Poetry at Work, Chapter 3: The Poetry of the Workspace

My first workspace after college graduation was a newspaper copydesk.

I’d been hired as a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise. The title was grander than the reality of the entry-level job; I was one of four copy editors, and my workspace was a desk pushed against seven other desks to form a squat “H.” We were collaborative and team-based about three decades before it became corporate cool. 

It was a perfectly comfortable space for me. My last semester before graduation, I had worked in exactly the same kind of space for the college newspaper. The space in college and the space at Enterprise required learned deafness; you learned to blot out a lot of sounds – reporters talking with editors; wire service machines; the whirr of pre-fax telephone transmissions; people from page paste-up coming to an editor to trim a story; the sports department on the other side of a wall that was not floor-to-ceiling; and the nearby receptionist who enthusiastically (loudly) greeted visitors, told jokes, and handled incoming telephone calls.

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Everyone is young, once

I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, most likely because I have to manage a corporate Facebook page as part of my job (along with other social media). I do like seeing what friends are up to, and I “like” several pages related to writing and poetry and check those on a regular basis.

Everyone has a “reconnect” Facebook story. Last year I had a surprise friend request from my best friend in junior high – someone I hadn’t seen since high school. We actually were able to talk on the telephone, and it was great fun to remember life at 12 and 13 years old (and he remembered things I had long ago forgotten about, like riding the bus into downtown New Orleans for a movie, and where we went biking).

This past week, a friend request arrived, and I looked at the name and said “It couldn’t be.” But it was. The guy who was a copy boy at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise in 1973 had sent the request.

Something like this happens, and you move back 40 years in time. It was the summer of 1973, and my first job out of college. I was all of 21, engaged to be married, and working as a brand new copy editor. The copy boy, John Sniffen by name, took photographs; I believe he was taking a photojournalism course at the local university.

And there we are, again, a group of editors, mostly young, working on the publication of three editions of a newspaper in a small town in Texas. I remember the names of my colleagues. This photo would most likely have been taken in June because of where I’m sitting – the spot designated for whomever was the new kid on the block. Because staff turnover tended to be high, with three months I would occasionally sit in the position at the far left – assistant slot man. Three months was all it took to go from newbie to No. 2 on the copy desk.

It was an exciting time to be in journalism – the Watergate scandal was unfolding; Vice President Agnew would resign that fall; and the Yom Kippur War broke out in October, ushering in the first oil embargo the United States had experienced. The world changed forever in those few months.

After we were married that August, my wife also worked here as a copy editor.

Another interesting (for me) part of this is that we reconnected because we have a mutual friend. John is a member of the same church as Marcus Goodyear, editor of The High Calling.

A Facebook friend request, a photograph – and suddenly you’re reminded that you were young, once.

Everyone is young, once.

Photograph by John Sniffen, summer 1973, Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise copy desk.

My First Job - Part 3

From the summer of 1973 through the winter of 1974 was a heady time to be in journalism, even small-town journalism. Consider what was happening: the Watergate hearings (“They really tape all the President’s conversations?”), the Yom Kippur War, the first oil embargo against the U.S. (long lines at the gas pump and skyrocketing oil prices), inflation starting to run amok, the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, the Soviets arresting and then exiling Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. It was a wild time for the world but a great time to be in journalism (“You, too, can be like Woodward and Bernstein and topple the government”).

I was married in August, and my wife, also a journalist, was hired by the Beaumont Enterprise as a copy editor. That’s right – we worked together, in the same place at the same time doing the same thing – for the next six months. We were now both the kids on the copy desk. And it was extremely convenient for scheduling purposes to have us work on weekends – convenient for everyone else. So the two of us essentially put out the paper, all three editions, for Sunday and Monday. There were two other husband-and-wife teams at the paper – a copy editor and a sport editor, and two reporters – but we were the only one doing the same work side by side.

In spite of me, or really because of her, our marriage survived the experience. She was, and still is, a better editor than I was; I was the writer. But the back shop people still came to me for decisions and fixing things, primarily because I was likely the fastest person they had ever seen on the copy desk – the fastest and the one who made decisions like now. I learned that from Richard, the assistant slot man now decamped for a newspaper in Dallas.

My wife and I adored the back shop people – quiet, capable, competent, good people, with volumes of experience in dealing with lame brained journalists. A balding man name Atch ran the back shop; I can remember many, many times finding Atch quietly standing at my side while I was seated at the copy desk, holding a too-long headline or too-long story, or a page where a copy editor had placed an airplane accident story right above the ad for Delta Air Lines (classic no-no for an editor). If Atch knew the slot man had made the mistake, he’d look at me and give a little nod in the slot man’s direction. That was my clue to follow Atch to the back shop and work the problem out there.

Two other back shop people stand out in my mind. Penny was a thin woman who seemed to move at the speed of light, and spoke at the speed of light. She could also paste up pages at the speed of light. She was wonderful. And then there was Shirley, the methodical and painstaking counterpart to Penny and her speed. Shirley was a man, and Shirley was his first name. His parents should have been arrested for that. He was like that stern, disapproving teacher you had back in third grade, the one who struck fear in everyone, including the good kids.

