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Our Town Today
with
Hank Fiset
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AN ELEPHANT IN THE PRESSROOM
SO MANY RUMORS here at da Paper! The Bull Elephant in the room says the Tri-Cities Daily News/Herald is giving up the economic ghost of a printed version of our Great Triple-Metropolitan Newspaper. If/when such a business move is made, the only way you’ll be reading my column and everything else you now hold in your hands is on one of your many digital devices—your phone, maybe, or a watch that needs recharging every night.
SUCH IS PROGRESS, but it makes me think of Al Simmonds, a rewrite man at the old Associated Press. My career at the AP lasted close to four years, but I would have been quickly pink-slipped were it not for Al Simmonds, who took the choppy prose and schoolkid syntax from my reporter’s notebook and turned those scribbles into bona fide news copy. Al is long gone, bless his heart, so he never saw the advent of reading a newspaper on a laptop or pad. He passed away before the idea was any more real than the Starship Enterprise. Not sure the man even had a TV, as he complained that nothing good was on the radio since Fred Allen went off the air (this story is now carbon-dating me!)…
AL’S TYPEWRITER WAS a Continental—a beast nearly the size of an easy chair—bolted to his desk, not because anyone would try to steal the thing. You’d have been foolish to have tried to lift it. Al’s desk was a small, narrow altar of editing. He would bang out his version of my copy—leaner, crisper, better, dang it—then flip up the typewriter on hinges, and on the cleared space go at his own stuff with a blue pencil. The man made quite a racket doing his job a few hundred times a shift—the chonk-chonkka of his typing with the ba-ding of the bell, the krannk of the carriage return, the shripp of the copy ripped from the machine, then the ka-bump of his tossing back of the massive tool of his trade to scribble away with an even more primitive mode of writing. Al was at one with that typing machine and was never more than a yard away from it and his desk. He sent me out for coffee and food on many occasions, but when I came back with the delivery he’d be hacking away at some copy and I’d have to set the food on a nearby stool until he flipped up the Continental and made room for his lunch. If Al Simmonds sounds like a stereotype, a cartoon version of a newsroom denizen, he was in every way but one: he didn’t smoke and hated all the dopes at the AP who did.
QUIET! REPORTERS WORKING would be a superfluous sign here at the Daily News/Herald these days. We’ve been on computers since the eighties, though the first generations of them were called word processors—that was what we called ourselves. The point being, Al Simmonds would not be able to fathom how we have been reading our newspapers in ever greater numbers over the past five years—bent over our handheld miracle machines. Too, he’d not recognize how we’ve put out the newspaper for the last three decades. “Where’s the roar and fury of a newspaper going to press?” he’d holler. At me.
IN AL’S HONOR here’s an experiment: if you are reading this on your phone, I’ll write some of it on mine. My edited, proofread, stream of consciousness…
“I’M GOING TO miss reading a physical copy of the paper, on newsprint, delivered to my front lawn seven days a week by a fellow named Brad who scoots by in a car, chucking my copy out the window with but the smallest of deceleration, or from the copy I read at the Pearl Avenue Café (on Pearl Avenue) a few days a week. I’ll miss the sensation of a story placed above the fold on page one, and the shame of a story being relegated to page B6. I admit I get a kick out of seeing my face and my byline—my column—on the back page—so easy to find, and did you know a reading of the column and the timing of a soft-boiled egg are a perfect match? If/when the Tri-Cities Daily News/Herald goes all-digital/no print, this reporter will be sad/resigned at the advent of this thing we call Reality. And Al Simmonds, in Rewrite Heaven, will scratch his head in confusion, his typewriter flipped up forever.”…Now, an auto-corrected version, pinched out on my phone…
I’M GOING TO miss reading a physical copy of the paper, on newsprint, delivered to my front lawn seven days a week be a fellow named bark who scours be uv a cat, chi hubs my cope it the window Eugene the shanked the dr fjsrstik, or FYI. The color I eat at the peak avebure cadge on Zoesrkavfnud a few days a week. I’ll miss the sensation of a dying place Abu d to gold page one and the shame oif a duties relegate to osfs h6. I admit I gat a kick out is seeinmy fx e and my belie—my Viking—on gage back page—so esu to find, and did you know a reading of the volume and the timing of a foot hooked egg is a perfect match? If/when the tri-cities Zfaiky need/heard hies all-digital thus rouoter will be sad/resigned at the advent of hugs gjjng called result And All Simmonds in Rewrire Heaben, will scratch his head in confusion, hostyoeetotoer flipped up forever…
GOTTA RUN NOW and get my copy down to the pressroom…
Welcome to Mars
Kirk Ullen was still asleep, in bed, under a quilt and an old Army blanket. As it had been since 2003, when he was five years old, his bedroom was also the back room of the family home, one he shared with the Maytag washer and dryer, an old, chipped, out-of-tune spinet piano, the idle sewing machine his mother had not used since the second Bush administration, and an Olivetti-Underwood electric typewriter that had been rendered inoperable when Kirk spilled a root-beer float into its innards. The room had no heat and was always chilly, even on this early morning in late June. His eyes were rolled up into the back of his head as he dreamed he was still in high school, unable to dial the correct combination for his gym locker. He was on his seventh attempt, turning right, then twice around to the left, then once back to the right, when a flash of lightning made the locker room blindingly white. Then, equally suddenly, came a darkness that encompassed his whole world.
There were more flashes, like sheet lightning, then blackness again—everything white again, then an impenetrable black, over and over. But there was no rumbling thunder, no claps of Thor echoing off the distant canyons.
“Kirk? Kirkwood?” It was his father. Frank Ullen had been snapping the overhead light on and off—his idea of an amusing wake-up signal. “Were you serious last night, kid?” Frank began singing. “Kirkwood, Kirkwood. Give me your answer, do.”
“Wha’?” Kirk croaked.
“About going to Mars? Say no and I’m gone. Say yes and we start your birthday like true Ullen men, brave and free.”
Mars? Kirk’s brain flickered into consciousness and he remembered now. Today was his nineteenth birthday. Last night after dinner he had asked his father if they could surf in the morning like they had the day he turned ten and, again, the morning he turned thirteen. “You bet!” his father said. Conditions at Mars Beach would be good. There was a swell coming from the southwest.