The Backroom: Life among the ink-stained savages

There is a definite caste system to a newspaper.

You have advertising, all dollars and deals, and editorial, the news side, nerds with pens and pads and principles and the personalities of peacocks.

News is always screeching about how it must be kept pure of the filthy money of advertising, which in reality cashes its paychecks. I have known of papers where members of the advertising staff were actually forbidden by policy from entering the newsroom nerdom.

But if there is one thing news and advertising can agree upon, it’s they both feel superior to the men and women in the backroom: The printers, the people who prepare the papers for delivery, and those who actually either get it to the subscriber or newsstand.

News and advertising are populated for the most part by people with degrees. The backroom is manual labor, where a high school diploma, or even a command of English, is often not among the job requirements.

The college kids and the townies.

One of the first things I tell new reporters who come to work for me is to never look down their noses at the people in the backroom. In fact, I suggest, make friends with them.

“All your pretty words aren’t going to matter if that person delivering the paper doesn’t get up in the morning and get it to the subscribers and the newsstands,” I tell them. “If you treat the people in the backroom with respect, they will move heaven and earth for you. Treat them like you’re better than them, and they’ll stand there and watch the presses roll with a major fuck-up of yours on the front page and just smile.”

In reality I think my affection … or maybe more accurately connection … for and to the backroom … comes from my literal roots in the business.

I grew up working class. There were no respectable Republican cloth coats in my mom’s closet. My dad carried mail, and on Sundays, when he wasn’t carrying mail, he delivered the Sunday newspaper, The Star-Journal Chieftain, taking bundles to the convenience stores and other places where people picked up copies, and filling the numerous vending racks around the city.

Every Sunday morning at 3:30 a.m. a truck from the Star-Journal, usually drive by one of my dad’s old stock car racing buddies Scottie Oldedaker, would stop next to my dad’s pick-up parked on the street and toss papers into the back.

I’d awaken to the sound and lay in bed listening to the muted metallic echoing whump… whump… whump…  whump… as the bundles hit the bed of the truck, and then hear my dad’s smoker-hack cough and his footsteps walking around the house. Then I’d hear the front door close, his truck start, and then silence as I wondered where he was going and what he’d see in the middle of the night when I was leashed by childhood to my bed.

I’d fall back asleep, only to be awakened in the morning to him coming back home. My mom would make him a bologna and egg sandwich and I would sit on his lap in his Lazy-Boy and he’d read me the comics from the Sunday Journal-Chieftain, the ink still so fresh you could smell it as it left little pastel streaks on the paper towel when he wiped the egg grease from his hands.

Like the rumble of the presses starting to roll, that sound … newsprint bundles being tossed and stacked … still makes my heart beat a little faster even today.

As I got older, sometimes as a special treat during school vacations, I would get to go with my dad “on the route.” In the dark hours and early morning while most of the town slept I would see people and things that nobody in my class at Olga Hellbeck had a story to compare with come Monday morning at school.

Just before dawn, in downtown Pueblo, we’d stop at Reese’s Diner on Main. My dad would get a cup of coffee and I’d get a glass of milk and a chocolate glazed doughnut and we’d sit at the counter with the homeless people, hookers and last-call bar diehards sopping up the sloshing liquor in their stomachs with pancakes and sausage and hashbrowns.

Later, when I got older, and in trouble, my dad would make me go with him on the route. I know now in retrospect that the aim was not to get some slave labor, or even exact some punishment. For all I know, but now can imagine, he may very well have treasured those hours alone in the middle of the night once a week. I know now, and I think I even knew back then, that the idea was to get some time alone with me. Some time to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me.

Time when my dad would talk to me like he would never think to talk with me with other people around. Just the two of us alone in the cab of his pickup for hours, as the conversation rose and fell like the up- and downshifts of his manual transmission, with the golden opportunity to break off a subject that became too embarrassing because we needed to fill a rack or go into a store.

Secrets and stories, that’s what I learned on those mornings on the route with my dad. And all of it woven in and around a pickup full of newspapers. Even the reaction of the clerks in the convenience stores and the people, some literally waiting for the newspaper, fed on that feeling. As I walked in the door I knew something they didn’t, and because of me, they were going to find it out. And because of that they were if only momentarily all focused on my existence.

Newspapers made me special and worthy of notice.

And then, when I got my license, my dad turned the route over to me and my friend Mike.

Can you imagine a better job for two 16-year-olds than to be able to ride around town in the middle of the night, not only with the right, but the responsibility to do so, just to make sure the news was delivered? All that time I don’t think we ever got pulled over, or even talked to for that matter by a single cop. We were just a part of the night-scene pulp paper delivery woodwork.

