“Who are these guys?
“Some big Chicago outfit. They say they have some other papers and some TV and radio stations.”
“Which ones? Where?’”
“I dunno. I couldn’t find them in Editor and Publisher. But that’s like looking for flyshit in pepper.”
“What the hell do they want your paper for, Bob? Afternoon dailies are as useful as concrete bicyles. Why didn’t they buy an A.M. paper?”
“I dunno that either. But they did get a monopoly, and I can’t see anyone starting a morning paper here with the Register tying up all the good local ad contracts, and the rest of the gravy going to the dailies from the City and Chicago that can get here in time for morning home delivery. Maybe they’re going A.M. with the Register”
“Oh, bullshit, Wartovsky. You haven’t got five people over there that can either stay awake or stay sober past ten at night.”
When it became clear that I really didn’t know anything beyond what happened the first morning Shiu and Swift arrived, the hearts game resumed, interrupted only by the occasional arrival of a press release from the governor’s office or one of the departments.
The tempo of the cluttered and scarred old room around the corner from the governor’s office was set and enforced by Wes Johns, the dean of the Capitol correspondents. His position was strictly based on his twenty-plus years seniority, but it made him the unchallenged king of the newsies in the pressroom.
The first month I got there, I was watching the game—shorttimers aren’t invited to sit in and those whose jib Wes didn’t like the cut of weren’t called to the table for a year or more—when a handout from the conservation department was dropped off.
It wasn’t much—an announcement of dates for hearings on the trout season for the following year, I think, and I took one of the releases off the stack and went over to the CR&P desk and began to dial the paper.
“Hold on there, buster!” Wes yelled from the card table. “That ain’t how we do it here.”
I stopped dialing and looked at Wes, who had slammed his cards down on the table and was standing. “You just come back over here and watch the game for a while,” he said.
“But this is an item our sports page will want,” I said.
“And it’s an item my papers will want for the front page said Wes, who covered the capital for a string of small dailies in the upstate resort region. “But it ain’t something that is gonna stop presses anywhere, and I got a damn good hand here. You just wait till we’re done. We don’t go for cheap scoops here.”
I put down the phone and waited about ten minutes while Wes played out his hand, which I think netted him eighty-five cents. Then he and the other players got up, picked up press releases, and after everyone was seated at their desks, Wes nodded and the fiercely competitive Capitol press corps began to compete.
I noticed that even the wire service reporters conformed to Wes’s rules and after the game resumed, I asked Lew Fraser, the young National Press reporter who had about six months seniority on me in the statehouse, how come.
“I thought you guys had ‘a deadline every minute,’” I said.
“That’s right, but in this place Wes keeps the clock. One time he had a run of hot hands and everybody had to sit on an eighty-million-dollar highway contract announcement for most of an hour.”
“Screw that,” I said. “If something good comes in, I’m going with it.”
“Suit yourself, Bob,” Fraser said. “But don’t be surprised if your copies of the governor’s speech texts or the legislative calendar get lost on the way to the pressroom.”
“He can do that?”
“Damn betcha. My bureau chief says when he was here we had to make the rounds twice a day to every department for handouts. Then Wes broke his foot coon hunting and arranged for them all to send their stuff over. He got it and he can stop it.”
So I waited like everyone else until Wes was ready to work, and in time—eight months, I think—Wes sauntered over one morning and announced: “Poor Bing Johnson. The state editor of his paper dropped dead yesterday, and he’s got co go back there and replace him. You know how to play hearts?”
I did and in fact picked up eight to ten bucks a week regularly from Wes and his buddies until Bing came back, having found the promotion, as he feared, required a full day’s work. He got transferred back to the capital after a year by conspiring with Wes to make his replacement miss a couple of good stories and then telling his publisher that they were doomed to be skunked unless he was put back on the state-house beat.
I gave up my seat without protest, and henceforth got along with Wes, who invariably referred to me as “that lucky kid” who “won a couple of hands here.”
It was a quiet time at the statehouse and I was able to go by the secretary of state’s office to pull out the incorporation papers filed by the CR&P’s new owners. Fred Bannerwald, the secretary, was a bigger snoop than any reporter I ever knew, and when I told him what I wanted, got the documents out without making me sign the register for them. Like the boys in the pressroom, Fred also wanted to know what was going on at the paper.
There was nothing on the face of the incorporation papers that looked fishy, but two things struck me immediately as odd. First, the new ownership was represented not only by a Chicago law firm, but by an attorney from our state’s major city, who got the reputation during a couple of terms in the legislature as a chore boy for the race track interests that were trying to establish a track in the resort region. I had heard people say he had friends who wore six-hundred-dollar suits, three-hundred-dollar shoes, and traveled in big black cars with bulletproof windows, but as far as I could tell, that was just wishful gossip around our sleepy little capital town.
The second thing that seemed strange was the statement of purpose of the corporation, called SNS Associates, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ail-American Enterprises. It said the new company intended to engage in the interstate collection, processing and transportation of news and advertising. I checked Morgan’s old incorporation papers and they didn’t say anything about interstate activities or anything about transportation.
“What the hell can it mean?” I asked Grace at the Next Door one evening after work.
“Damned if I know,” Grace answered. “But I did notice that the Mighty Midget [one of his names for Shiu, used only off the CR&P premises] gets a lot of aviation trade magazines and even some official-looking stuff from the FAA. That’s transportation. Think that means they’re going to turn us into an airline?”
“Yeah. Air Poland, probably. You don’t know any more about all this than me, and you’re sitting right under their noses.”
Shep Carley interrupted. “I know something. The hairy one has the hots for sex and crime stories.”
“Swift?”
“Yeah. He told me to save all the out-of-town blood and gore and sex crime wire stories we don’t use. The short items—quirks and chuckles—too.”
“What does he do with them?” I asked.
“Takes them into Fargo’s, I mean his office. I looked in yesterday on the way back from the water fountain, and he had them stacked up on the desk and was working on what looked like a page dummy. A tabloid dummy, I think.”
“Oh,” Carley said to Grace, “and tell him about the measuring. ”
“Well, that was the first week I came back to work,” Grace said. “Shiu and some young guy in a skinny suit went around the newsroom measuring distances. It didn’t make much sense and when Doralee Green asked Shiu what was going on, he smiled one of those hundred-watters of his and said, ‘The improvements we promised, Miss. The improvements.’”