barricades. “This is bad,” Packer says, assessing the terrain from his media-centric viewpoint. “There’s only a sidewalk between the barricades and the building. The cops probably won’t let me stand there.” He shrugs and moves on.

After circling the perimeter, Packer settles on a spot of the sidewalk near the corner of Rockefeller Plaza and West 49th Street, not far from the stage. “If I can stay here, I have a good chance,” he says. “The reporters like to come over here.” He’s not making this up. In 1998, Packer came here to check out the tree and Garth Brooks and got himself quoted by the AP (“It’s great because you get to see the tree being lit, but what I really want is to see Garth”). Tonight he wants to see the tree, Tony Bennett, and the press—but not in that order.

Packer invented a classification scheme to describe the lengths of his waits. A “dayer” means showing up early in the morning for an event later in the same day. That’s not to be confused with a “one-dayer,” arriving the night before an event. He also mentions “two-dayers,” “three-dayers,” “four-dayers,” and the truly heroic “five-dayer” for the iPhone. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a guy who waits in line hours a day several times a month. Not that Packer gets bored. A raging extrovert, he spends much of his time chatting up the people around him. When conversation wanes, he uses his iPhone to search the Web. He goes to news sites to research upcoming events and patrols eBay for tickets.

Once Packer claims a spot, he watches for reporters. When he spots them, he gets their attention (“Hey!”). They often look surprised. Reporters typically approach the man on the street, not vice versa. If they hesitate, he smiles and waves them over. If Packer snares one, the rest tend to follow. When that happens, he holds a mini press conference right on the sidewalk, with reporters asking him questions in turns and writing down his every word. Whether talking to one reporter or five, Packer speaks with the cheery tone of a man providing a valuable service. You need quotes, he somehow communicates. I have them. And he does—perfect sound bites.

Reporter Amy O’Leary noticed this in a 2004 interview with Packer on National Public Radio. The most quotable man in America stood outside a New York post office on April 15th, looking for reporters to talk to about tax day. When O’Leary interviewed him, Packer said, “I try to get my taxes done early and save it for the last minute and throw it in the mail, right here in New York on tax day.”

“OK,” O’Leary said in her report. “See what he did just there? He slipped in the phrase ‘right here in New York on tax day.’ You’ve got the time, the place, it’s a totally usable quote—Greg’s specialty.”

Besides imbedding newsworthy details into his quotes, Packer gets into print by steering clear of controversy. Reporters turn to the man on the street for local color, not for partisan harangues. Packer meets the demand, supplying tame—even bland—lines to the media. The tameness and the blandness make the quotes easier to use. In fact, Packer supplies such usable copy that the Los Angeles Times actually quoted him in absentia. When staff writer John J. Goldman came to ground zero in 2002, he saw “thousands of messages written on flags, bed sheets, planks, teddy bears, T-shirts, hats—anything that can hold ink.” Here is one of the messages out of the thousands that Goldman chose to quote: “Thank you to all our heroes. May God bless America. Greg Packer. Huntington, New York, USA.”

Usually, Packer gets quoted by cozying up to the elite, including the man with friends in low places. Garth Brooks was so impressed by an initial meeting with Packer that when Packer called out the country star’s name at the Country Music Awards in 2005, Brooks said, “I knew I knew you from somewhere.” The story might sound far-fetched—unless you know Greg Packer. He calls out to anyone he recognizes, from police officers (“Hey, Artie!”) to pop icons like Tony Bennett (“Merry Christmas, Tony!”). He lacks the sotto voce manner of speaking that parents call an “inside voice.” He strikes up booming discussions with shopkeepers, spectators, waitresses, anyone. Within a few seconds of his arrival, most everyone within earshot dons a tight smile, as if trying to decide whether this guy is a character or a threat. Garth Brooks might actually remember meeting Packer. The same goes for Packer’s other famous conversation partners, including Britney Spears, Courtney Love, ’N Sync, Mariah Carey, and Ringo Starr. He tends to make an impression.

His brushes with presidential fame started with Jimmy Carter. Several years ago, Packer came to a book signing and spoke with the man from Plains. Another book signing in 2004 led to a chat with Bill Clinton. Packer told The New York Times that the man from Hope asked him how long he had waited in line. When Packer told him 24 hours, Clinton said, “God bless you.” Packer talked baseball with George W. Bush at an Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. Of course, none of the presidents knew they were talking to Greg Packer. Hillary Clinton did. Packer traveled to White Plains, New York, in 1996 to go to her book signing. “Hello, Mrs. Clinton,” Packer said.

“Hello, Mr. Packer,” she answered.

