Editorially speaking...
This newsroom from 1900 isn’t quite like it was in the old Victoria Press Building when I worked there but it gives a general idea of a large open room with multi desks and editors and reporters at their work. —Wikipedia
Here’s a recent news item near and dear to my heart.
The former Times Colonist building at Hillside and Douglas streets, Victoria, has been renovated, reinvented and reopened as a combined commercial and residential building.
Photos of the ‘new’ Victoria Press Building show it to be nothing like it was in the 1960s when, fresh from high school and armed with only a year of Grade 12 journalism class and dreams of being a writer that went back to early grade school, I served in the lowly but essential role of copy boy.
What fun that was. I learned almost as much about life and about human nature on that job as I have in all the years since. It was like learning to swim from the high diving board—sink or swim!
Well, I learned to swim although, if it isn’t a mix of metaphor to say it, I still have the scars.
As copy boy I was absolutely essential to the creation of the daily paper. It was my job to clear the wire copy (the reams of teletype messages that came in 24/7), deliver the in-house mail twice daily, fetch cuts (photo files and engraved plates) from the morgue (the newspaper library), go to town for the stock market reports, clean the paste pots, run errands, etc., etc. My shift began at 1 o’clock in the afternoon before any of the news or sports editors or reporters came in. I’d get things ready for them.
I should explain that this was before the two papers merged: the Times, owned by the same company was the afternoon paper and situated at the opposite end of the second floor; the Colonist published in the morning.
For all my necessary usefulness, I was the bottom of the editorial room totem pole—even once told I was the lowest form of life. Was he really joking?
At that time there were three kinds of people who worked on the Colonist editorial staff: the Nice, the Neutral and the Nasty.
By Nice, I mean very; although I was a teen, some of them mentored me and became lifelong friends. The Neutral were those who just went about their business paying no attention to me or at the very least, doing little or nothing to offend or annoy me.
Ah, but the Nasty were a different kettle of fish. It was said, derisively, that ‘newsmen’ (as by far the majority were in those days) started or ended their careers at the Colonist—there was no middle ground because no one stayed. After two years there I could see why.
It wasn’t that the Managing Editor, who was in overall charge of the editorial department, was Nasty; not at all. He was neither-nor anything. Other than his first priority was squeezing company dollars to the last half-copper, he seemed to live in his own world. By all appearances he was intentionally oblivious to all that went on around him, people-wise. His policy was to hear no evil, see no evil, just do your bloody job and leave me alone to read the Toronto Star on the toilet for hours at a time.
Which, of course, he could do because he was the boss. Reading the Star and going home for extended suppers took up much of his day.
But it hardly mattered whether he was on-site or not so far as the actual operation of the news room went. The senior Sports, News and City editors actually got the paper out. There was a succession of city editors in my two years, more the result of personality clashes than professional differences.
Because, once you got above the reporting level (I’m excluding the separate departments such as the Sunday magazine, social, editorial and financial pages) it was jungle warfare for the most part.
Nothing a visitor would see. But the tension could be lethal, the air thickened by both cigarette smoke and venom. That old expression, “you could cut the tension with a knife,” was often the literal truth at the Colonist while I worked there.
And I, unworldly and shy, just like the virgin sacrifices of old, was there to be used and abused at will without any support from the Managing Editor who blinded himself to it all.
It was the senior News Editor who made it most difficult for me. Editorial staffers didn’t just dislike him, they hated him. And he felt the same about them—and particularly me. Why me? Because he could.
I was the flunky, there to answer his beck and call no matter how unrelated it was to his work (such as going three blocks to a drive-in to fetch his supper) and always ordered with saccharine sweetness—while the eyes revealed everything I really needed to know.
He never missed a chance to humble me; when he wanted a photo of the prime minister from the library he’d insist upon writing it out for me as if I was incapable of knowing who was the prime minister of the day and how to spell his name.
That was just a small insult; there were more, much worse, and I could go on and on but I’ve bored you enough, so I’ll close with this:
The greatest tragedy of my time in the Victoria Press Building (that’s what this is supposed to be about, remember) was that I’d booked a day off to go with a friend to Washington State the day that it blew up and I missed the fireworks!
Very simply, the News Editor I just described got into a wrestling match over who was really the senior man. My work station and theirs were side-by-side: I’d have had a front row seat!
When I went to work the next day, the editorial room was empty but for the secretary, as per usual, but, I swear, the air was electrified. I could sense it. Then the News Editor came in, hours early, to take up a handful of wire copy and seat himself at a desk in an adjoining office after closing the door behind him.
Shortly after, the Managing Editor arrived, also early, to call the News Editor into his office. Again, the door was closed—the first time I’d ever seen it so.
By then I’d heard whispers of what had happened the night before, of the argument that led to the News Editor being picked up by an arm-lock around his throat and dropped on his butt on the hard floor by the Slot Editor. He was shamed before all present while the ME was home, having his dinner.
I so hated him I’d have given a year’s pay to have been there. But I wasn’t.
The irony was, for the first several days that I began my shift and saw the demoted News Editor working alone at a desk in an office down the hall (his self-inflicted Gulag), I almost—almost—felt sorry for him.
But it was all too late for me. Despite the offer of a promotion to reporter (I’d begun writing regularly for the weekend magazine by then) I wanted OUT. Out into the clean air as a freelance writer.
Such are some of my memories of the ‘new’ Victoria Press Building. Here’s hoping that its Karma has also undergone a complete reno!