Maureen Dowd’s ‘Requiem’ prompts RG alumni reminiscences

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1. A sweet obituary for newspapering. I managed to catch the end of an era in my first job at a daily, where the night news editor would send out the copy boy (yes, we had copy boys in 1977) to the store across the street for a case of beer and a fifth of whiskey on Saturday nights once we’d gotten past the state edition deadline, about 10:30 p.m.

   The newsroom was thick with cigarette smoke, and more than once reporters accidentally set fire to their waste baskets by dumping ashtrays with live butts. One of my first tasks as night cop reporter was to bail the managing editor out of the drunk tank one night. Bubby, the day cop reporter, couldn’t write or type, and called his stories in — sometimes from a poker game with the cops — to a rewrite man on the city desk.

   Charlie Sutton, the city hall reporter, had his desk up against a newsroom wall, facing away from the city desk, so he could put on a headset — not in common use in those days — and look like he was doing a phone interview while he took a nap in the afternoon. Jack Baldwin, who covered Long Beach harbor, would come to work wearing a red sock on his left foot and a green one on his right, as in a ship’s running lights

   Meanwhile they were managing to write amazing stories about crime and tragedy and corruption and heroism and comedy. Mary Neiswender, sometimes referred to as a “girl reporter” when she started work in the 1950s, got the only jailhouse interview any reporter ever got with Charles Manson. Our medical science reporter was a Pulitzer finalist for a series on patient dumping by LA hospitals.

   My journalism education as a 25-year-old beginner came from listening to these guys and gals on the phone, or bullshitting in bars, and it was far, far better than sitting in a university classroom listening to some professor drone on about ethics. I’m sorry that today’s 20-somethings will miss all that.

2. Maureen Dowd’s Saturday column spoke to me like few things have since my retirement from The Register-Guard newsroom 20 years ago. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long.

   But it also makes me really grateful that I got into the newspapering business when I did because that allowed me to experience most of what Dowd often lovingly describes about typical newsrooms back in The Day.

   I strongly suspect that except for maybe some of the largest metropolitan dailies, 90 percent or more of what she describes hasn’t existed for people who’ve joined the business since the dawn of the 21st century.

   So please excuse this trip down memory lane (feel free to exit at any time, of course) but here are my favorite portions from her column, accompanied by my related recollections from 38 years working for the R-G “city desk,” an identifier that apparently has been replaced at most newspapers by terms such as “editors” becoming “managing producers” (which I hate):

   “What would a newspaper movie look like today?” wondered my New York Times colleague Jim Rutenberg. “A bunch of individuals at their apartments, surrounded by sad houseplants, using Slack?”

   That is an incredibly sad and lonely image.

   “Newsrooms were a crackling gaggle of gossip, jokes, anxiety and oddball hilarious characters. Now we sit at home alone staring at our computers.

   The first was certainly true at The R-G. One of my favorite oddballs was Marvin Tims. The only emotion I ever saw him display was laughter. He was a tail gunner on bombing runs over Germany during World War II. He once told the city desk that he sometimes made up quotes for members of the Lane County Board of Commissioners because they didn’t quite say what he knew they meant to say. He also covered Springfield for a while and liked to tell the story of how the mayor there once urged city council members to “grab the bull between the horns!” When we transitioned from typewriters to computers he drove many of us in the newsroom crazy because he was slightly hard of hearing and tended to shout into his phone during interviews.

   I can’t think of a profession that relies more on osmosis, and just being around other people, than journalism.

   “Osmosis” is a terrific way to describe the transfer of skills from person to person that routinely happened at The R-G.

   “At the end of a Zoom call, nobody says, ‘Hey, do you want to get a drink?’ There’s just a click at the end of the meetings. Nothing dribbles out afterward, and you can really learn things from the little meetings after the meetings.”

   We didn’t actually have an afterwork watering hole at The R-G, especially after we switched to all-morning publication in the fall of 1983, but reporters often would lunch together and occasionally met for drinks on Friday nights after deadlines were done.