Packer’s hobby got a whole lot more complicated in 2003, when The New York Times quoted him at another Hillary Clinton book signing. Conservative syndicated columnist Ann Coulter saw the quote and wrote in a story, “It was easy for the Times to spell Packer’s name right because he is apparently the entire media’s designated ‘man on the street’ for all articles ever written.” The story spread from her to the wider world. Until Coulter turned him into Exhibit A of shoddy journalism, the media had mostly ignored Packer. His days of near-total anonymity were over.

The day after Coulter’s column ran, the Associated Press released an internal memo. “The world is full of all kinds of interesting people,” wrote then-deputy managing editor Kristin Gazlay. “One of them is Greg Packer of Huntington, New York, who apparently lives to get his name on the AP wire and in other media.” She recapped a handful of Packer’s gets and concluded, “Mr. Packer is clearly eager to be quoted. Let’s be eager too—to find other people to quote.”

Gazlay doesn’t blame Packer for the ban. “It’s not about him,” she says. “It’s about us. He never misrepresents himself. But it’s lazy to quote him at every event. We need to be more ambitious.” She bears no grudge. “Getting quoted is his avocation,” she says. “If that’s what he wants to do, bless him. He’s one kind of American success story.”

Packer’s peculiar version of success draws harsher criticism from other quarters. Some media bloggers argue that he hardly qualifies as the man on the street. A legitimate M.O.T.S., they say, comes to events to see newsworthy things, not to make news. The real M.O.T.S.’s randomness ensures that his quotes reflect the views of the people, not those that please the press. So the professional man on the street is an oxymoron.

The critics have a point. A retired road construction worker from Long Island who “lives to get his name on the AP wire and in other media” represents a group no larger than himself. And a one-of-a-kind can’t be an average Joe.

Then again, just who is the average Joe? Does he even exist? And does it make sense to let a single person represent all the rest of “average” humanity? It takes some arrogance to assume that a quote or two could represent the opinion of all the little people out there. Besides, the press has bigger things to worry about than Packer’s status as a not-so-average Joe. Declining audiences, for instance. Or charges of bias. Or the rise of blogs and cable.

Not that Packer needs any help defending himself against the Associated Press and his other critics. “The AP should have better things to do than ban me,” he says, then veers off to settle other scores. “If I’m a ‘professional’ man on the street, show me the money. It’s a competition between me and them. They don’t want to give me the attention. They want it all for themselves. They’re just jealous.”

Packer claims his spot at 1:30 p.m. near the corner of Rockefeller Plaza and West 49th Street. Though the show starts at 7 p.m., reporters could show up at any moment. “Now,” he says, “we wait.”

“Blue.”

That was Greg Packer’s first quote—concise and straightforward from infancy. The youngest of four children, he was born in 1963 in Huntington, a Long Island bedroom community for New York City. His father owned Packer’s Wholesale, a candy supply company, and his mother helped with the family business. Packer grew up in a four-bedroom house with a big backyard on Holst Drive. His unique hobby began there in the living room, when he was 8 years old. Packer remembers his mother giving him a photograph of Natalie Wood after a short meeting with the famous actress. Later his father gave him an autograph of the legendary boxer Joe Louis. The idea that an ordinary person could talk with celebrities, could own something they had handled, thrilled him.

If an early brush with celebrity memorabilia gave Packer a willingness to sit in line for days at a time, wrestling at Huntington High School showed he had the ability as well. “Greg wasn’t much of a wrestler,” says longtime friend Kieran Mock. “But he had determination. When he wanted to do something, he did it.”

Packer graduated from Huntington High in 1983 with sketchy career plans. He thought about getting a job as a truck driver but wound up earning a degree in marketing from Nassau Community College. After a disappointing year doing temp work—“I was never big on the confinement of an office”—he finally got behind the wheel of a truck, working as a road construction worker in Huntington. His parents had sold the family business several years before and eventually moved to Florida. His brother and sisters left Huntington. Packer stayed.

He eventually soured on the highway department. “Office politics,” he says. “Everybody getting ahead of everybody else.” He needed a break from the job, an outlet to interest him—something, anything. So he set out to see a sitcom star.

On Feb. 28, 1994, Packer went to the B. Dalton bookstore on Fifth Avenue. Roseanne Arnold was there, signing copies of her autobiography My Lives (Ballantine Books). The next day, Newsday ran a story about the event that took on a greater historical significance only in retrospect. Not because Arnold had been on the cover of Vanity Fair the month before, or because some fans asked her to sign baseballs in recognition of her deliberate botch of the national anthem at a San Diego Padres game four years before. It was the first time the media ever quoted Greg Packer. From Newsday:

“Other fans, most of whom bought several copies of My Lives, brought her bouquets, even a mug, ‘in case she needs tea or coffee,’ said Greg Packer of Huntington. Packer, a Huntington Town highway worker, also gave her a dozen roses. ‘I’m a real fan,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t miss her show at any price.’”