At the time, in my mind because he was a pussy, but now, again in retrospect, perhaps from carbon monoxide poisoning from the old exhaust system on the truck and running the heater in a closed cab, Mike would invariably get nauseous during the route.

I would find myself at dawn in an empty grocery store parking lot, reading how my secret high school crush Connie Bond had done the day before in the gymnastics meet in the sports section of the Chieftain, while Mike, clad in his cotton jumpsuit during his Pete Townsend Woodstock phase, hunched and hurled next to the idling truck. I was such a sociopath that I wouldn’t even turn off the engine.

The pops that washed the vomit taste out of Mike’s mouth were bought from the jangling bag of quarters provided for the racks. The coffee and chocolate doughnuts and bags of chips were paid for by the Chieftain as part of our self-styled employee profit-sharing plan.

What I remember most about my days of delivering the Chieftain back then, however, is showing up at the newspaper at about 5 a.m. to get another truckload of papers to distribute on the east side of town.

We’d load up and then walk through the back shop where the papers were inserted and bundled for delivery. We’d go into the bathroom. Pressmen, who probably had a couple of job-printing runs for other papers and publications after printing the Chieftain, would just be showering and would be standing around in various states of ink-smeared sullenness and wet fatigue. Across the entire floor would be newspapers strewn, as if they used them like towels.

What always struck me was the calm after the storm environment of the now nearly empty newsroom that we would walk by along the hall headed back to the truck. The silence, broken by the monotonous low chatter of the police scanner, the vibe of the deadline push still shimmering off the metal desks and typewriters like a cooling heat. I still love the newsroom after deadline on Wednesday nights at The Breeze and do everything I can to assure that I am the last around, so I can sit and bask in the afterglow.

Later, at one of my first real newspaper jobs as a reporter, I was required to deliver the weekly edition myself. We would finish the paper’s layout at around noon on Wednesday afternoon and while we were at lunch it was printed and brought back to the offices, where we inserted the weekly ad flyers, and then, while the other reporters went back to work, I was expected to load my white 1969 Pontiac Bonneville with bundles of papers, which I took to the racks and businesses.

I remember at the time being mightily offended that myself, a professional, degree-carrying journalist, was expected to deliver the issue that I had just helped create. Embarrassed. What I realize now is that the other reporters, having just finished deadline, were now expected to go immediately back to work that afternoon on the next issue that sat somewhere in the murky mist a week-away under the watchful eye of the editor and owner, while I got to drive around town and listen to the radio, buying smokes from money in the racks.

I find it funny, that now, as the owner, one of my jobs still is making sure the weekly issue gets into the mail on Thursday mornings, and then I drive the route to the racks and vendors. Reality is, I haven’t found anyone that I trust enough to do it. You know those little tiny typeset things in the back of newspapers that are written in lawyer language? The entities and individuals who want those run pay the newspaper to print them. And to print them, your newspaper’s U.S. Postal Permit, our means of delivery to our subscribers, must be in good standing. And to be in good standing, you must have printed and successfully put in the mail by each Thursday an issue of the newspaper. If you don’t. If you miss a week. Then you have to print 52 issues before you can again run legals.

Maybe now you can see why I might be a bit edgy about entrusting the last, most important, link in the publishing chain to someone with only the investment of the 30 or 40 bucks I would pay them for a couple of hours work.

But no one can deliver the papers unless the drivers from the printing plant get them to us. They are the first human I interact with on Thursday mornings. I consciously make an effort to get to know them, and more importantly, that they get to know me. That they understand this is my paper, owned by my wife and me, not some corporation.

Those pictures on the wall above my desk … they are my daughters … their college education will be paid for by this paper. I tell them family stories. Share my week, ask about theirs, ask about their families. Give them a reason other than their paycheck to make sure that things go OK for Matt.

The driver is one of the last links in the chain to get the paper to our readers. I want to engender that sense of responsibility with them. That buy-in to what we’re trying to do each week, and have to do. You want that kind of loyalty when the roads are icy and it’d be easier to say you’ll come later. Or when the boss is being a dick and you’d just as soon take the whole load of newsprint to the recycling center and get some meth with what you can get for them, or dump them in the river, which for some odd reason has always been a fear of mine.

Wayne is the grumbling angel that wakes me from the ether each Thursday morning. A couple of drivers before him, I set up a deal where they would call my cell phone as they exited the interstate outside of town. This would give me about 15 minutes to wash my face, get dressed, grab a cup of coffee and more importantly … sleep as long as possible … before meeting them at the paper by 6 a.m.