   “Hello, Mr. Vesco,” Pear said in his whispery voice. “This is Robert Pear of The Washington Star.”

   When I was a reporter at The R-G, I loved being able to say, “This is Lloyd Paseman. I’m a reporter at The Register-Guard,” adding “in Eugene” if I was calling someone outside Lane County. During our heyday the name of the newspaper was received with respect throughout Oregon, and sometimes outside the state. I vividly recall phoning former Gov. Tom McCall to get a quote for a story I was working on in the early ‘80s and was surprised when he answered the phone at his home because I knew he was battling cancer. I offered to postpone the call but he said no, the issue I was writing about (I think it may have been a land-use planning ballot measure) was too important and he’d do his best to answer my questions. He was a remarkable man and an excellent governor (and before that, TV journalist).

   “There was an overwhelming sense of purpose, fire and life: the clacking rhythm of typewriters, the throbbing of great machines in the composing room on the floor above, reporters shouting for copy boys to pick up their stories.”

   Also true at The R-G, except that our newsroom was a floor above the composing room after a second story was added to the High Street Building, and we never used “copy boys” in my time there (1965-2003).

   Forty years later, when I began working in the Times newsroom, it was still electric and full of eccentric characters. The green eyeshades were gone and nobody yelled “Hat and coat!” to send you out on breaking news.

   I never heard anyone yell “Hat and coat!” at The R-G but there was one copy desk editor who wore a green eyeshade when I first started work there. We were a small enough staff that reporters were summoned by their last name or nickname.

   My job was to type up stories on my Royal typewriter, with carbon paper, dictated by reporters who called in from the field, including from the trial of the Watergate burglars;

   I had an Underwood manual typewriter when I started at The R-G (one carbon copy required) and I took a few “rewrite” calls in my day, although the stories called in were edited but seldom actually rewritten. I liked that she dropped the Watergate stories reference at the end.

   An editor sent me out for beer on deadline and then almost fired me when I brought back Miller Lite. Reporters had temper tantrums, smashing their typewriters or computer terminals on the floor.

   The R-G had a strict no-alcohol policy when I joined the staff, although some reporters tippled during their lunches. Political reporter Henny Willis was notorious for what we called his “three-hour lunches” at which he would often have two or three, or more, glasses of wine; we were never quite sure whether it affected his performance because he was only productive every other year when he was covering the Legislature in Salem, where—his expense account confirmed—he continued to enjoy leisurely lunches. Our wire editor in my early days often came to work inebriated, as did one of my later colleagues on the city desk. We had our share of temper tantrums—ME Dave Baker once physically separated our police and court reporters—but I never saw anyone smash a piece of equipment.

   As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels.

   Even sadder than empty desks is the abandonment of an entire newsroom. See the attached photo, taken not too long before our planned “RG Golden Era” reunion had to be put on hold in March 2020 because of the pandemic. Now not only the newsroom but also the R-G press are gone, with the only remaining trace that a great midsized daily newspaper once thrived there being the gutted five-story press building.

   Management, which says one thing it is worried about is that young people will stagnate and see the institution as an abstraction if they work remotely too often,

   I’ve tended to be sympathetic to people who want to primarily work remotely, and I hadn’t thought of the “see the institution as an abstraction” argument, which makes sense to me.

   “Let’s be honest,” she said. “Political reporters have always worked from wherever, whenever, as long as they are filing good stories.”

   It has always been my feeling, even as an editor, that reporters should be judged for the quality and quantity of their work, not from whence they perform that work, but I know some managers have a problem with not being able to physically see their employees on a regular basis.

   But now I’m looking for proof of life on an eerie ghost ship. Once in a while, I hear reporters wheedling or hectoring some reluctant source on the phone, but even that is muted because many younger reporters prefer to text or email sources.

   I like the “eerie ghost ship” analogy. What used to be The R-G newsroom certainly had that feel when I last visited it more than three years ago. And phone conversations certainly feel more personal than texts or emails.

