By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — In the evening I enter the unlocked side door at the large newspaper building. All is quiet and no one sees me. I ride the elevator to the third floor and walk down a hall past the photo lab. Still, no one sees me. Security guards work here, but they just walk occasional patrols. You might enter and leave the building without encountering one of them.
I walk into the newsroom of the largest evening paper in Arizona. Because it’s after hours, no one is around. Just a few ceiling lights are on. Being an evening paper, the newsroom work hours begin at 6 a.m., in order to put the paper on doorsteps in the afternoon.
Of a total of four editions, the first one, to be trucked to distant parts of the large Grand Canyon State, goes to press at 10 a.m., as copy editors take their lunch break. The final edition, only for newsstands, not home delivery, goes to press at about 2 p.m.
At the various desks, almost all activity has ceased by around 3 p.m., and now it’s evening. I put something on an editor’s desk and retrace my steps, soon being back on the sidewalk. I get into my car and drive away, still unnoticed.
Writing up this description of my after-sundown visit decades ago to The Phoenix Gazette, I’ve feigned a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere to illustrate how much times have changed since the 1960s.
Back then, no one was on alert around there for people walking unannounced into the newspaper’s unlocked side door after dark because no one feared or screened for terrorists and rioters as threats to everyday life in the peacetime U.S. People generally behaved themselves socially.
As a teen-age correspondent for the weekly 12-page youth tabloid of the daily paper, I dropped off articles on my editor’s desk in the evening while inhaling the wonders of professional journalism.
The wrongdoers mainly began to affect our lives with airliner hijackings to Communist Cuba in the 1960s, then strife over issues including race, the Vietnam War and the military draft, and also significant bombings of buildings including the Pentagon in 1972 and in the garage of the World Trade Center in 1993. By then, unimpeded entrance to a large news building would have become too tempting for bad guys.
I was put in mind of 1960s newspapers in Phoenix by the December 4, 2021, death of the young man who had preceded me as copyboy at the Gazette, John Winters, almost 81 now, who went on to work as a reporter at three of Arizona’s four largest dailies, including serving alongside The Arizona Republic’s Don Bolles on that paper’s organized-crime investigative team.
In secularized 2021, many newspapers probably aren’t as sentimental about Christmas as they used to be, surely not so much as when The Sun, of New York City, published its famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial in 1897.
Holiday decorations still were up after Christmas Day 1980 when I went to a mortuary for the visitation of John and wife Mimi’s adopted son, Joey, who died on December 26 at age 7 from leukemia. I also attended the funerals of some of the couple’s parents.
One Catholic tradition says Christmas is the day when the most souls are released from Purgatory. A longtime friend of mine died from medical problems on Christmas Day 2020 after I had seen him in the Communion line at church just over a week earlier.
John Winters used to tell me that because of his crime reporting, Mimi urged caution about planted devices when he got into his automobile, but John said he replied to the effect, “Mimi, we’re reporters, who’s going to hurt us?”
Who would want to be in a merciless spotlight for killing a journalist?
As it turned out, Bolles was assassinated by a bomb planted under his car outside a hotel in June 1976, not far from St. Joseph’s Hospital, where he was taken and later died of his injuries.
The Republic and Gazette building housing the two papers under the same ownership quickly was given upfront police protection on the sidewalk because no one was sure at first just why Bolles was attacked. It was because of his writing, not some personal grudge.
John, along with other reporters, received temporary police protection, too.
To my surprise, I had learned that John, like I, was Catholic. In daily journalism in a large city, he might have been any religion, or no religion. But, as God would have it, right up until the pandemic, I later saw John at my very own parish church and also received thank-you notes signed by him as chapter president that he sent out to donors to the parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society pantry.
But this was all far in the future when John handed me a list of the copyboy’s duties as he walked me through a day of the job I was inheriting from him. It’s the lowest rung on the newsroom ladder, but back in those days of hot-type production and teletypes, someone had to keep the sheets of paper moving. And the job often led to a newsroom promotion.
Our first duty at 6 a.m. was to get the newsroom urn of coffee brewing, followed by the initial “ripping the wires” for the day — rolling up the long yellow paper with wire-service teletype printing that had accumulated since the nearby Arizona Republic newsroom ended its operations after midnight.
Ripping the wires was a recurring duty throughout the day.
Like John had been doing, I took the rolls back to my little desk at one end of the U-shaped copy desk and separated the individual stories, to deposit in the news editor’s basket. He would select stories to give to the “slotman” — that’s the chief copy editor, in the “slot” of the “U” — to distribute to the “rim men,” the copy editors along the outside of the “U.”
Once the stories were edited, I’d fold them to be whooshed in a pneumatic tube downstairs to the second-floor composing room for typesetting. It’s the same process that drive-in banking still uses for deposits and withdrawals.
To the west of the copy desk and the city desk were the reporters’ desks, which filled up later in the workday as reporters came in from their beats to write up what they covered. The sports department, which had its own flow of paper and a pneumatic tube, was to the north.
Another duty early in the day was a walk down a long, narrow staircase to the composing room, to pick up a sturdy wood container filled with the metal “cuts” of photographs, as they were used in hot-metal production, that accumulated overnight. They had to be carried up to the third-floor newspaper library, the “morgue,” to be filed for future use.
I stepped very carefully to avoid the potential for falling backward on the stairs, which would have sent maybe 20 pounds of sharp-edged “cuts” flying around.
On rare occasions an editor would hand me a “chisel order,” requiring a walk into the basement, where a pressman would stop the roaring presses and chip off some small piece of the curved printing plate. A rare duty, but a wonderful time to see the presses in action.
Without going into more detail about helping the newsroom to run, I’ll just say the copyboy was on his feet almost the entire workday.
I went down to the cafeteria to eat lunch with the copy editors, who of course sat almost all day long. So they liked to stretch their legs outside during the remaining half-hour of the break, while I would have loved to have more time to sit, but gamely accompanied them as the junior news partner.
Later on, after John became a reporter and I ceased being a copyboy, I remember him in the newsroom expressing amazement to me about some raunchy lyrics by the Rolling Stones. But far worse was to come in “entertainment” as the twentieth century advanced, or degraded.
Time For Awe
A half-decade ago, John in retirement had been on dialysis for about seven months after having both kidneys removed, before he received a kidney transplant. What an ordeal that had been for him.
A few months ago I ran into his wife at church and she said we’d all have to get together. But then he had to go into the hospital, initially for bleeding polyps, then he fell and broke his back.
On December 10 I asked Mimi for a comment about John. She replied, “John was very devoted to St. Vincent de Paul and Voice of the Poor,” both organizations serving those down on their luck. “He was very interested in reading,” she added. Which I certainly knew from John having made recommendations to me on reading material.
He was double-vaccinated against COVID, Mimi said, and didn’t have it before going into the hospital, but died with the disease.
John also had worked with John Doherty, also a Catholic and an awesome researcher and book aficionado at the Republic in the pre-Internet days, who could turn up material on about anything upon request, including organized crime. John Doherty hated Communism because his mother had lived under it in Poland.
Most of the faces at that old Gazette newsroom when I was a teenager have passed on by now. One of them on the copy desk became a murder victim. I guess they have to find a different line of work in Heaven. No one needs a newspaper to know what’s happening there. It’s just time for awe, more than the splashiest headline could create.
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