Misty, the office cat back then, loved Wayne. As it happened, his own cat died just before he starting delivering the paper and the two bonded in his grief. I take it as a sign of his genuine good and trustworthiness that he dotes on and loves her so much. If I ever had to give Misty away, I would have given her to Wayne.

I trust Wayne to deliver the paper every week. I would certainly trust him with my cat.

Back when my daughters were little we had a cat… singular. We went away on vacation and when we came back the cat never showed up. Telling the girls the cat went to “live with the coyotes” in the farm field north of our house I took them to the pound to each a get a kitten. Misty was one of those kittens.

Over the years, dogs, three of them, the other kitten, now a cat, and another cat, were added to the mix. Misty was miserable. She’d spend her days hiding under the couch in the living room, then at night she’d try to sneak downstairs to the food and litter box.

Along the way, to show how she felt about the state of things, she’d piss on chairs, plants, shoes, you name it. I had been trying to talk Lesli into making her an office cat for months, but Lesli was worried she’d be lonely at nights and on the weekends when no one was in the office.

The night she pissed on Lesli’s head while she was asleep was the night Lesli decided we could maybe try Misty as an office cat.

She has blossomed. Former interns bring their parents to the newspaper as they’re passing through town not to meet Lesli and I, not even really to show them the paper, but to show them Misty.

Everyone loves Misty. But most of all, Wayne.

Every Wednesday night after deadline the last thing I say to Misty as I leave is, “Your boyfriend Wayne is coming in the morning.” While other days when I come into the office Misty takes her sweet time about coming out of the various nooks she sleeps in, ever Thursday morning, as she hears Wayne’s voice coming from the back of the building as he and I walk in, she comes and stands in front of the darkroom door from which he’ll enter.

Wayne played football on scholarship in college. “I was pretty good,” he says without any trace of ego, simply stating the facts, as he winces as he squats down to scratch Misty’s belly while I write the check for that week’s print bill.

Having noticed early in our relationship his limp, and having heard him allude to a knee injury that cut his career short, I had always assumed that he had hurt it on the gridiron field of glory. It wasn’t until about a year later that he told me he was riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, and his knees were angled out, and one caught the rear fender of a car that his friend rode too close to. And All Things Changed. He lost his scholarship and had to drop out of school.

Now, the road for him that started with dreams of the NFL has led him to the back parking lot behind our paper, where every Thursday morning we meet before dawn.

As I pull into the parking lot one morning I see Wayne sitting in the cab of his truck doing paperwork. As I park and get out of my Land Cruiser he clambers out with a wince as his leg hits the ground that has become almost as natural to him as breath or how to properly block on a sweep.

“It’s a new moon,” he says. “You have to close your eyes, spin around three times, and make a wish. It’s an old pagan ritual my mom used to teach me.”

So we both close our eyes, spin around three times, and make a wish.

Then Wayne tells me his idea.

“I’m going to need help with this,” he says. “Someone who can write. We should do a new version of War of the Worlds, but we make it terrorists this time. We need to write this, Matt. I don’t know how long I can keep pushing in that clutch.”

“If we tried to make that we’d end up in Guantanamo Bay,” I reply. “These are not the kinder and gentler times of our youth.”

I pull out my pack of Camels. “Hey Wayne,” I say, doing the traditional tap tap tap on the bottom of the pack against the palm of my hand. “What’s this sound? The mating call of the Great American White Trash Woodpecker. Heh heh.”

Wayne laughs.

If Wayne’s happy. I’m happy.

Wayne is just the next in a long line of drivers.

There was Deaf Jeff. It was a year before I learned to understand his slurred speech. Two before I remembered to look at him when I talked. But somehow we managed to develop a friendship that, even years after getting fired from the printing company for sexual harassment, he still drops by every now and then to say hi and show me the progress on the 1976 Pontiac CanAm muscle car he is restoring.

There was Scott With The Weird Eye; a real estate agent who had to take another job when the housing bubble burst. I talked a lot about the stock market with Scott on those Thursday mornings as we both saw the lives we thought we were going to be living disappear.

And there was one who went by “Buffalo”. A shaggy biker type, Buffalo obviously could smell the weed hanging in the air from me getting high just before he showed up at the office. He would stand around shuffling and pawing at the carpet after he helped me bring the papers in, with me impatiently waiting for him to leave so I could blaze another bowl before I went and did the route.

I became convinced that he was actually an undercover narc that was just posing as a delivery driver to bust me and never ever offered to get him high. 

And there are some who I don’t even remember their name. In one case I feel bad about that, because the guy literally risked his life to get the papers to me one week.

