ROLDO: Newspapers – The Way They Were or How I Remember Them

Newspapers – The Way They Were or How I Remember Them

By Roldo Bartimole

With newspapers in such precipitous decline my thoughts have traveled back to my first newspaper job in Bridgeport Conn. in 1959.

It made me think that I was lucky enough to experience the days of old newspaper people and when the daily newspaper WAS the news. I had the opportunity to enjoy newspapers as we remember them.

I haven’t been in a modern newspaper since the inception of the internet and new technology. The newsroom I experienced has disappeared. So I don’t know how the modern newsroom works. I know it’s different, however. (The last time I was in a newspaper office I sort of snuck into the Plain Dealer news room. It was before the paper was in security lock-down. I got in the locked door by following Mary Strassmeyer as she went through. I remember Bob McGruder reacting in mock shock and telling others that I had a satchel that might be dangerous. What shocked me was the clean whiteness of the city room.)

I remember the huge and dingy old “city room.” I started working nights in the sports department for the Bridgeport Telegram, the name of the morning newspaper in Bridgeport, Conn. The afternoon paper was called the Bridgeport Post. Today it is called the Connecticut Post.

In today’s editorial room I suspect a reporter’s prepared article – or “copy” as it likely is still known – goes from reporter and editor into print much differently than in 1959. “Copy” is the material that eventually readers see when they get a newspaper.

In the past, final edited copy would be put in a cylinder-shaped container with an opening to shove in the copy paper. It had hard rubber endings because it was going to take some punishment.

When ready it would be put in a tube and propelled by forced air through this tubing to travel from the city room to the composing room. You could hear the traveling container and hear a pop when it hit its destination. It traveled as water would through the plumbing, only via a vacuum with forced air.

There it would be opened and given to a linotype operator. He (and I don’t remember ever a she) would sit at a large linotype machine with a board that resembled a typewriter but was much larger.

He would type from the copy given him on this machine with hot lead that would form the necessary metallic letters that fell to shape the individual letters and then the words. What he typed came out in a line called a “slug” that would become a single line in the newspaper article. You can get a good picture of this at Wikipedia and even a demonstration of how a linotype works on YouTube. It’s neat.

The city room certainly was different, even from the one I worked at the Plain Dealer. I can remember as the night wore on and copy had to be produced for deadline. A rush began. The staff was small. Only one old veteran reporter and the night sports editor and me when I started.

I can see the vet at deadline. Johnny Johannsen would be typing furiously. One finger of each hand pecking away at the typewriter. A cigarette would dangle from his mouth. As the minutes passed his right hand would reach down to the bottom drawer. Out would come a small liquor bottle and Johnny would take a belt. Helped calm the nerves, I guess. Then he’d continue. His ash tray would be smoking. He’d have at least one lit cigarette among the overflow of half cigarette butts. Burns on the desk revealed that they didn’t always remain in the tray. Sadly, years after I left I learned that a cigarette had resulted in the fire that took his life. The afternoon sports editor Eddie Shugrue chewed on a cigar more than smoked it. There were always paper cups of coffee. Spills and attendant stains and smells. That may not have changed.

I left the paper for another in Haverhill, Mass. However, I was asked back months later to take the job of assistant to the Sunday editor. (Oddly, the same thing happened at the PD. I left and months later was asked back and returned. I couldn’t have been as troublesome a reporter as some think of me.)

What struck me only recently was that I returned to the Bridgeport Sunday Post as an assistant to the editor. There was only one such position. But there were three older women on the staff, all much more experienced and accomplished than I. If my jump over them caused any animosity, I didn’t observe it. One, Andree Hickok, remained a long-time friend and later kept up with me as a subscriber to Point of View, my newsletter. Andree’s father was Guy Hickok, a contemporary foreign journalist and friend of Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s.

Part of my duties would be to work Saturday nights putting the newspaper “to bed.” That required working in the composing room. Trays of type had to be transported to those preparing the pages that would make the Sunday paper. The task would be making stories fit the page and it sometimes required carrying trays of type in a rush to finish off a page. The Sunday editor, Pat Pallotto, had one leg and a mangled hand though he never gave even a passing impression of being crippled or even handicapped. He used one crutch to bounce around the composing room carrying trays of type to be set in a large iron mold that held what would be a single newspaper page. This was always exciting.

I’m sure today I wouldn’t pass over a much more experienced woman. That’s to the better. I was advantaged by discrimination. The opportunity to write I got in changing from sports to news and features certainly paved my future in writing.

City rooms have a certain plodding process to produce each next day’s paper. One day that was different.

The day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas was a Friday and payday. People got their weekly paychecks and quickly cashed them. About noon the city room would nearly empty as people went to lunch or took their checks to banks close to the downtown newspaper. When the news broke the city room was near empty. I was sent out to scout downtown to get staff back to the newspaper. The question arose whether the paper should put out an extra edition that afternoon. It became a hot topic among staff. We thought it the responsibility of the paper to produce an extra issue that day. It didn’t happen. Management, likely thinking of the cost, wasn’t as excited. It could wait for the next morning paper. There was much rumbling among people about the decision. The paper was a family-owned, non-union newspaper and the decision was no. Of course, there was television. It took the story from newspapers.

Now, of course, the world hardly needs an Extra edition of a newspaper to get dramatic news to millions. It just takes a few clicks of a computer. (I remember taking a copy of the next day’s New York Times and placing it in a hidden nook in the attic of the house where we lived. I always wonder if someone years later had found it.)

It is sad today to pick up the Plain Dealer in the morning. The front pages are filled with unneeded sports, apparently the thoughtless decisions of editors who downplay the needs and desires of citizens. The sports are accompanied by what are supposed to be “feel good” pieces that might belong on a feature page. It seems the policy to ply the positive. I think the managers want people to love them. That will sell papers. I don’t think so.

It’s such a disappointment. So much of the PD seems to be “filler” material, rather than valuable information. Pages are filled with non-essential, easily compiled listings. There are many articles from other cities, Toledo, Akron, Columbus and Dayton. Too many of them of “Who cares?” quality.

The truth for me is, however, I didn’t spend that much time at mainstream newspapers. I found them very limiting. I ended up starting my own newsletter and writing for non-traditional news outlets for many years.

From 1959 to 1968 I worked at five newspapers. Two of them twice. In Bridgeport and in Cleveland.

I guess you could say that I’m still writing. Maybe looking back more than forward now.

Roldo Bartimole celebrates 50 years of news reporting this year. He published and wrote Point of View, a newsletter about Cleveland, for 32 years. He worked for the Plain Dealer and Wall Street Journal in the 1960s.

He was a 2004 Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame recipient and won the national Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in 1991. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]