Newspapering in its seventh age

When I started my career as a newspaperman with The Baltimore Sun more than 40 years ago, if memory serves -- and it does less and less with the passage of time -- most people in the business did not call themselves journalists. Some came to the business from journalism schools, but most did not and those who did, did not call themselves journalists. That is not to say that the products of journalism schools were not good at what they did; most of them were very good once the unfortunate assumptions attached to them in journalism school were scrubbed off. But that was long ago. Things are different now.

I am reminded of this too many times every day. Whenever I am working on a document and see the options to cut or paste, I recall that back in the day, we actually used scissors to cut, and real paste to paste. It was a messy business. So messy in fact that the quality of what was finally printed probably suffered as a result of sheer laziness in the face of the onerous task of cutting out a piece of text to paste it in a better place in a lace it elsewhere in a story.

The mess that came with cutting and pasting was made even messier by the carbon paper used to produce three or four copies of each page. Each page of a story was called a take. Each take was usually no more than three paragraphs because text had to be triple-spaced so the various editors sticking their noses into the story would have space to write in changes, always with a pencil that made it even messier. These copies were moved around the newsroom by copyboys, (later copygirls, too), amid a cacophony of "Copy to the City Desk!" "Copy to the Copy Desk!" "Copy to Photo."

 After the editor had made his changes, and the copy editor had made his changes and written a headline, the takes would be dispatched to the composing room by pneumatic tube connecting the two floors. "Copy Down!" Down there, typesetters banged the text into lead on clattering linotype machines fed by melted lead. This was not only messy; it was downright dangerous.  The din in the composing room was deafening. This would explain why so many people working down there were deaf people and the only conversations of meaning were between them by signing.

The newsroom was noisy enough in those days. Looking back on it through the mist of time and with great affection I certainly did not feel at the time, it seems now to have been a symphony that reached a crescendo as the first deadline deadline of the day approached.

 Apart from the orders and summonses shouted back and forth, the calls for copy transfers, as the first deadline hour neared, the clickety of typewriters could have been imitated by several dozen very fast tap-dancers. In the center of the newsroom there was the wireroom where a dozen or so teletype machines clattered incessantly bringing news reports from all over the world from agencies such as the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters and others. (Reuters also carried the reports from The Sun's far-flung overseas bureaus. The Sun's sending code was norbay which stood for North America Chesapeake Bay.) And this symphony had bells. Bells rang on the wire machines to announce that something really important was coming across. Bells rang on the typewriters. Bells rang on the telephones we used. High on a wall near the City Desk, the seat of all power and frequent humiliation in the newsroom, a bell rang whenever a fire alarm was pulled anywhere in the city. This bell signalled where the fire was, using a sort of Morse code. If the bell rang "ding-ding-ding (pause) ding-ding (pause) ding-ding-ding" the alarm was coming from box 323. A clerk at the city desk would look up the code in a book supplied by the fire department and quickly identify the location of the fire. If the bell rang the same code again, it was a two-alarm fire and so forth. Fires alarms were taken seriously in every newsroom in America, but especially so in Baltimore where a fire in 1904 practically destroyed the whole city. Such was the daily newsroom symphony.

A word here about telephones. These were dial phones, very clumsy-looking equipment compared to what's used today. If you wanted to place a local call, you had to dial 9 to get a dial tone. If you wanted to place a toll call, you called the Sun operator to ask for a long-distance line (called a wats line for reasons that elude me to this day). The Sun had a fulltime staff of telephone operators who answered and placed calls around the clock.

When I started at The Sun, the chief operator was a crusty Baltimore spinster named Miss Thornberg. Her position as chief operator seemed quite remarkable given that she pronounced S as T and the operators' greeting was "Sunpapers."  (Sunpapers because there were The Sun, The Evening Sun and The Sunday Sun, all of which had separate and sometimes even competing news and editorial staffs). When Chief Operator Thornberg answered an incoming call, she did not say "Sunpapers" she said "Tunpapers."

Early on in my career I had an unfortunate encounter with Chief Operator Thornberg. I started at the paper as a police reporter, as every reporter did no matter how much experience they brought. Usually this was a 2 PM to 11 PM shift. On weekends, though, one reporter started an early shift. One Friday I staggered home from a boozey night and having no alarm clock I called the paper and asked for a 7 AM wake-up call Saturday morning when I had such an early shift.

A few hours later, the phone rang at 6.45 AM, Chief Thornberg calling. I looked at my watch as I answered and grumbled something mildly rude about her calling too early and hung up.  A minute later the phone rang again. It was Chief Operator Thornberg, audibly enraged.

"Litten to me, you ton of a bitch," she spat. "The Tunpapers dudn't pay me to make wake-up calls. Tow get yerself an alarm clock!" And she hung up, or unplugged. It was one of the most painful calls I had ever received. When my head cleared, I realized how dangerous it would be to be an enemy of the newspaper's chief operator. I bought her a bouquet of roses, which was no small gesture given the pittance I was paid in those days, and Miss Thornberg forgave me that very day.

The importance of good relations with the phone room was manifest in a later experience in which the night operator performed far above and beyond the call of duty.

After working my usual 2 to 11 police shift, I had repaired with some others from the newsroom to the Calvert House, a saloon less than a block from the newspaper. At about 2 AM, emboldened by several drinks, I thought it would be nice to call a lady I was seeing who lived in New York. Long distance calls were expensive in those days, so I went back to the newsroom,  sat on my desk, picked up the phone and asked the operator to give me a wats line for my long-distance call. I talked with my friend in New York for a long time and while I was talking, I stretched on my desk and then  I fell asleep with the phone still in hand, still connected to the wats line.

The operator, a buxom red-head named Betty, left her station, came to the newsroom, gently took the phone from my hand and replaced it on the cradle while I still slept. Then -- and this is when Betty  rose above and beyond -- she managed to get me downstairs to the platform where trucks were preparing to deliver the early morning editions and put me in the hands of a driver whose bundles were to be dropped off near where I lived and he delivered me to my front door.

The girl in New York is long-forgotten. But Betty remained a blessed friend for years to come. There are no more telephone operators at The Sun, their greetings, however uniquely pronounced, have been replaced by monotonous non voices, call-waiting, voicemail and the rest of it.

And the newsroom is quiet these days, half empty, half darkened thanks to huge reductions in staff. There are no typewriters. No copypersons. No bells. No scissors. No pastepots. No loud voices trying to reach above the cacophony. No need really to shout or even move across the room to speak to anyone, or as it seems, to leave the building to speak to anyone. No hot lead. No linotype machines. Only the deaf could fail to notice.

Shakespeare's seventh age of man comes to mind: Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

                                        © G. J. Price III - buggerthebooboisie