Tonight was the office Christmas party at the paper, and I have to tell you, getting a bit tipsy at work, with your boss, is freaking great! Anyway, after the party died down only myself and one other employee stayed a little late to sit and talk with the owners/publishers, Mike and Sandy. These two are some of the best human beings I have known. Loving, kind and hip. They want us to learn, they push us to succeed. Tonight, they shared with us stories from over 30 years in the journalism biz. Funny stories and stories about how things have changed. We settled for a while on technology and the fast improvements in printing over the last 30 years. Mike talked about lead-setting in College, where each letter was plucked from a case and set backwards and upside down. Sandy talked of the lead-setter with one eye who could read the backward, upside down type. Ha!
Mike was a country beat reporter for the Eugene Register-Guard for some time, when he started he had a teletype machine at home.
The machine sat in their dinning room, and Mike had to first type out his story on a typewriter and then re-type it into the machine, which was on a primitive network that reached all over the state. He said that two reporters on the network liked to use the machines to send chess moves back and forth to one another. Mike added the code to activate his machine on the network was “EE.” One night, while having dinner, the machine went “wiz-bang” and spit out “EE to K4, take that you bastard.”
Sandy added if the machine broke down they had to call the teletype guy, Scott, to come fix it. Sometimes Scott would be there so long she would serve him dinner. Sometimes they still see Scott, who is long retired but likes to work at Duck games. Wow.
I’m glad to hear that the celbratory spirit of Ellyn’s birthday was felt worldwide.
ps.can we get a teletype machine? Like as a pet?