Late Edition: A Love Story

     My most recent read is Late Edition: A Love Story, by Bob Greene (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009). In it he recalls the summers of 1964-68, when he worked at his first newspaper, the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen-Journal, during high school. It really is a love story; because of the excitement he had for working in the same building as all these people doing something as simple, and as local, as producing the local newspaper.

     It started on the day JFK was assassinated. No one quite knew what to do, so it seemed just as natural to write about how his high school class reacted to the news. And then he took it down to the C-J offices and dropped off the story at the city editor's desk. They didn't take that story, but he kept pestering folks, and that led the next summer to his first job with the paper, which was as a copyboy, running errands of all types. Nest summer he found a place in the sports department, with led to further adventures. By then he had started college near Chicago, but came back to Columbus the next summer to work for the city department.

     It was at a special week of extra work for the paper's parent company that he realized there was a wider world out there. That week Greene was asked to serve as a copyboy during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which made lots of news for being very acrimonious. He didn't notice; he was running errands for senators and famous TV broadcasters, so he figured they were all like that. But it was there that he realized that there were bigger places to write than the Citizen-Journal, much as he loved it. So he went to the Chicago Sun-Times, then across town to the Chicago Tribune. And then books came, a column in Esquire magazine, and a freelance spot reporting for ABC News. Computers entered the scene, and then changed the landscape completely. Gone are the Linotype operators, or scissors necessary for physically cutting the copy to rearrange the paragraph structure. There are no more typewriters making that wonderfully noisy clacking noise. And it's rare that people will read an actual newspaper any longer. Which is really sad. But here Greene does a wonderful job of recapturing that world of that newsroom, and the public's attitude and assurance that they would be here forever. There was a romance to that time, like the way he describes assuming that everyone always read at least one paper a day, usually more. It would have been nice to live in that world, I think.

#Wesley