Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 1, 1995 TAG: 9507030052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
You will see that The Roanoke Times is back in charge of the flag at the top. The World-News, an afternoon newspaper that, like many other evening editions, didn't make it into this part of the century, is dead for good. Also gone is the somewhat overpowering ampersand that was part of the Roanoke Times & World-News title.
(A word here about the flag. Many newspaper people, and practically everybody else in the world, confuse a newspaper's flag with its masthead. The flag is at the top of the front page. The masthead is inside. It lists important people on the paper's staff and other things.)
The flag with the ampersand was adopted in 1977 when the morning and afternoon papers became one and were called "all-day," a description of journalistic effort that befuddled some reporters, but merely meant morning and evening weekday editions were produced by the combined staff.
Over the years, however, the circulation of the afternoon edition declined, following a nationwide trend toward morning-only papers. The final evening edition was published Nov. 29, 1991, but technically the afternoon newspaper had been gone for some years. Now its very name and the ampersand are dead. Forever? Who knows?
Things change and change back. If you could walk downtown on the morning of Saturday, Sept. 27, 1890, you could buy, for 3 cents, a newspaper whose flag closely resembled the one you see today at the top of the front.
It looks like the flag that appeared on the morning paper on Nov. 15, 1954, when I came to work for the Times.
Then, there were Times staffers who thought that the slightly italicized flag of the old World-News was a trifle dainty.
They also thought that the block-letter, plain black Times flag had meat in it - as it should have had, being a regional newspaper that, in its time, covered most of Western Virginia.
Some of those same people believed real newspapering was done at night and in the early morning hours by tough guys who scorned regular business hours. Others would have gladly traded such glamour for a daytime job.
World-News people thought Times people to be odd creatures of the night, who ran after wrecks, covered dull meetings and took obituary notices by phone from such odd places as Saltville, Norton and Damascus.
The Times and the World-News were quartered in the same newsroom, yet they sought to be competitive. Often they were. Sometimes they were not.
Their staffs were not above cruel jokes - some of which went awry. It is legend that a Times reporter once left a note in a World-News reporter's typewriter suggesting that something big - and at the time fictional - was going to happen at the bus station the next morning.
The World-News reporter went to the bus station and landed one of the most readable sob-sister stories in the history of newspapering. I will be charitable and not mention the details.
This return of what appears to be largely the flag I once knew tends to nostalgia.
When I worked under that flag, everybody plunked away on Underwood typewriters - some of us, with two fingers. Our daily masterpieces went to the composing room, where men who knew what they were doing sat at clattering Linotype machines and our words were immortalized in hot lead that eventually cooled.
In those computerless times, reporters and editors couldn't move type around merely by key strokes. If they wanted to insert a paragraph or move one, they had to cut the copy paper and paste the paragraph in. Everybody had a paste pot. The glue smelled sweet, and it didn't taste bad, either.
Sweaty editors typed headlines on small pieces of paper - "City Passes Quiet Holiday" - and put our words and the headlines into the pneumatic tube that led to that noisy, hot, wonderful composing room.
Today, editors do things with computers I am glad I don't have to understand, and the only Linotype machine is the one on display in the lobby. But you remember how Linotypes could spit hot lead on you and how, in clearing the keyboard, operators wrote "etoain shrdlu" and how that phrase sometimes got into the newspaper.
You don't see "etoain shrdlu" in the paper anymore, and telephones in the newsroom make disturbing, burbling noises instead of a robust ringing, the way Alexander Graham Bell intended them to.
There were spittoons tobacco chewers actually used, and it was considered mannerly, as well as macho, to stomp out your cigarette butts on the floor. The floor was tiled, not carpeted, thus there was no danger of fire.
There was a kind of music in the sounds Teletype machines made; when they began to show garbled copy, old-timers said that was caused by the aurora borealis. Old-timers attached Christmas tree tinsel across the machine rollers to stop garbling and/or static electricity.
These old-timers were called "Sparky" everywhere in the business, and they once knew the uses of Morse Code.
When they saw garbled copy, many of these men would yell "Ah-Roaroh! Ah-Roaroh!" and jump about the wire room excitedly.
There are no cigarettes anymore and, although computers won't spit hot lead, they have ways of hurting you.
And it was possible, in those times before the computers and voice mail, for the nightside switchboard operator, the late Betty Lou Harrison, to tug at her switches on the console and play "Jingle Bells" on the newsroom phones as the morning newspaper staff worked on Christmas Eve.
Now, if you could only buy a newspaper for three cents.
by CNB