Back when we still had peel-off and paste-on mailing labels for subscribers’ addresses we had to get the labels to the printer on Wednesday night. Usually, a driver out on another delivery in the area would stop by and pick them up. The paper would be printed that night, the labels put on, and they’d be bundled for the various mail routes for delivery Thursday morning.

One Wednesday evening the driver who picked up the labels said our usual Thursday morning driver … let’s call him Lucky … might not be coming in the morning. They had just got word at the print plant that he had been in a car accident on his way to work.

But the next morning there he was, pulling up in the huge truck that carried the press runs of probably a half-dozen papers he’d stop at that morning.

It seemed Lucky was cruising along in his car on his way to work when some jerk in front of him slammed on his brakes and he plowed right into the back of them.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“I had a bunch of CDs hit me in the back of the head that were lying on the back seat and I smacked my forehead on the windshield,” he said. “But I’m fine. I just got one of the guy’s from work come pick me up at the accident when they towed my car.”

I looked him closer in the growing light of the dawn. He had a huge hematoma on his forehead, all blue and green and purple.

“Dude,” I said, “You’ve probably got a head injury. You need to go to a doctor.”

“Nah,” Lucky said. “If I had they’d probably want to put me in the hospital or something and people die in hospitals. I ate a handful of Advil when I got to work. I’m fine.”

We unloaded the papers, and I got ready to go back inside the office.

“Hey, smoke a cigarette with me before I get back in the truck,” Lucky said. “Driving is weird. Especially when the headlights are coming at you.”

So I smoked a cigarette with him and sent him on his way. I felt a little bad about turning his loose on the roads … for his sake and for others … but I did have a paper to get out.

And then there was this Hobbit like hippie. All brushy black hair and Birkenstocks. One time, he and I unloaded literally a ton of newsprint for a total community distribution of a special issue – one of the weeks when everyone in both Johnstown and Milliken got a newspaper whether they wanted one or not – probably four times the number of papers we usually printed.

We unloaded them out of the truck, hauled them into the office, and then loaded half of the run into my Land Cruiser. We then took it to the Post Office. Unloaded it. Went back. Loaded the other half and took it to the post office. And unloaded it.

After dumb stuff like that, and two hernia surgeries, I decided it was time to start working smart not hard and convinced the bosses at the printing company to let the driver meet me at the Post Office, where we would just unload the whole mass once.

And the backroom people understand what they are doing. They understand what a newspaper means to someone. They get the basic tenets of the craft of journalism, that you need to spell the names correctly.

It was early in our ownership of the paper when the local high school cross country team won the state championship. On our front page that week was a team picture.

I was standing watching the presses roll at the daily newspaper in Greeley where we were printing at the time. It’s amazing that you can look at a story, or a laid out page for hours during production deadline, but as soon as the process occurs that mixes ink with newsprint, and a newspaper is created, you’ll see mistakes you missed all day.

We were almost through the entire press run when I idly picked up a paper off the conveyor belt of the presses and glanced at it to see how the color registration of the picture was.

The name of one of the kids on the team was misspelled in the cutline below the photo.

My heart froze. I tapped Mike, the head pressman on the shoulder.

“This kid’s name is misspelled!” I yelled at him above the roaring rumble of the press. “This paper is going to be a forever testament to the year he was on the state cross country team in high school. He’s going to get it out and show it to his grandchildren, and his fucking name is misspelled.”

Without flinching Mike reached up and hit the stop button on the press. It is literally the only time in my career I have seen them ‘stop the presses.’

We went into the production room. A page designer matched the font of our cutline and typeset it and printed it out. We took the corrected name back to the people who shot the negatives of the pages. With an x-Acto knife they cut out the misspelled name and “stripped” in the corrected version and re-shot the page negative, which Mike then took back to the presses, where they loaded the plate and re-ran the entire run of the paper.

I heard that the publisher wasn’t happy the next day when he came to work and wanted to know why an entire run of the Breeze was in the dumpster out back. But he never said a word to me. Mike acknowledged, the next week when we were doing the run, that he had gotten chewed out, yeah, but it was OK. Don’t bother sticking up for us, he said, they’re just dicks with ties and they wouldn’t even listen. He was just glad that that kid would have that memento of his winning season, he said. Tell the team congratulations for us.

Recently I was sharing a ride back from Denver with the current publisher of the paper, and I related the story, thinking he might get a kick out of it.

He didn’t talk about how important things like that are. He didn’t agree that people cut out what we do for a living and put it in their scrapbook, or like a widow who once told me that late at night, when she missed her husband, how she’d take out the yellowed copy of the paper where a reporter wrote a story about her Rueben and re-read it.

“They should have charged you for another press run,” was all he said.