Though Packer calls his first quote an “accident,” he relished the notoriety. He told friends and family about his coup, and soon fixed on the idea of using media events to make a name for himself. The hobby combines his childhood interest in celebrities with the stamina he developed on the wrestling mats at Huntington High. And since Packer took early retirement from the highway department, he has more time to devote to his hobby. Fourteen years after his first quote, he sometimes points his parents toward his latest ones, the equivalent of a sports figure saying “Hi, Mom” on TV. Even better than the Packer quotes are the Packer profiles that ran in 2003: stories about the “Long Island everyman” (The New York Times), the “celebrity-struck highway maintenance worker” (Associated Press), and “possibly” the “world’s most successful man on the street” (The Wall Street Journal).

Packer’s profile trifecta marked the high point of his media career. By then, Ann Coulter had exposed him, and the AP’s Kristin Gazlay had made him a marked man. Packer kept up his usual schedule of eight media events a month, but fewer of his quotes ended up in print. The papers that did quote him fell lower on the prestige scale than those in years past. The Epoch Times, a newspaper linked to the Chinese spiritual practice of Falun Gong, noted in 2005 that Packer stood in line to buy one of the first copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Scholastic) but did not quote him. He appeared last year in the Bronx newspaper Norwood News (“I’m a big J-Lo fan”). Realizing he needed to adapt to stay in the news, Packer decided to venture out to places where reporters wouldn’t know him. In 2006, he traveled to Pennsylvania for the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Super Bowl victory parade and showed up in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (“There was no way I was not going to be up close for this. It’s fantastic”). And last September he went to the memorial concert organized by the Dave Matthews Band for the mass shooting at Virginia Tech University. This appeared in an article about the concert in Blacksburg:

“Greg Packer, 43, of Huntington, N.Y., bought a ticket on the website Craigslist and rode the bus overnight to attend the concert.

“‘I just wanted to show my support and express my sympathies,’ said Packer, who also wore a commemorative T-shirt.”

Those lines appeared in a story by the Associated Press.

Packer brushes off the suggestion that he used a tragedy to get back to the big time. “It’s important to give condolences, to show you mean well,” he says. “If I was able to help, then so be it.” Besides, the iPhone coverage he garnered some two months before the concert had already ended his drought.

Whatever the motive, Packer’s far-flung triumphs make the AP’s Gazlay sound like a prophet. The last line of her 2003 memo reads, “So far, he’s apparently just attending East Coast events. But it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he will someday show up in your town, first in line somewhere….”

Greg Packer spots the WNBC team first. From his position near the Christmas tree, he notices a News 4 reporter and cameraman walking up West 49th Street. At this point in the day—about 3 p.m.—he can’t leave his spot. But he can flag down the pair for an interview.

“Hey!” Packer yells, grinning like a mustachioed madman. Reporter Michelle Franzen goes walleyed at the outburst, edges away from him, and interviews a woman three people over from Packer. He keeps grinning throughout the Q and A. But instead of moving down the line toward Packer, Franzen thanks the woman and walks away, her photographer in tow. Packer shrugs, turns back to the tree, and leans on his police barricade.

Each passing minute adds another layer of spectators to the rear of the crowd, pressing everyone in front of them still closer together. Rockefeller Center charges no fee for the live performances by Josh Groban, Natasha Bedingfield, and the Rockettes, and fans don’t pay to watch the Christmas tree illuminate for the first time. But there is a cost: By 4 p.m., each person near the barricades winds up with about a square foot of space until the show ends five hours later. Since leaving would require an airlift, spectators try to take their minds off their numb legs by talking about anything and everything (“That singer doesn’t know the words to ‘O Holy Night’”), asking for impromptu back massages from friends (“a little to the left…harder…harder”), and shifting from one sore foot to the other. Packer slumps over his barricade like a shell-shocked French revolutionary.

About an hour before the show starts, a photographer walks by. “Hey!” Packer shouts. “Hey!” This time the direct approach works. The photographer snaps away at Packer.

“Who’s this for?” he asks, as the flashbulb strobes.

“Rockefeller Center,” the photographer says. “They want shots of the event.”

