Extra, Extra: Read All About It!

I discovered that the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the newspaper that formed the model for the fictional Knoxville Times of my novel, Byline, had an alumni page on Facebook. Although I didn’t recognize any of the member names, I asked to join the closed group and was accepted. I posted an image of my American Newspaper Guild card on the site.

Scrolling through the posts, I found dozens of pictures of co-workers from the mid 1950s and early 1960s, pictures of newspaper people whose descriptions and traits I had borrowed for my book. Here was the sweet-natured cartoonist. There was the scary news editor. Here was the smiling face of the morgue—now called the library—manager.

So many of my colleagues stayed on after I left, first for Spokane, Washington, then to Greece, New York, San Francisco.

It was a sobering discovery to learn that almost all of them have died. The one live person I knew was a red-haired photographer who was only a couple of years older than I, and he proved to be the website’s administrator. I remembered his strolling out of the teletype room, waving a piece of paper and saying, irreverently, “Pope’s pooped” when Pius XII expired.

This fellow drove me, in 1963, to get an interview with someone involved in a Congressional inquiry. She was visiting relatives at Christmas, and I faked my way into her house by carrying wrapped gifts, as if I were a family friend. The story was picked up by the wire services, Newsweek and Time magazine, with my name. It was my Brenda Starr moment...such a big deal at the time, and such a forgettable deal 50 years later. The photographer didn’t even remember me.

On the alumni website, I saw pictures of the old copy desk, the newsroom, the composing room, the pressmen with their newspaper hats. I saw pictures of the presses being moved with heavy equipment when they became obsolete. I saw the typewriters go and the computers come in, saw copy boys become writers and editors, marry, have children, retire. Saw the assimilation of the rival newspaper, the move to a new campus, the launching of an on-line edition.

The old News-Sentinel had four editions every day, back in the day. When a big story broke—the death of the Pope and Kennedy’s assassination both happened when I was on the copy desk—an Extra would be put out. The newsboys on the street really would shout “Extra, extra, read all about it,” just like in the movies. The paper’s circulation was huge, among the top one hundred nationally.

I can only assume that the newspaper, like all newspapers, has downsized. One alumnus, responding to a photo of the old pressmen in their newspaper hats, remarked that the broadsheet newspapers are now too narrow to make those hats...but then there are no ink-spattered pressmen either.

When I wrote my novel, I drew a map of the old newsroom and made a list of all the editorial employees, pretty surprised that I remembered those things when I can’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday. I am glad I wrote my novel, trying to describe how it was in the glory days of newspapers. But I found all the information on the alumni page disquieting. I was left with mixed emotions, as if I had experienced some odd sort of time travel, more than fifty years of the road not taken.

(The novel Byline is available on Amazon.com)

The Girl With Many Names

             I am pushing eighty now and am beginning to think about how many writing projects I’ll be able to finish before I forget how to type. One of these is a kind of autobiography with the working title “The Girl With Many Names.”

            When I divorced my third husband (yes; I learned my modest people skills the hard way) some 25 years ago, I asked the judge to restore my maiden name. I had to ask twice. I still get Christmas cards addressed to various old names, and while I am glad to be remembered, I think 25 years is sufficient to accommodate a name change.

            Partly I wanted to go back to my original name because my father, not realizing that it would hurt my feelings, said something about having only one male descendent to “carry on the name.” Partly it was because I was tired of being married and tired of having my name indicate I was somebody’s property...though it wasn’t as bad as the Greek system of a wife’s having her given name followed by “of” and both the husband’s names.

            When Nicodemus and I got married sixteen or seventeen years ago, Father Anthony of blessed memory put us through weeks of premarital counseling and made us go over and analyze every failed relationship we had ever had.  It took us a long time to get it right, and we don’t plan on marrying anybody else. Although Father Anthony was a traditionalist and didn’t truck with the maiden name business, I persisted in keeping my last name and nobody ever challenged it.

            It is a tribute to Nicodemus that various stores call HIM by my maiden name and that he doesn’t particularly care one way or another.

            My son Ed recently applied for a passport and had to produce the document he has instead of a birth certificate, a statement from the American consulate in Thessaloniki certifying the birth of a child abroad to an American citizen. “It says my middle name is Anthony,” he said. “I always thought it was Antonios.”

            “Well, now you’ve had an Ellis Island moment,” I said, thinking of all the new Americans whose names were too foreign for the clerks at the famous immigration office to pronounce.  The consulate officer had translated “of Antonios” into “Anthony.”

            My just-released novel, BYLINE, has an Ellis Island moment when an editor changes the heroine’s Greek name into something that’s “easier for the people.”

            And I won’t even start on my first name, which I have to explain to someone almost every day. It’s just plain old MY-KUL, I tell them. Like David’s first wife in the Bible. Not Michelle or Mikaela or, as a childhood playmate once essayed, Mackerel.