Birth of a Hack: Part Three

they wanted me to make coffee.

this, to me, was silly. i didn't drink coffee, so i saw no good reason why i should be the one to make it. also, logistically, it was complicated. coffee was made in a giant urn that i could barely lift when it was full. the only place to get water was in the men's bathroom. there was a women's restroom on our floor, but it was a tiny, one-hole affair with a very small sink. it was located directly across from the sports department, which meant that every time one of the six women on the floor had to pee, all of the sportswriters didn't just know it, they could hear it.

so to make coffee i had to lug the heavy urn down the hall to the men's room, pound on the door, yell, "IS ANYBODY IN THERE?" and then go in and fill it up at the big deep sink, hoping that no guy came in needing to take a whiz.

this i was not inclined to do.

so i set about scheming to get out of this responsibility. first, i started bugging guys when they were at their busiest. "can you fill the coffee urn for me? there's someone in the bathroom." they didn't care to be interrupted when they were on deadline, or to be away from their phones when they were waiting for a call back from a source.

once the urn was filled with water, i made coffee...badly. very badly. undrinkably so (and in a newsroom, that's saying a lot). guys would saunter over to the urn, fill up their blackened cups (nobody ever washed anything, of course), take a swig and then spit it out on the floor. "GAAAA! who made this, anyway?"

and someone would nod in my direction. i was over at the city desk, importantly taking calls and writing obits, and i'd smile innocently and say, "is it too strong? i don't really know. i don't drink coffee."

so that responsibility went away fairly quickly, and i could concentrate on the fun stuff: snooping around in the county courthouse amongst the bankruptcies and divorces, calling the fire chief to get the fire runs ('food on stove' was a common one; so was 'dryer fire,' which probably launched my lifelong paranoia about leaving clothes in the dryer when i'm not home), and writing short newsy items for our daily "Duluth Briefs" package. when the Herald came up off the press in the early afternoon and was delivered to each desk by the nutty copy girl, i used to open it up, turn to the Duluth Briefs, and stare at them with love.

i wrote that. i wrote that. and now it's in print! i'd think, reading them over and over and over again. i got no byline, no tagline--most of them were written straight off of news releases, and required no reporting whatsoever. but still, there was something incredibly magic to me about seeing words that i had written put into print and distributed for all the world to read.

but that, of course, was not my only duty. i also called down to the harbor twice each day to get the marine log: the names of the ships that had passed under the aerial bridge on their way into the harbor, and the names of the ships that had passed under the bridge on their way back out into the lake. many of the lakers quickly became familiar to me--the Arthur Anderson, the Cason J. Callaway, the William Irvin, the Edmund Fitzgerald.

the salties--the foreign, ocean-going ships--got an x in front of their name, to distinguish them.

accuracy was paramount. you don't want to get this wrong, one of the oldtime editors told me. make sure you don't miss a boat. women--the wives and girlfriends of the sailors--scoured the paper for these listings to know when to expect their man's boat back at port. it gives them time to get their boyfriends out of the house, the editor said. more than one angry woman has called up here, wanting to know why we didn't warn her that her man's boat was back in the harbor.

i believed that story, as i believed all the stories the old guys told me.

i don't remember much about the day the edmund fitzgerald sank, but i do remember a little. i remember reporters racing around, and great commotion, and intense, frantic typing and phoning, and i remember standing in the middle of the newsroom and feeling so excited that i got to know all of this first, before anyone else. news as it happens. it was a powerful and heady feeling.

and i remember one of the editors hollering at me to go pull a mug of the boat from the morgue (the newsroom library). and make sure you get the right one! he yelled.

later, he explained that some years before a ship had sunk and the morgue didn't have a picture of it, so someone had run a picture of some other, random ore boat, thinking that all ore boats look alike. the panicked wives and girlfriends who had men on board the pictured ship flooded the newsroom with calls--they recognized the boat, and they thought that was the one that had sunk.

it was a lesson to me that scrupulous accuracy was paramount. someone is always paying attention; someone always knows more than we do; someone will always call us out if we are wrong.

a note on the pictures: the top picture is the newsroom in 1978. it had already started to change--the blond woman in the middle of the picture is the second newsroom clerk, hired a year or two after me. i'm the one with the prim braid at the lefthand side of the picture. it appears as though i am poring over the paper, admiring my work again.

the second picture was my file mug , taken later that year.

click on the top picture to make it larger; it's worth studying.

TO BE CONTINUED