It all began in 1973 at old Al Lopez Field in Tampa, Fla., the long-time spring home of the Reds, an old ball park with a tin roof that clattered like hail stones on a cheap car's roof when foul balls clanked off it.
We sat in a dusty press box at a wooden table fraught with inch-long splinters and typed our stories on portable typewriters.
A Western Union operator with a teletype machine sat in the press box to wire our stories back to the paper. If you were close to deadline, it migh help to slip the operator a ten-spot so he or she would send your story first.
Then we were equipped with cumbersome word processors, starting with something called a Porta-Bubble. The problem with a Porta-
Bubble was that if your electrical cord was accidentally kicked out, you lost your entire story and had to retype it.
More than once a writer was working on his last paragraph when his cord was kicked out and sometimes the kicker was an opposing writer and, well, maybe it wasn't an accident.
Then there was the Radio Shack and the Texas Instrument. The Shack had rubber ears to fit around a telephone's receiver to transmit your story, but it was so ssensitive to noise that you had to tightly squeeze the rubber cups tight around the telephone with both hands or it would cut out and you would have to re-send and re-send and re-send.
And even that didn't work at times and it often took four or five times before you successfully sent your story, with appropriate epithets.
The Texas Instrument had no screen and worked like a typewriter. You typed your story on paper, then hooked a phone to the machine and hit a couple of buttons. Your story printed on the paper as you sent it and you prayed the paper didn't jam. It always did.
Earl Lawson of the old Cincinnati Post & Times-Star, my mentor in the early 70's, had one of those electronic monsters. He was having difficulty sending from his hotel room in St. Louis one night and finally called me, of all persons, for help. I walked into his room to a disaster scene – curtains torn away from the windows, chairs turned upside down, bed torn up. He had quite the temper.
Later, he was involved in an accident while riding in a taxi and his machine, sitting on the front seat without a belt, hit the floor and was destroyed.
Lawson called his office and without preamble said, "The monster is dead."