   If you interview someone in writing, they have time to consider and edit their responses to your questions, which means that spontaneous, unexpected, injudicious and entertaining quotes are dead.”

   I hadn’t thought about the loss of spontaneity from relying on texting or email but that’s a valid point. On the other hand, I prefer emailing because it does indeed give me time to see what I’m saying before I say it, which isn’t necessarily a good thing for story sources to be able to do.

   I never could have latched onto so many breaking stories if I hadn’t raised my hand and said, “I’ll go.”

   As an editor, one of the greatest values I looked for an appreciated in the reporters I worked with was an eagerness, not just a willingness, to go cover a story, especially breaking news where we often had no idea what it was going to involve. Fortunately, most (but not all) of the reporters I worked with shared that value.

   “Let’s go see Yasir Arafat at the White House and go shopping!”

   I absolutely love this quote.

   There were weirdos in newsrooms, and fabulous role models occasionally, and the spirit of being part of a motley entourage. Now, it’s just you and the little cursor on your screen.”

   I think “motley entourage” was a fairly accurate description of our R-G newsrooms, although “diverse personalities” might be more accurate. And “just you and the little cursor on your screen” kind of sums up all the changes in the past 20 years, doesn’t it?

3. When smoking was banned at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, there was legit concern the paper wouldn’t get out. A creative exec ed found an empty office in the far top corner of the building (two floors up from the newsroom), had a bunch of decrepit computers put up there and, on deadline, sent the smokers up there to write. That worked until the smoke got so thick it found its ways into stairwells and elevator shafts.

   So the smokers had to step outside, which in in winter in Minnesota will either prove you are beyond addicted – or cure you.

4. If my loss of hearing today wasn’t caused entirely by high-decibel rock music in my youth, I suspect one culprit could be the R-G copy desk, where I worked many shifts amid the cacophony of the teletype machines and the incessant racket of the vacuum tubes as they noisily suctioned cylinders bearing page proofs from the shop downstairs, then returned them with a thundering whoosh after editing.

   Everyone on the desk smoked, including me for my short stint there, simply because I was a kid who wanted to fit in with a very salty group of news veterans. One of them always came to work drunk and went home for lunch every day to get even drunker. Amazingly, he was great at his job and taught me a lot.

   Another of this crew was notorious for spilling his coffee — sometimes with semi-disastrous results during an era of eyeshades, red pencils and copy paper. I learned new swear words during some of these emergencies.

   Meanwhile, just a few feet away was the city desk — the true heart of the newsroom — complete with non-stop ringing of phones, barking of orders and fascinating reeparte between witty, seasoned reporters and harried, sharp-tongued editors. Newsrooms got quieter after cold type arrived, but I never saw the energy level wane.

   I thank my lucky journalism stars that I was privileged to catch the tail end of that colorful era.

   1. I’d forgotten, or didn’t know, that you worked on the copy desk during that time. My recollection, which is likely faulty, was that when I started on Nov. 1, 1965, you were working on was the county desk, which was adjacent to the city desk and across from the copy desk. But I also remember Jim Boyd, Mike Forrester and Doug Wilson working there, too—memory can certainly fade with time.

      I also recall the red pencils—grease pencils, weren’t they? And the glue pots, for pasting copy pages end on end before editing a story.

      I don’t know if you were working in that area when our dimwitted maintenance man came out to retrieve a cylinder that had gotten stuck in the pneumatic tube somewhere between the copy desk and the composing room.

      I think you must have been able to see the cylinder from the copy desk end because the maintenance man decided he could reach into the tube and grab it. Paul Harvey III and several other people watching cautioned him to shut off the vacuum before reaching into the tube but he poo-pooed their warnings and stuck his arm into the tube, up to at least his bicep.

      And, yes, his arm got sucked into the tube and he couldn’t pull it out. He stood there, struggling and yelling and getting red in the face, while Harvey and the others stood there and laughed.

