Aliens Land in Pahokee in Jesus is Back type on a story about illegal immigrants.

It was funny when the “suits” got involved though. The managing editor was never around at go-to-press deadling, except on election nights. After doing my page layouts, I always worked in Composing, telling them where to cut the stories to fit the hole on the page and handling any other glitches. As deadline neared and I was busy signing off pages, the “suits” would look at me like “are we gonna make it?” And I’d remind them that “they won’t start the press without us.” We were all doing the best we could with the late-breaking copy and such, and if the press was a few minutes late starting, oh well……But the editor always gave me an odd look when I said that…..

And of course there were some rough nights when after deadline we’d notice minor errors on pages and blow them off with “The way things went tonight, we’re lucky we didn’t say “F–K’ in a headline”….(don’t think we ever got THAT word in the paper, although the Evening Times came close with a typo from Hell. Their headline said “8 Arrested on Drug Counts” but someone left the “O” out of “Counts.” No, nobody got fired).

Nice take on how a copy desk works. WAY too many of those rushed to the last second nights were due more to indecision on story play by the “suits” than by late breaking news. But we usually still made deadline despite them.

It was good to have a stereotypical crusty old editor on the desk. They’d teach you something. Before pagination, we’d type our headlines on paper for the slot folks. The late-great Pete Briggs would sometimes wad the headline sheet up and toss it back across the desk to a cringing editor who would open it up to read his “NS” – NO SHIT – rewrite it. He’d also reject bureaucratic language, saying things like “There are no power ‘outages,’ just as there are no power ‘onages.’ They’re “power ‘failures.’ Period.”

We didn’t have proofreaders in Composing. The pasteup folks weren’t even supposed to read the stories as they pasted them up. But they did anyway, and they saved us from major league embarrassing errors LOTS of times.

The copy editor, Bill (Meston, I think was his last name), had a thing about not talking to reporters.

You’d turn in your story, wait anxiously as Bill scrawled all over it with his soft lead pencil and watch while he sidled over to your desk holding it gingerly between two fingers until he dropped it like it had been rolled in something dirty.

Attached to your copy would be a typewritten note – usually no more than a couple of sentences long – asking a question, wanting clarification or snidely pointing out something like “Cape Girardeans do not hit each other in the rear, alas.”

The bad thing was he was always right. Not usually right, always right.

One day, though, I thought I had him.

I took an obit about a woman who was married on her birthday. Same month and same day.

I knew this was the kind of thing he would pounce on.

I watched him work his magic on my copy and swivel over to his typewriter to pound out one of his notes (which I assumed would be something like, “Are you SURE about those dates?”).

When he slid the note on my desk, I was sitting smugly ready.

Until, that is, I read his comment, “I’ve heard of child brides, but this is ridiculous.”

Yep, when I typed out the birth date and the wedding date, I put in the same year for both.

It’s been 40 years and I can still remember the sly smile on his face as he walked back to his desk.

I got to know Bill a lot better when I worked the copy desk. Turned out he was a nice guy, well read and whose outside-the-office hobby was NOT pulling the wings off butterflies.

Just for the record, here’s what proofreaders looked like back in The Old Days:

http://ken.steinhoff.net/southeast_missourian_1965/target4.html

Even thought they were only supposed to flag places where the type didn’t match the copy, they still saved me from factual errors more times than I’d like to admit.

http://ken.steinhoff.net/Production/

When I heard that The Post was going to farm out its printing to The Sun Sentinel, I made two last visits to the production department just before the place went dark.

Even though I’ve been around newspaper presses since I was 12 years old, the magic of a press room still fascinates me.

I subscribed to a dozen of the best photo papers in the country back in 1969 when I was plotting my next career hops. Over the next 18 months, I gradually let all the subscriptions expire except The Post because they did the best photo work in the country on a daily basis and they had, arguably, the best reproduction.

I hope these pictures reflect some of the appreciation I feel for them. They made me look good for a lot of years.