A moment
The computers were down, so I took a coffee break.
In the break room, I found history kicking back for a cup of joe.
They came as though summoned, gathering in chairs and leaning in door frames. The Editor, the Columnist, the Copy Editors - men with grey mustaches and heads filled with memories. They brought with them all the classic tools of the trade. The clack of a manual typewriter played the rhythm of their chorus, accompanied by the metallic ding of a bulletin on the wire service machine that was actually hooked up to a wire. They told of other days, which seemed not long ago when the memories shined in their eyes, though I had lived to see none of the days they described. The references to events I’d only read about came too quick to remember almost too quick even to follow for one who did not have the memories they shared.
Life moved to the rhythm of the AP machine. Dictations came by telephone, and that sometimes from Europe on a bad connection. The papers were small, but the staffs were enthusiastic - young men the age I am right now before the beards and the years were drawn upon their faces. Those young men made mistakes. They wrote too slowly. They turned a grisly scene grizzly, to the likely quiet amusement of the veterans of their day. And they knew those veterans; talked to them and read their archived copy from the drawers of great steel filing cabinets that once ruled the newsroom.
I looked back through the lens of another mans spectacles and lived a moment neither of us had known first hand. It was a tragedy. At the Ambassador Hotel, a gunman shot a Kennedy. The report came from an old hand sent to cover the celebrities. The name was Bob Thomas and I didn’t know it but his talent was much easier to recognize.
“He wasn’t writing and parsing. He was just thinking,” said the Editor, “but he was thinking in story. And they rolled with it.”
For one moment, my eyes shared the gleam of admiration in those older orbs.
Then the computers came back up.
The crowd of sages wandered off to rejoin the fray.
Restored technology plunged us all back into the very present craft of our own moment.
But I had been there. I had lived another time. And I was glad.
In the break room, I found history kicking back for a cup of joe.
They came as though summoned, gathering in chairs and leaning in door frames. The Editor, the Columnist, the Copy Editors - men with grey mustaches and heads filled with memories. They brought with them all the classic tools of the trade. The clack of a manual typewriter played the rhythm of their chorus, accompanied by the metallic ding of a bulletin on the wire service machine that was actually hooked up to a wire. They told of other days, which seemed not long ago when the memories shined in their eyes, though I had lived to see none of the days they described. The references to events I’d only read about came too quick to remember almost too quick even to follow for one who did not have the memories they shared.
Life moved to the rhythm of the AP machine. Dictations came by telephone, and that sometimes from Europe on a bad connection. The papers were small, but the staffs were enthusiastic - young men the age I am right now before the beards and the years were drawn upon their faces. Those young men made mistakes. They wrote too slowly. They turned a grisly scene grizzly, to the likely quiet amusement of the veterans of their day. And they knew those veterans; talked to them and read their archived copy from the drawers of great steel filing cabinets that once ruled the newsroom.
I looked back through the lens of another mans spectacles and lived a moment neither of us had known first hand. It was a tragedy. At the Ambassador Hotel, a gunman shot a Kennedy. The report came from an old hand sent to cover the celebrities. The name was Bob Thomas and I didn’t know it but his talent was much easier to recognize.
“He wasn’t writing and parsing. He was just thinking,” said the Editor, “but he was thinking in story. And they rolled with it.”
For one moment, my eyes shared the gleam of admiration in those older orbs.
Then the computers came back up.
The crowd of sages wandered off to rejoin the fray.
Restored technology plunged us all back into the very present craft of our own moment.
But I had been there. I had lived another time. And I was glad.