The way it was

At my last stop, a bunch of the old equipment was still sitting were it was used decades ago.

 

They still had the vacuum tubes at Fairchild, for sending hard copy to typesetting. The teletype was operating but removed a week after I started.

Most distressing I suppose was the B2B mag I worked at in the early 90s that still used typewriters.

 

My first job, there were vacuum tubes. The News Editor sat next to it. He smoked a pipe. Every time he sent something to the composing room, he blew a puff of smoke into the tube. So, when it landed, smoke came pouring out of the tube.

 

In the early 2000s, when we needed pre-press to tone photos, we filled out a form, printed out a copy of the photo, walked over to this chute, and literally dropped the papers down the chute (basically a large hole) to a wire basket one floor below.

That's right, we used gravity to communicate with pre-press.

 

First newspaper job was in 1999. Pagination was digital, photography was not. For the first few months we had to drop off film at the Wal Mart photo counter, which gave everything a nice sepia tone as though the prints were already a generation old. But that wasn’t a choice for Friday night football, so I got a crash course in developing film. I learned to shoot lots of extra pictures to compensate for the ones my thumb invariably ruined while trying to spool the film in the darkroom.

 

We sent a live frog down the vacuum tubes one night. It was well-received, from all reports.

We sent a ham and cheese sandwich down the vacuum tubes another night.
We loaded it up with cayenne pepper, though, so the reception was a bit ... feverish.

GOOD TIMES, FUCKIN'-A!!!

 

I would sing into that tube before dropping the deuce.

 

Man, now I'm remembering the darkroom at the college paper. I can still smell those fumes. I went back for a reunion a while back and it was now the library storing all the old bound editions housing each academic year's newspapers as well as all the papers they hadn't bound in the last several years, the latter of which really depressed me b/c I knew they were never getting bound.

 

Not to mention, in the pre-digital days you didn't know if the great "action shot" was actually great or a blurred POS until you developed the film.

I learned to take quite a few celebration pics and "coach talking to quarterback on the sideline" photos to cover for my very mediocre camera skills.

 

I never came close to getting great action shots because a couple of years before that I had tried my hand as a videographer shooting Friday night football and broke my tibular plateau after getting run over on a kickoff. So print journalist me would stay on the sidelines for one quarter and bail anytime the play came remotely close to my direction.

 

Somehow I never was run over on a football sideline. I did get slammed into on a basketball baseline, hit in the head with a volleyball and heard a puck whiz by me while shooting hockey from the penalty box.

Hockey and swimming are two sports I happily will never shoot again.

 

My very first job out of college in 2000 was at a weekly and we had an account at the local photo shop (remember those!). Just go and drop off the film and get it back a few hours later! Our pagination was digital too. Since we were a weekly didn't have to worry about deadline photos. I wasn't there very long, so don't know how much longer they did that. Probably for a while. My next stop was a daily with a separate photo department and they were starting to go digital then. I didn't have to take photos there, other than mug shots, but the mugs shots were done on super crappy probably state of the art at the time digital camera.

On the getting the paper from the press before you left, I always did this and loved it. I hated that one stop made us get a subscription since I had access to all the copies I ever wanted, right off the press, every night.