One New Year’s Tale from the Washington County Post

Being such a talented journalist I was fired the first week I worked at a newspaper often called, for excellent reasons, either “The Standard Mess” or “Substandard Press,” although the masthead read “The Standard Press.” All three of you who read my writing with any regularity will more remember “The Washington County Post,” but both publications were actually identical on the inside 12 pages, only the outer four reserved for more local readership in Hoosick Falls and Cambridge. Jointly we were called “Horicon Newspapers,” the publications owned by Nick and Laurie Mahoney who made the grave error of hiring me fresh out of college in 1976. I’ve often wondered had they not done so how my life would have wound up, and today strongly believe not nearly as good. It’s astounding what working 60 hour weeks for 90 bucks every Friday will do for the soul, if not more mundane things like the chance to learn necessary job skills. Beyond question, the opportunity was a great gift to a most unworthy recipient.

As for the big reason “why” that’s often mysterious and unknown, in this instance I believe I know the answer. For reasons defying logic Laurie Mahoney liked me, irrespective of a dozen good reasons not to give a loose-wired 22-year-old real responsibility and plenty of chances to do serious damage. Instead of polite rejection of a terrible resume, Laurie remembered a single isolated incident upon which she based her judgement and advocacy 10 years later.

When Nick and Laurie first moved to the Cambridge area they toured our house on East Main Street when I was in the sixth grade and our house newly on the market. My parents weren’t home when the the couple arrived to view the property and it fell on me to provide a tour, which for some reason greatly impressed Mrs. Mahoney. I know this because she felt compelled to write a thank you letter to my parents where she gushed profusely about my “charm and intelligence.” I think Dad first thought the letter a forgery, one of my many talents, but the letter was genuine. I’d made a big fan, and from that point on, as far as Mrs. Mahoney was concerned, I was golden.

Of all God’s creatures, I think only humans possess selective blindness. Once we get fixed on some notion, nothing short of a nuclear explosion will change our perception, and we miss so much when it’s right out there in the open. Regardless of reason, I will be eternally grateful for being in Mrs. Mahoney’s favor. I could have burned down the paper, but upon inspecting the smoking ruins and me with a match and gas can in hand, I’m certain she would have ignored clear evidence and sought some other reason for the fire. Nick, however, was far more objective. Still, Nick knew who was most important to keep happy in his family and the indirect consequence led to one of my greatest blessings. I was given the time to learn by repeated failure, one of the fastest ways to learn almost anything, but also one of the more painful.

As for being fired, I’d just finished my first week of misspellings, typographical errors, factual inaccuracies, and corrections hand written between the lines in unique illegible scrawl that our typesetter said looked more like hieroglyphics than written English.

Young folks may wonder why many computer programs have features called “cut” and “paste.” Old timers know it’s because this was what really took place before computers killed the typewriter business. If, for example, I wanted to transpose a given paragraph, I’d literally cut out the typed copy and paste it with rubber cement into another section. We also used copious quantities of a product nearing mass media extinction, paper. Crude technology and a stunning lack of skills consequently made my copy appear like a kindergarten arts and crafts project made worse by someone spiking the Kool-Aid with tequila.

Late in the afternoon following my first full week, due to the conditions just explained, a man I recognized from the newspaper office in Cambridge but didn’t yet know walked into Ruditis Home Appliance Store in Hoosick Falls where my “office” was located. My desk was right between the upright refrigerators and chest freezers, a situation requiring some explanation.

The big time newsroom environment was the result of a real fire (not the metaphorical one just referenced) that burned down the Hoosick Falls office just before I started working for the Mahoney family. Arrangements were made for space in the appliance store, most likely by Mike Mahoney, my immediate supervisor and Nick and Laurie’s son. I also owe my professional life greatly to Mike’s kindness and training about life in the real world, not to mention innumerable lessons about journalism he taught mostly by example.

As just explained, I did my original disservice to the world of journalism in the corner of the refrigerator section, and I’m not making this up, I actually sold a freezer for store owners Herb and Peggy, two delightful people as were their daughters. Anyway, we occupied two desks right in front of chest freezers I often used as additional desktops when things got really busy and I was even messier than usual.

The first fateful week our papers published with my grammatical dyslexia, l looked up from a WW II refugee Royal typewriter that stuck on every third key stroke to see the man I’d seen briefly before working in the Cambridge office. He looked down on me severely with a mixture I interpreted as sadness and disdain. The alcohol fumes coming from him were so strong if I’d lit a match (I still smoked at the time) I think the guy would have exploded.

