We were right on the cusp of the electronic age and had begun to use phototypesetting machines, but the paper was still composed physically on cardboard flats with film strips, X-Acto knives, hot wax, and rubber rollers. We used blue pencils to write on the flats so our notes wouldn't be picked up by the camera during production. After a final proof, each flat had to be initialed by me and the production manager before it went in the transport box, which was carried away by the courier, a Vietnam vet with a logo-festooned jacket and handlebar mustache.
Our paper, The Winchester Star, had been owned by a politically conservative Civil War buff named Pete Jorgensen. One of his other publications was called The Artilleryman, which is still being put out on the Web by his wife, Kay.
Jorgensen sold his small newspaper group to Hart-Hanks, a Texas-based publishing and marketing conglomerate, which hoped to surround The Boston Globe and strangle it by taking all the ads from the rich suburbs, leaving the husk of the inner city to the city paper.
But in that year after Jorgensen sold it and before Hart-Hanks got its arms fully around its acquisition, the Winchester Star was mine. Mine were the last eyes to see the flats before publication, and what came out on the street was my baby, from start to finish.
The managing editor had expressed doubt when I said I wanted the job. It paid $21,000 per year. I was a freelancer and had done special sections and the like for the chain. When the Star editor quit, I said I’d do it, and the managing editor, a woman in her forties who walked with a cane due to an injury, said, “You should do an editorial.”
That began a string of 60 editorials, the number of weeks that I served, one each week. The first was timid, on some local topic, but in the second, my fancy took flight. I had determined to include an international as well as a local reference in each one. We put 6,000 papers on the street each week, and after staying up most of the night Wednesday, I would come in late Thursday and bask in the glow: townspeople stopped by to chat, bring announcements, and drop an occasional compliment on the editorial. At lunch in a local diner, I would watch to see how people were reading the paper, whether they read the front and then went right to Page 8 or leafed back and forth, rattling it emphatically to shake it out.
What I had inherited as a hodgepodge gradually tightened up. I told the staff, “There’s no reason the front page can’t be as good as the New York Times: no errors, tight leads.”
Page 8, which had been a mess of lousy syndicated columns, births, and weddings became a hotly contested forum, high-priced real estate. For my editorial, I claimed the first two columns between the flag and mast, bumped my type up a point, and spread my piece over the whole width. That was my turf and I filled it exactly every week with between 700 and 1,000 words. After that, there remained only four more columns to fill.
A cartoonist, a local kid, walked off the street and asked if he could contribute. I asked him if he’d ever done political stuff and he said no, but I liked the style of his samples and told him to come in on Thursday. We looked at the fresh front and found a theme, together roughed out an image, and he brought me a sample Friday. I said we’d run with it, and he brought finished art Monday. That was the first of many. I wrote the caption and kicker head, and, depending on whether it was a landscape or portrait, sized it for three or four columns. Carl’s cartoon because a regular feature and took up plenty of space at the top.
We had a feature called Man in the Street. A reporter would go out and ask a question, get an answer, and snap a picture of the subject. We’d take the best four and run them at the bottom of the page. That left precious little white space in the middle of Page 8, the former barrenness of which had seemed like the Nevada desert.
Now, because the editorials and cartoon were thought provoking, we started getting letters, which we published and answered where appropriate. And local people began showing up, asking to write columns. Pretty soon, Page 8 had overflowed onto Page 9, which became the Op-Ed, and even Page 10 on weeks when there were lots of letters.
We took that moribund little forum and turned it into a tiny Athens, a beacon of open thought and debate. One of my greatest joys was tossing the syndicated content in the trash at the end of production. We didn't need it. We had our own content.
After I left, I made (by hand) several copies of a book out of the compiled editorials.
Recently, I pulled one of the books out because I was thinking about that second editorial. There it was, all long and thin, and I thought, let me scan it and OCR (optical character recognition) it. I had a couple of OCR packages in my software, one that came with Hewlett-Packard printer software and another from Corex, but neither worked. I though, I bet there are programs available on the Web.
But it was even better than that: OCR is now a Web service. Just upload your jpg or pdf, and it will ship you back a txt or doc file automagically. I used Online OCR, which worked well and with minimal fuss.
The editorial, which was called “Why Worry About The Fate Of The World,” was recovered from its analog tomb, and I, because I have already gone on long enough in this space, reproduce it here for those interested.
That job was the best I ever had because, even though the pay was dirt, the creative freedom and feedback from the town was exhilarating. Just making something good, something over which I had control, made it worthwhile, at least until Hart-Hanks management began to figure out what they had bought.
All that is dead and gone now, the assets sold off repeatedly, staff reduced to near zero, local production uprooted, even the storefront, which had been in the center of town, sold. These days, the staff — if you could call it that — wraps a core of syndicated content in the thinnest of local reporting, and the ads are bundled in nationwide packages.
But it was great while it lasted!
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Twitter: RogerKay
