Years and years before I had an iPad, I carried a pager.
The first one was a Motorola Pageboy--it would sound a tone and I'd hear a brief message, usually to call the office or swing by the police station to meet another cop reporter, Gary Hines. We both had Bearcat police scanners too. The Shreveport Journal might have paid for his but I bought mine and never had the nerve to turn in an expense chit.
I didn't mind; the Journal paid me mileage and I spent most of my time--when I wasn't in the office typing up stories or in cop shops drinking coffee left over from the night before while shooting the bull with detectives--cruising around town. I could fill up my tank at the company pump, which cost me a couple of pennies per gallon. The other good thing about the company pump was that it didn't require any cash outlay; you just signed the receipt and they took it out of your next check. A week out from payday, sometimes you needed that float.
Just like you needed the tab at Mama Mia's, the downmarket Italian place where we drank and sometimes ate. Pat, the proprietor, loved our newspaper and wouldn't let you run up too high a bill; if it got too big he'd quietly call you aside and ask if you could pay $5 or $10 on it. Whenever anybody left, which happened pretty regularly since we were all young and smart and going places, we'd all chip in a couple of bucks to pay off the departing's tab.
I lived a couple of blocks from Pat's joint in a walkup apartment on aptly named Stoner Hill. The anarcho-syndicalists lived downstairs. Sometimes the Picket Line Coyotes played house parties in the crumbling mansion across the street where nobody seemed to live. I remember it as kind of a journalists' ghetto, but only a few of us really lived in that area. Stuart Leavenworth lived a couple of blocks west. I think Bob Mann was in an stylish old apartment complex a little south of where I was, but I could be mistaken.
Isadore Rozeman was murdered around the corner from me. I knew him well enough to wave. For 30 years, the wrong man sat on death row for his murder.
Around this time, they gave me another pager, an alpha-numeric one which could receive early text messages. Usually they said to call one editor or another.
I tried to stay out of the office except when writing. We shared what we called terminals then, hulking dedicated word processors with green screens mounted on a kind of lazy-susan turntable that allowed us to swing them back and forth between our desks. Even then I wrote slow.
I tried to get into the office by 3:30 a.m. or so--I typically started my beat rounds at about 2 a.m., hitting two sheriff's offices and two police stations to pick up overnight arrests and incident reports--and get my three or four or five stories written and filed before the rest of the reporters started showing up around 7 a.m.
So I drove around the bad parts of town. The Bottoms. Cooper Road. Stoner Hill. At the beginning, I had a silver Audi Fox, an unusual car for Shreveport in the 1980s. People began to recognize me. I'd get little waves, lifted fingers. The scanner crackled. I'm sure some of them thought I was a cop too.
The idea, Hines told me, was to stay out of the newsroom, where there was no news. The telephone was an instrument of last resort. You braced sources face to face. "A cop reporter is a different kind of cat," he'd say. You didn't want to be around when an assistant city editor was looking for someone to interview a walk-in for a bright.
We wore our pagers on the golf course some afternoons.
Someone else told me that if you could afford it, you should always dress just a little better than your usual sources. Don't dress like the detectives in their JCPenney suits and clip-on ties (one explained it was a practical matter; if it came to it, you didn't want a perp choking you with your own fashion accessory), invest in a raw silk sport coat and a couple of Countess Mara ties. Subconsciously, it would lend you an air of authority.
I always thought that worked until a couple of months ago when I saw a photo of the newspaper staff circa 1984--we look like children playing grown-up in our pinstripe suits and sheath dresses. The exception is John Copes, who looks like Tom Selleck in his $30 Dickies khaki suit.
When we were away overnight on assignment we could check out a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100--the infamous "Trash 100"--from which we might file remotely via its built-in 300-bps dial-up modem that attached to a telephone with two rubber cups. You could view eight lines of text on its screen. It had 8KB of memory. It cost $799.
Sometime in 1985 the newsroom got a Macintosh 128K computer. It had its own cubicle in the middle of the office and we were only allowed to touch it after a day-long training seminar. I don't remember to what purpose we were supposed to put it but Copes and I ended up spending a lot of time playing a flight simulator game on it.
By then, I was a columnist and didn't carry a pager anymore. Instead I took more or less permanent possession of one of the Trash 100s and started filing columns from around the state. From Texas and South Arkansas too.
My first "portable" computer was a Compaq Portable. It weighed 30 pounds and was lugged around like a suitcase. It cost $3,000 in 1987 money, which would be close to $7,000 now. The newspaper didn't buy me that either. I don't know how I afforded it, but I got my money's worth. I dragged it all over. It came with me to Little Rock in 1989.
I remember linotype machines and hot type; at my first job I produced copy on a typewriter. I was the first writer at this newspaper to tag my work with an email address.
Change isn't the problem. All stories are about transformation. Stasis equals death.
We've got skills, we've got talent, and people need us more than they know. The old hack Joseph Campbell would call this moment a "call to adventure." I don't know about that; but I think it's time to get to work.
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Editorial on 05/26/2019