Packer mugs for the camera until the photographer moves on. A few minutes later, two people with press passes appear to his left, walking his way. He waits until they get to the 10 o’clock position, then pounces: “Hey! Hey!” The pair glances over but never breaks stride. Packer won’t lay eyes on another journalist—AP or otherwise—for the rest of the night. He never sees Samantha Gross, the AP writer covering the event. She quotes two men on the street in her story. Except one’s a woman, and they’re both from Italy. Gross translates Maria Teresa Marchesano’s quote from Italian to English (“In Italy each year they show it to us on TV”). Greg Packer just came from Long Island and speaks only the mother tongue. Good luck beating those odds. But Packer remains unbowed.

“Greg Packer cracks me up,” says New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. “He’s like Zelig—always where news happens, but he doesn’t make it. He’s a hilarious parody of the media.” Rosen, author of What Are Journalists For? (Yale University Press) and creator of the influential news blog PressThink, believes that Packer’s story provides far more than entertainment. “Figures like this tell us something about the culture,” he says. “The media is a closed institution. It allows non-journalists to participate only in symbolic ways, like the man-on-the-street interview. Well, here’s a guy who wants in. So he masters the code of journalism to influence the media. A lot of people would like to do that. I oppose how he does it, but I support the idea of more participation.”

When it comes to citizen journalism, Packer is a man ahead of his time. Technology made more participation possible several years ago. Blogs and personal websites allow people to share their views without needing to convince editorial boards to give over space on their op-ed pages. But years before people without printing presses used the Web to circumvent the media, Packer went through the media. Without a computer or even a sandwich board, he broke into the closed institution. He has done it scores of times, sneaking quotes by the gatekeepers charged with keeping him out. And he started doing it long before dissident editorialists across America fired up the first version of Blogger.

Packer was at the vanguard of a much-discussed trend in American life: the destruction by the masses of the barrier between public and private life. Celebrities, by definition, had always embraced the spotlight. Ordinary people liked their privacy. Any fame they enjoyed was thrust upon them for the allotted 15 minutes, as Andy Warhol had predicted. But sometime in the ’90s, account executives in Chicago and tennis shoe designers in Boston came to believe that exposure conferred stature. They clamored to join reality TV shows like The Real World, Survivor, and Fear Factor, baring their souls, and in some cases their bodies, for Nielsen ratings, million-dollar prizes, and careers in show business. Others, like socialite Paris Hilton, used outrageous behavior to elevate themselves from the D-list to the A-list. All of them hoped to become famous not for playing scripted roles but for playing themselves, a postmodern twist on fame. They wanted to democratize the cult of personality.

And they succeeded, landing book deals (The Bachelor’s Jen Schefft), creating clothing lines (The Real World: Boston’s Syrus Yarbrough), and marrying NFL quarterbacks and co-hosting ABC’s talk show The View (Survivor: The Australian Outback’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck). Hilton, Hasselbeck, Yarbrough, Schefft, and Packer shed their inhibitions to get the attention they crave, the latest version of the American dream. But even if we don’t share their dream—why wait in line for five days to get into the paper?—we can admire their chutzpa.

Back at Rockefeller Center, the Christmas tree lights up, the crowd streams away, and Packer disentangles himself from his barricade. After more than seven hours of standing in one spot, he can hardly walk. “I’m getting old for this,” he says, lurching down the street. A few minutes later, hunched over a Sbarro’s double order of chicken marsala, a salad, a slice of pie, and a large Pepsi, Packer returns to the topic of his advancing age. “It’s like sports,” he says. “At some point, you can’t do it anymore. Maybe I could do a radio show instead. Or a TV show, like Tom Snyder—quiet,” he adds in his usual high-decibel voice. “Not like Jerry Springer.” He pauses for a moment and lifts an index finger. It’s a signature gesture that signals the imminent arrival of a quotable line. “I won’t quit until a doctor tells me to,” he says. “This is what I’m good at.

“You take whatever comes to you,” Packer adds with a philosophical air. But what came to him tonight was a Rockefeller Center photographer, not the AP, the Times, the Post, or the Daily News. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. And it doesn’t. Though Packer battles like a Spartan to get onto page one, he reacts like a Stoic to success or failure. For him, just trying to get noticed brings its own reward. Take the time six years ago when Packer joined his old high school friend, Kieran Mock, along with Mock’s wife and kids for a Mets family day at Shea Stadium. The group peered into the ticket office and checked out the box seats until a photographer called the Mocks over for a family portrait. Just before the shutter snapped, Packer edged into the picture. Mock waved his friend off, pointing out that the photographer wanted a family picture. Packer wouldn’t budge, despite several more requests to step aside.

“Packer,” says Mock, “just couldn’t stay out of the picture.”

Brad Cope is the executive editor of Spirit.