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Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, July 3, 2000
Mutinous press puts amateurs on the streets
Like some of you - quite a few of you, as it turned out - I found my Wednesday getting off to a mildly disconcerting start.
As I do most days, I flung open the front door and staggered out into the yard to retrieve my favorite newspaper.
And . . . it . . . wasn't . . . there.
Hm: Guess the carrier just missed the house. These things happen rarely.
Then I glanced to the left. To the right. Across the street. Nobody's paper had arrived.
Turns out (as most of you know) that we had - how to put this? - a situation at the Caller-Times. I'm not familiar with all the details, but in essence it amounted to this: The press announced Tuesday evening that it just wasn't in the mood and packed it in for the night.
This entailed a certain amount of heartburn. However, through some inspired scrambling, and a strategic assist from our kind friends up the road at the Victoria Advocate, we did manage to get the Wednesday paper printed.
That left just one problem to be dealt with - but it was a killer: How do we get them to our readers?
Many of our carriers, who do their work in the wee hours of the morning, have other commitments during the daylight hours. Those who could pitched in. That, however, still left a serious shortage of bodies to pitch papers.
What ensued put me in mind of C.S. Forester's old Horatio Hornblower novels, which described the spectacle of British Navy "press gangs" ranging through the streets of port towns, yanking unsuspecting civilians off their barstools and impressing them into His Majesty's Service.
Reporters, copy editors, sales personnel, management types - even, I kid you not, an editorial writer - were swept up, hustled to the loading dock and given huge bundles of newspapers and armloads of those cellophane sleeves in which your Caller-Times is delivered.
Did you ever give any thought to the matter of how your paper gets into that nice wrapper? Me neither. Turns out that even in our high-tech age, this particular exercise involves a human being - highly fallible and fumble-fingered human beings, in the case of our valiant few - rolling up the newspaper just so and inserting it in said wrapper.
I'm sure that if you know what you're doing, this can be managed with grace and swiftness. However, my route partner - the managing editor, no less - and I found it to be a downright humbling experience. After a few dozen botched efforts, we more or less got the hang of it, but proficient? Not on your tintype.
That, however, was a relatively minor challenge compared with the business of trucking out to the route and getting those papers to our readers.
Division of labor was the first issue confronting us. More or less by acclamation, we resolved that she would be the driver and I would play the role for which I was clearly best suited: comical sidekick and newspaper-flinger.
Talk about striking the scales from one's eyes. Even with two people on the job, sorting out who does and doesn't take the paper, and whose paper requires special handling of one sort or another, can be a mildly hair-raising business. Even while you're traveling at a virtual crawl, it's tough to keep all these strands together.
I am pleased and proud to announce, however, that we did no damage to lives or property - at least, none that we know of. There was a close call with a parked vehicle or two (or three), and one inattentive dog came close to buying the farm, but withal we could take a little pride in having gotten through the exercise with no catastrophes.
We emerged, finally, with a new and heartfelt respect for those who do this every day (often in the dark) - and with a sense of personal accomplishment. True, I never made it to the big leagues, but for one afternoon I was a hurler.
(Peterson can be contacted by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com)
Brooks Peterson
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