Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 21, 1995 TAG: 9507220004
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-14 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RAY COX
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Which is just as well, because he won't have a chance to read this brief reflection on the newspapering we've both spent a few years doing. Knowing that he harbors little sentimentality for the business from which he is now retired, I'm sure he'd wonder if such an impulse in me indicates that I'm going dangerously soft-hearted. Never mind that I suspect he thinks I'm soft-headed for getting into this ink-blotted trade to begin with.
The genesis of these musings is a couple of recent events. One is the bankruptcy proceedings entered into by Smith-Corona, the last American typewriter manufacturer. The other is the removal of the ``World-News'' from the masthead of this newspaper in favor of the cleaner and simpler The Roanoke Times.
When Daddy got his first byline in the old Roanoke World-News almost five decades ago, the story he wrote was pounded out on a typewriter. Every newspaper all over the world used them in those days. The big, cumbersome machines clattered away on desks in the office; the lighter, sleeker portables went wherever reporters traveled to gather the news of the day,
The favored model around our house (Mother was a writer, too) was a Royal. One of the ones we had was the one on which I taught myself how to type (two-fingered). I typed all my high school and college papers on it, faster than you'd think.
Electric typewriters were still being used when I got my first press pass to a high school football game, but the heavy machines were on their way out.
My father took right to the switch from typewriters to computers, so much so that he's now on his second home computer. My enthusiasm for the switch was less than his, although the new technology helped make neater and swifter corrections to my bad typing than ever would have been possible with gallons of whiteout and miles of correcting tape.
The World-News, which was the afternoon paper in what once was a two-paper town, has been gone for years, although the name was retained on the flag for a long time. Now even that is gone.
When the Ledger-Star in Norfolk shuts down soon, as was announced this week, the last of the state's big afternoon papers will be history. You can't buck consumer trends.
I suspect that Daddy never missed the p.m. papers as much as I did. Force of habit keeps me reading the bulk of my paper late in the day, as though it were still an afternoon edition.
The old man never missed getting up before dawn to go to work at the World-News. I can remember lying in bed as a kid and hearing him getting ready on cold mornings.
I can also remember the sounds of that typewriter. He could make it fly as he sat working at his desk in the gritty, smoky Roanoke newsroom or on a folding table in the shade of our back yard when it got hot.
He never said so, but I know the old man never shared my enthusiasm for sports. Most of them, with the exception of football, bored him. He preferred covering the big stories. Working for newspapers in Roanoke and Richmond, he was privileged to cover important matters such as the desegregation of the state's schools, the civil rights movement, Apollo space shots, floods and hurricanes.
Good stuff, but it never did the same for me as a violent Giles-Narrows football game or Carolina League pitcher's duel. I'll take the Pulaski County Cougars beat over politics any day.
Come to think of it, maybe he's right after all. I am soft in the head.
by CNB