When you
walked through the front door of the small-town newspaper where I used to work,
you came into a lobby area with the main switchboard on one side and the
newsroom on the other. On one wall was a set of sepia photographs that
attracted almost everyone’s attention. As a young reporter I often looked up
from my typewriter to see someone standing in front of that wall, gazing at the
photographs in rapt fascination.
Above the
photographs was the headline “The Quarter Century Club.” They were pictures of
the men (and one woman, Virginia Peixoto) who had worked at the paper for 25
years. Time spent in the military, if served after being hired by the paper,
counted.
At the time
of my hiring in 1972, the newsroom was represented by editor Frank F. Orr
(hired in 1938), managing editor Ward Bushee (1946) and city editor Howard
Sheerin (1931). Quite a few of the photos were of printers and pressmen, guys
without a college degree who became damned good at a skilled trade and made a
life’s work of it: Gordon Littlefield, Hank Senini, Dick Heebner, Cy Crawshaw,
Bill Brazil. Others went up on the wall later.
You Got a Watch for Your Time
One of them
was Sam Vestal, the paper’s first photographer, whose pictures proved the
connection between the district attorney and a notorious gambler and helped the
paper win a Pulitzer Prize. Sam went on the wall in 1975, and I remember being
out with him on a story a few weeks before. At one point he reached into his
pants pocket, pulled out a beat-up wristwatch with a broken band and checked
the time. I asked when he was getting it fixed. “Not worth it,” he replied. “I
hit 25 years in a few weeks, and I’ll be getting a new one from the company.”
They gave
watches in those days, too.
In today’s
economic and employment environment, where two-way loyalty is an alien concept,
the idea of a quarter-century club is incomprehensible. It wasn’t always that
way. A company with solid roots in the community could provide steady,
long-term employment at a decent wage, obtained, to be sure, with some coaxing
from labor unions representing the printers and pressmen. If you had a high
school diploma and the willingness to learn some skills, you could make a
career of it.
The Decline of the Physical Product
What
happened in the newspaper industry is typical of what happened across America
to businesses that actually produced a physical product. There are no printers
any more because technology wiped out their jobs; computers enabled editors and
reporters to do the typesetting and produce the pages themselves. The high cost
of maintaining a press, coupled with satellite capability and the internet, has
decimated the ranks of pressmen. Many newspapers no longer do their own
printing; instead, the editors design the pages on the computer and send them electronically
to a press at a distant location. One community newspaper has even tried moving
its newsroom offshore, outsourcing reporting work to people in India, who cover
the city council meeting by watching a community TV broadcast on the internet.
The printed newspaper itself will no doubt vanish during my lifetime, replaced
by images flickering across a computer screen or smart phone.
For a long
time I assumed my picture would be on the wall some day, but the company was
sold and I left after 19 years. I remain grateful for having had the experience
of working in such a stable and welcoming environment, forever gone. Newsrooms
will have typewriters again before the Quarter-Century Club makes a comeback.
Originally posted February 2012