      Someone finally went to wherever the off switch was and turned off the vacuum and the crisis ended. As I recall, the maintenance man avoided the copy desk area for quite a while after that.

      1. I worked about five years on the R-G copy desk. Started with the paper as Cottage Grove bureau reporter in 1969, moved to the county desk in Eugene after Doug Wilson died in a plane crash in 1971, joined the copy desk in 1972 when Rich Jordan left the paper, became news editor in 1973 when Barrie Hartman became managing editor and stayed on the desk through 1978.

         The first notorious coffee-spiller was a character named Meinhardt. He didn’t stay long, and I can’t remember his last name. Barrie was just as bad, maybe even worse, at spilling things. But he was secretly halfway blind, so I cut him a lot of slack. The most notorious smoker was Don Brand, who had cigarettes smoldering non-stop, all day long, and sometimes hauled out a cigar.

         The unfortunate drinker was Ed Coursey, who was always well-lit when he came in to begin ripping the news wires at 6 a.m. After the presses rolled for the first edition around 11:30 a.m., he would walk a few blocks to his home for “lunch,” then return to help us fill the often-enormous Section A news hole for the next day, mostly national/international wire copy wrapped around page after page of department store ads.

         By 1983 I was back on the copy desk as news editor again, and I was sitting next to Ed one morning that year when he fell over dead, shortly before deadline. I ran downstairs to the backshop and fetched Al Adams, a master printer known for his training in CPR. He ran back upstairs with me and gave it his best try, but Ed was gone — the first person I ever saw die right before my eyes.

         That’s just one of thousands of vivid memories I have after 42 years working in six different daily newspaper newsrooms. I miss them all.

         P.S.: Great story about Henny Willis. I’m glad Barrie stood behind you.

         1. I have my own smoking story to tell:

            Barrie Hartman replaced Bill Wasmann as ME early in my term as city editor at The R-G. As a reporter for nine years I had suffered mightily, along with probably at least half of the rest of the city desk staff, from the air pollution created by the people in the newsroom who smoked—mostly cigarettes, but also a pipe or two.

            We were on the second floor in the High Street building by then and the air currents flowed up the stairs from the first floor, across the newsroom and out through a large vent built into the wall between the two restrooms.

            In what I believe was my first sit-down meeting with Barrie, I asked him if I could move the smokers to the back of the newsroom, near the exhaust vent, so their smoke would be immediately sucked into the outside air instead of passing over all the reporters’ and editors’ desks.

            He said “Sure,” so I put out a memo to the staff, announcing that the half-dozen or so people who smoked would be having their desks changed to ones in the back of the newsrooms, and gave them until the weekend to transfer their files and personal belongings to their new desks—and the option to give up smoking, which I don’t believe any of them accepted.

            There was some grumbling but everyone complied—except Henny Willis. Sweetheart that he was, he insisted he needed his desk near the front of the newsroom so he’d be easily visible to his many visitors, mostly state and local politicians. I told him the move was not negotiable and urged him to move his stuff out of his current desk and into his new desk before Monday.

            When I drove to the building that Sunday night to check on the moves, none of Henny’s stuff had been touched. So I spent the next hour or so transferring his things for him, taking care to put everything in the same place, in the same drawers, in the same order, in which I found them.

            When Henny reported for work that Monday, he found another reporter sitting at his former desk. He stood there, stunned, for a moment and then got madder than I’d ever seen him. I believe he even went to Barrie to complain but Barrie backed me up and the deed was done.

            I believe that was in 1974 and it was several more years before Doug, after he became ME, banned smoking throughout the newsroom, allowing most of us finally to literally breathe a sigh of relief.

5. When we began the shift to computers, we brought in electronic air filters (smoke is bad for computers as well as lungs). We placed them strategically at the copy desk to suck up smoke from Ed Coursey and Paul Harvey. Worked pretty well. Machine innards got filthy in a hurry.

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