“Bad news goes about in clogs; good news in stockinged feet.”

-- Welsh proverb

Smoke from cigars and cigarettes filled the air, which already was tense as the deadline neared for “putting the paper to bed.” The city editor seemed like he’d been in that role before there was a city. “That’s all the news today, boys and girls,” he yelled, the daily signal that everyone could finally relax. Reporters and editors sighed breaths of relief.

The copy editor leaned back in his chair, resting his head in his arms. Another, a recent journalism school graduate, was already at work on R.O.P copy (Run of the Paper) which editors gladly used when they needed a few more inches of space filled. One editor lit his cigar and tossed a rumpled piece of paper into a wastepaper basket. All the editors sat around a number of desks joined together to foster teamwork. The truth is you didn’t have any choice other than work together. Your very jobs depended on each editor completing his or her work under incredibly tight deadlines.

A touch of humility wall hanging hung below a clock in the news room: “Today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s kitty litter.”

After finishing your work all you had to do was wait out the call from the back shop where the first copy of the morning paper arrived on the managing editor’s desk for review before the rest of the copies were produced and sent their way on trucks. I became an editor on a small city newspaper after getting a master’s degree in philosophy and not knowing what else to do. I had no experience in journalism. I was literally thrown into the fray without the slightest idea what I was getting myself into. It was, I thought, better than wandering the streets of the city looking for an honest person, as some early Greek philosopher reportedly spent his life.

I was terrified of making mistakes and being chewed out in front of everyone by a cigar smoking, cussing editor who was twice my age and had been a city hall toughened reporter for 20 years before becoming city editor. For some reason he took pity on me and taught me the ropes of editing. He was one of the best teachers I ever had, this ex-Marine, high school dropout who sliced up excess verbiage as if he was on a linguistic battlefield. If my writing accounts for anything today, I have him to thank for toning down my academic tendency to use 20 words when three might do the trick. I don’t know how I survived the first months, but I did.

More than this, I learned to appreciate the editors and reporters with whom I toiled daily to put out all the bad news we could find from murders and robberies to political malfeasance. Given these daily doses of suffering, I am surprised I didn’t turn into a Calvinist looking for bad news even where there wasn’t any. Maybe it’s the human tendency to look back and turn harsh times into good ones, but to tell you the truth, I’ve never learned so much from so many misfits in my life, the “salt of the earth” as my Mother used to call ordinary people who slop through each day without complaining too much.

I miss the ink on my hands, the slicing red pen I used to mark up a reporter’s copy, the chance to run out to the back shop and tell them to start printing the paper, and the sheer delight of holding in my hands a newly born newspaper, even seeing one of my stories there. I know the “good old days” were not always so good, especially when it came to looking at one’s paycheck every two weeks. But I tell you this much — putting out a newspaper in those days was a lesson in learning to live under pressure, depend on others, and appreciate an edition done well, sleek and slim and sizzling. I visited a modern newspaper office a year ago. Everything was quiet. Reporters worked in little cubicles. One could not hear the click of typewriter keys or the cussing of editors under deadlines, but only the dull tap of computer keys. I couldn’t even smell cigar smoke. It could well have been the waiting room in a morgue.

There’s no going back. I know that for sure. But at least I can keep good memories of smoke filled rooms, cussing editors, and getting ink on my hands. Call it a requiem for the good old days I don’t care. I just know I miss them.

-- John Morgan is a columnist and writer who lives in Berks County. He also teaches philosophy and ethics at Reading Area Community College. His e-mail address is jcrossleymorgan@yahoo.com.