So sorry, but it looks as if September will be dark.
But feel free to tell deadline stories on yourselves. I’ll tell a quick one. When I first came to the Evening Sun, I had never worked for an evening paper before and was a little fuzzy on the deadlines. (The San Antonio Light was a former evening paper that published on an “all-day” schedule, which meant one could update until 8 a.m. or so, but it was basically a morning paper by my time there.)
So, the first weeks at the Evening Sun, alone and friendless, I’d come to work and listen to my colleage Frank D. Roylance type endlessly, filing, filing, filing. (Frank was once described to me as the Brooks Robinson of the Evening Sun, fielding anything that came his way.) Eventually, the city editor, Wayne Hardin, would come by and ask me in his soft Arkansas accent if I could do “a little story.” Sure, I’d say, the eager beaver. When do you need it? “Noon?” Wayne always made it sound optional. And I’d report and type it up and away it would go and the next day, I’d check the paper, but it wouldn’t be in, and I would feel like a failure.
After about two weeks of this, my sister said: “Wow, you’ve had a lot of stories. Even some page-ones.” I have? Turns out I was filing for the seven-star and the final editions, but I never knew that.
See you in October.
I remember one morning on our scrappy little P.M., when all at once the stock market was in a panic sell-off, dropping 500 points (this must have been the ’87 crash), a military jet crashed into a hotel near the Indianapolis airport (an event witnessed by our bureau chief there) and a big local story was breaking (I think someone in an elected position was being indicted). It was all-hands-on-deck time, with not nearly enough hands to go around, but here’s the weird thing — I’ve never seen a crew run more smoothly. Someone would fetch clips on the elected official, type a few grafs for the plane crash background, answer the phone and do a quick interview with a local stockbroker, boom boom boom bing bing bing, and no one got in anyone’s way and it was as though we were all communicating telepathically. It went so smoothly the bosses basically stood around and watched, beaming at our efficiency. Two people took dictation, deadline loomed, the paper was being torn apart and reassembled on the fly, and we were doing it without breaking a sweat.
I was so happy. This is why people take these crappy jobs for crappy money. Adrenaline feels good, dammit.
Let this be a comfort to you in your white-knuckle time, Laura.
Late to this, but — when a newsroom works, it works so beautifully.
As I’ve noted here and there, I spent my last year at The Sun in the Baltimore County bureau, which was not exactly my idea. But there was much to love about that final year, especially the camaraderie of working closely with seven other reporters, who ranged in age from 20-something to 50-something.
My second day at the bureau, some teens drove a stolen vehicle into a working-class bar. No one was killed, but it was still a story of some note — SUV crashing through the wall of a popular bar during happy hour. We worked that story so hard, as a team. The story appears, in somewhat altered form, in Every Secret Thing.
And there was nothing, nothing, like that feeling after the deadline was met and the work was done, and you sat in a bar with your colleages and sipped a drink to take an edge off that buzz.