“You have no future here,” he growled, “and I wouldn’t respect you even if you stayed, but I have to let you go.” He went on then for a few more sentences I either don’t remember or they weren’t clear enough due to the high booze content behind them. My assessment at the time was that the man decided to tie on a good bender to fortify courage before he canned me.

After his grand pronouncement, my “supervisor” made his way on unsteady legs back out of the door and wandered on to Dougherty’s Hotel right next door, still in existence at the time, and a favorite watering hole for many. I sat at my battered desk in total misery contemplating a future working at Hale Furniture in Arlington where lots of people in Cambridge worked at the time. Trading my wounded typewriter for the loud wail of a big wood planer I operated many summers would at least keep a roof over my head, pay marginally better, and probably create a lot fewer enemies. However, my prospects quickly changed.

“Pay no attention to him,” Debbie said shortly after the man left and she got off the phone. “He does that to everyone who starts working here. He can’t fire you. He’s just the proofreader.” Debbie occupied the second desk two days a week in Hoosick Falls to work on billing, and spent the rest of it setting type at our Cambridge office. She was the first classy gal I met in the newspaper business that seems to draw them for some reason. (Yes, I met my wife at a newspaper office in Louisiana!)

Unfortunately, the next week was no better, and this time I think I really would have been fired if not for Mrs. Mahoney.

Nick walked into our opulent chrome and white enamel office and tossed the latest issue at me, in which I misspelled “accommodate” in a 60-point headline on the front page. It was one of the best spelling lessons, ever.

“We all look like fools,” Nick said still using his characteristic soft voice but biting down hard on the pipe he smoked almost continuously. Nick was a real journalist, too, having come up in the business after many years of writing and editing, finally getting to the point where he could buy his own paper and run it as he saw fit. I think at this moment he wanted to fit me under the building, not in it. After Nick pitched the paper at me, he walked into the back of the appliance store where his son Mike kept a desk and then walked out of the front door without saying another word to me.

While Nick carried the title “editor” he actually didn’t see the paper until it was published; his involvement was much more as owner/publisher/column writer. My only true editor was Debbie the typesetter I just mentioned and the man who fired me, the proofreader entrusted to read my copy and compare it to what was actually set in type. Neither were paid to edit and both had plenty of other things to do as we all did. Anyway, the proofreader found it irritatingly difficult to do his job due to my inadequacies, and fired me even though he didn’t have the authority to do so. Between the two of them, and many times Mike Mahoney’s overview too, some of my glaring goofs didn’t make the paper, but I’d say at least 80 percent of them did, and that’s when the community in both Cambridge and Hoosick Falls most enthusiastically became ardently vocal supervisors, editors and critics, true and most important parts of journalism in a free society.

After a short while, I learned to come in late to work the day after we published just to miss being hollered at all morning via phone or by personal exchanges. Things calmed down a bit after lunch when I generally crept in with shirt collar raised and a baseball cap pulled down low over my brow to avoid recognition, just a poor guy looking to buy a refrigerator or toaster and not the infamous Mike Brown now on dozens of “Wanted Dead” posters.

Most seriously now, the true dynamics of life as a small town journalist were almost infinitely complicated and very diverse, from death notices to birth announcements, school budgets and traffic accidents, football games and armed robbery, it all came out in in one big rush, or, on other days, seemed to disappear entirely. I learned more in four months than I did in four years of college and the education was absolutely free so far as money went, but at times terrifically painful across the emotion spectrum. Then too were days of trying to find anything interesting at all to write about in small town America, but that soon changed as I learned where to look, another of many acquired skills one only learns by doing and seldom in a classroom.

At this time of the year I often find myself counting distant blessings as the ones up close and most plentiful are much harder to recognize at the time we’re gifted with them. Thanks to a great production by the CCS Class of 1967, I was first given insight into this strange oversight while I sat mesmerized by Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” I remember with much vividness because it moved me so deeply. It still seems only yesterday I sat in the front row, totally enchanted. One exchange in the play with many great ones I want to share here.

 

EMILY: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?”

STAGE MANAGER: “No. Saints and poets maybe…they do some.”

 

I’ve missed so much and seen so little, but still manage to stumble about. Right now this old half-blind bat is deep into a box full of moldy, yellowed newsprint and old CCS yearbooks, all containing stories just partially captured in black and white, very incomplete and frequently in error, like all humans. Still, ain’t life grand? Happy New Year! Mary and I wish you all many, many more.

Coming Next Week: The only reporter worse then me!