If you were lucky enough to be a small- to medium-market newspaper reporter, editor, photographer, an ad salesperson, or classifieds coordinator, or a back-of-the-building pressroom staffer—working with actual hot type, huge rolls of newsprint, and gallons of ink—you were part of a close-knit community not just within the walls of your offices, but within the boundaries of your publication’s distribution.
This was not only true of the full-time staff, but it was true of the crews who bundled the newspaper and heaved the bundles from the loading dock onto ancient, gear-grinding trucks that trundled around the town before dawn or before dinner, dropping off string-tied bales on the driveways of paperboys who then biked or walked their assigned routes, flinging the papers onto the lawns and porches (and roofs) of subscribers. From the receptionist at the front end, to the paper carrier across town, everyone who touched that journal before it was read over a morning cup of coffee or in an easy chair before dinner, was intimately involved with the heartbeat of their town. I know.
I was an eleven-year-old paper boy in Wilmington, Ohio, in 1960, and then a teen-aged “cub” reporter with the Northern Virginia Sun in ‘67-’68, moving away to college where I worked as a reporter and photographer for the Longmont Daily Times-Call, northeast of Boulder, Colorado, from 1968 to 1971. I remember my assigned beats for the Times-Call: the sugar beet crop and the Great Western Sugar processing plant; a huge turkey farm; the tiny towns of Frederick, Dacono, and Firestone with their quirky water-filtration systems and limited- or no ambulance services.
Breaking news stories were few and far between, but there was always something to keep our newsroom busy, and while we were small potatoes as far as the big-city papers down in Denver or back East were concerned, our readers depended on us to be a reflection of their daily lives in Small Town America. We were the chroniclers of their births, their struggles, their harvest successes, their courtroom dramas, their victories on the local football fields, their garden clubs, their Rotary meetings, their holidays, their 50th wedding anniversaries, and their departures noted in our obituaries.
We knocked out our stories on mechanical typewriters (imagine), using reams of cheap paper, and changing ribbons at least once a week. We huddled with the city editor and the managing editor who helped us shape our stories and cut them to fit whatever column inches were available, and we sighed whenever a story met an editor’s spike. Red pencils, blue pencils, layout sheets and waxed headlines, datelines and headlines, the rumble of the presses, the newsprint on our fingertips…the tactile, auditory, and olfactory memories of those days all flowed back to me as I watched the tragedy of Annapolis unfold. And I know with certainty that thousands of other journalists who grew up in the newsrooms scattered across the country in the ‘60s and ‘70s all felt the same pangs and sorrow and loss as the names of the five colleagues of the Capital cycled across our televisions, phones, and laptops.
Gerald Fischman, 61. Rob Hiaasen, 59. John McNamara, 56. Rebecca Smith, 34. Wendi Winters, 65.
I never had the pleasure to meet any of them; most journalists across the country did not know them. But we all do know what they did and why they did it. We know the kind of community they served, the world they knew and the work they lived and breathed. We know their labors of truth-telling, of their love for the basic Constitutional freedom they exemplified with each and every edition of the Capital. Your Capital was, by any other name, our Capital
This was not only true of the full-time staff, but it was true of the crews who bundled the newspaper and heaved the bundles from the loading dock onto ancient, gear-grinding trucks that trundled around the town before dawn or before dinner, dropping off string-tied bales on the driveways of paperboys who then biked or walked their assigned routes, flinging the papers onto the lawns and porches (and roofs) of subscribers. From the receptionist at the front end, to the paper carrier across town, everyone who touched that journal before it was read over a morning cup of coffee or in an easy chair before dinner, was intimately involved with the heartbeat of their town. I know.
I was an eleven-year-old paper boy in Wilmington, Ohio, in 1960, and then a teen-aged “cub” reporter with the Northern Virginia Sun in ‘67-’68, moving away to college where I worked as a reporter and photographer for the Longmont Daily Times-Call, northeast of Boulder, Colorado, from 1968 to 1971. I remember my assigned beats for the Times-Call: the sugar beet crop and the Great Western Sugar processing plant; a huge turkey farm; the tiny towns of Frederick, Dacono, and Firestone with their quirky water-filtration systems and limited- or no ambulance services.
Breaking news stories were few and far between, but there was always something to keep our newsroom busy, and while we were small potatoes as far as the big-city papers down in Denver or back East were concerned, our readers depended on us to be a reflection of their daily lives in Small Town America. We were the chroniclers of their births, their struggles, their harvest successes, their courtroom dramas, their victories on the local football fields, their garden clubs, their Rotary meetings, their holidays, their 50th wedding anniversaries, and their departures noted in our obituaries.
We knocked out our stories on mechanical typewriters (imagine), using reams of cheap paper, and changing ribbons at least once a week. We huddled with the city editor and the managing editor who helped us shape our stories and cut them to fit whatever column inches were available, and we sighed whenever a story met an editor’s spike. Red pencils, blue pencils, layout sheets and waxed headlines, datelines and headlines, the rumble of the presses, the newsprint on our fingertips…the tactile, auditory, and olfactory memories of those days all flowed back to me as I watched the tragedy of Annapolis unfold. And I know with certainty that thousands of other journalists who grew up in the newsrooms scattered across the country in the ‘60s and ‘70s all felt the same pangs and sorrow and loss as the names of the five colleagues of the Capital cycled across our televisions, phones, and laptops.
Gerald Fischman, 61. Rob Hiaasen, 59. John McNamara, 56. Rebecca Smith, 34. Wendi Winters, 65.
I never had the pleasure to meet any of them; most journalists across the country did not know them. But we all do know what they did and why they did it. We know the kind of community they served, the world they knew and the work they lived and breathed. We know their labors of truth-telling, of their love for the basic Constitutional freedom they exemplified with each and every edition of the Capital. Your Capital was, by any other name, our Capital
No comments:
Post a Comment