Tales of working on Christmas...

Not quite working but ...

I started at my first daily 25 years ago on Dec. 23. The job was about 120 miles from where I was living, so I paid for a hotel room for a week, planning to drive home each weekend until I could find an apartment.

At noon on Christmas Eve, I found out our afternoon paper did not publish on Christmas Day, so I was off until 6 a.m. Dec. 26.

Having already paid for the hotel, I decided not to drive home, so I spent Christmas going to the movies, eating dinner alone at Denny's and watching TV in a dank hotel room.

Being Jewish, I didn't miss out on any family gatherings, but it was still an odd way to spend a day off.

 

Covered a bowl game in Tampa on a December 23rd once a long time ago. My parents popped for airfare so I could fly home on the 24th then fly back to my "home" town for slot duty on Christmas Day. Got to the airport Christmas Day and started feeling queasy. Made the changeover in Atlanta onto a little puddle-jumper and started feeling really bad. We landed at my town's small airport and I barely made it off the plane before puking my guts out. I finally staggered off the tarmac and made my way to parking, where I found my car's battery had died while I was gone.

 

Al Martinez, Reck of the Tribune:

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-12-25/local/me-537_1

 

Spent Christmas Eve in a strip club one night after covering a game out of town, flew home bleary-eyed and reeking of strip club smoke-fog-perfume, wobbled through Christmas with the family and crashed that night like a paper kite in an Oklahoma thunderstorm.

The strippers wore little Santa elf costumes ... for a little while.

 

The night Billy Martin died was my first night doing layout by myself. THAT was fun.

 

Nothing extraordinary. I'm working on Christmas Eve this year. Press time is about 2 1/2 hours early, which is all well and good. But I'm flying solo and have nine pages to design. Nine. Five are wide open.

Time to make some poster-sized pics.

 

I only did it once, when I was an intern, in 1986.

The "boss" told me he NEEDED me, and I being young and eager to please, agreed to it, even though I didn't want to. Boss plied me by saying he would make it up to me by taking me to a nice dinner.

We did no work that couldn't have waited a day.

He took me to Burger King.

As an intern, I did not get paid.

Sorry, boys and girls, I win this contest.

 

Absolutely not, Mizzougrad wins this contest. Hands down.

 

Awesome. My first 3-4 years at Hartford AP were just like this. Nights, weekends and holidays. I was told, "You're a young, single guy. All the other folks have families." My mother never quite understood this rationale but what the heck, I was young and single. I'd have my dinner break at the Goodwin bar (now a hotel) on Asylum and Jim, the bartender, would always make sure I left with tall coffee and Baileys in a go cup. When the Goodwin closed, Jim moved across the street to Chuck's Cellar (at the Civic Center mall) and our tradition continued.

 

He got paid.

And for the record, I have a story similar to his, just not on Christmas. I'll take that episode over not getting paid.

 

Great story, Mizzou.

 

Had a couple of Christmases on the desk where we got hit with blizzards, and it would take me nearly two hours to drive to work.

And similar to Bamadog, we'd always have an early deadline, so I'd be stressing out driving through the snow to get to the office to have some time to get the section out. Then I'd get there, and find out that the production department never got the memo that there was an early deadline, or just didn't care. And we'd blow deadline every time.

This finally stopped after a couple of early deadlines blown. For New Year's, we deskers made it clear to management that we were leaving at the early deadline time so we could get to our parties, watch the ball drop, etc., and that if production didn't get our toned photos back in time, the paper was going to have a lot of blank spaces where photos belonged. Deadlines stopped being blown.