Everyone on the copy desk feared Shirley. Except my wife. Shirley loved my wife, and he tolerated me because I'd had the good sense to marry her. I don’t know if it was simply personal affinity or she might have been the daughter he never had, but whatever the reason, he’d do anything for her.

It was at the Enterprise that I first encountered the problem that I’ve faced my entire working career: decisions, especially decisions about people, get made too often for the wrong reasons. Decisions about people often have little to do with competence, creativity, performance or potential; too often, they have everything to do with how much someone likes you. I saw it in spades at the newspaper. I was also learning that newspapers were (are) first and foremost a business – which is what they don’t teach you in journalism school. And businesses do things that can shock idealistic young journalists, until they know better.

So when the call came from Shell Oil, thanks to the person I had talked to right before I graduated, I accepted the invitation to interview and later accepted the job. Then and now, some people in journalism consider a move to PR “crossing over to the dark side.” I didn’t. The dark side exists everywhere.

In late February of 1974, at the height of the long, long lines at gas stations, I moved to Houston, followed a couple of weeks later by my wife. But Houston is another story.

I don’t regret a minute of the nine months I spent at the Beaumont Enterprise.

My First Job - Part 2

My first day at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise was something of a surprise. I discovered small-town journalism and small-town Texas. Okay, Beaumont wasn’t so small – 120,000 at the time. But it seemed small, and it acted small. The biggest news to hit the city in years was the opening of the new enclosed shopping complex, Parkdale Mall. Every time a new store was announced, a story appeared on the front page of the Enterprise, typically a barely rewritten news release.

I walked in the door and took the elevator to the second floor. The doors opened, and there I was, face to face with the receptionist with the 18-inch high hair, go-go boots and mini-skirt. She glared at me. I explained I was the new copy editor, and she pointed toward the copy desk.

I approached the desk, and the slot man told me to sit at the vacant place. Introductions to the other editors could come later; there was a newspaper to get out. He passed down some typed sheets, told me to edit and write the headlines, specifying the type size. I looked at the copy handed to me by the editor next to me, and realized they were stories for publication in the next day’s East Texas edition. Deadline was 8 p.m. for the East Texas edition, 9 p.m. for the Louisiana edition and 10 p.m. for the home edition. The stories for East Texas and Louisiana were sent in by “stringers,” a group of both professional and amateur reporters.

I got the copy from the amateurs. I think this was my official training for the job. I had to rewrite everything and then track down the stringers to verify the spelling of names and facts and fill holes in the stories. The stringers loved getting calls like that from someone two days out of college.

There wasn’t much conversation at the copy desk, except for the snickers as more stories were passed to me. The slot man sat on one side of a square-shaped configuration. He didn’t talk so much as grunt. Every so often he would erupt into a story about the days when he worked at a real newspaper. There was also an editor for the news from the Austin (state capital) bureau; one who handled obituaries and memorials; one for the second front page; and three general copy editors. A copy girl or boy (local journalism students) would run edited copy and headlines from the copy desk to the back shop, where stories were typed on a rather large computer and then printed for paste-up.

The copy desk staff was, well, colorful. One editor always wore a black velvet cape, even while sitting at the desk. I wondered how he could stand it in the Texas heat, but I don’t think I ever saw him without it. Another usually showed up late, with bloodshot eyes and an unsteady gait. Well, actually two or three might show up that way. Bud’s Bar was right across the street from the newspaper, just down the block from the gay bar that had drag shows on Saturday nights. I discovered that my first Saturday night in town. I came out of the newspaper’s front door about 10:30 to go home, and the street in front of me was filled with what looked like people celebrating Mardi Gras.

Facing the slot man on the other side of the copy desk was the assistant slot man. My spot was next to him. His name was Richard, probably 10 years older than I was. He took me under his wing. It didn’t take long for me to see who really ran the copy desk. The clue was the people from the back shop. They were smart people. Whenever they had a question or needed a decision, they went to Richard.

He was a restless type. He was known for almost annual job changes between the paper in Beaumont and the Port Arthur News, about 30 miles south. One year it was the Enterprise; the next it was the News. And then back again. I caught him for his final two months in the area, though, because he left for Dallas two months after I arrived. But I was grateful for those two months; if there was anyone who trained me, it was Richard. And he did more than that – he took me with him to dinner or we’d sit together in what passed for the newspaper cafeteria. He told me stories about the paper and the staff. He checked my work and showed me how to improve it. And then he left.

Because of the high turnover rate on the copy desk, two months after I’d arrived, I'd taken Richard’s place. The back shop people were coming to me. If a story was too long to fit a page, they'd come to me to trim it. If a headline didn't fit, they brought it to me to rewrite it. I was the kid, but no one seemed to mind. From my first week at the paper until the time I left nine months later, I worked every weekend except the one I got married. There was supposed to be another editor working with me, but it rarely worked out that way that summer. So I had to edit, package and manage three editions of the newspaper on Saturdays and Sundays, with someone to help write obituaries when they were called in.

To recognize my additional responsibilities, I got a $15 a week raise. It was still near-poverty level.

My First Job - Part 1

I don't know what I was thinking, or what I wasn't thinking, but about three weeks before I graduated from LSU's School of Journalism, I realized I needed a job. I had been too busy being the student newspaper's managing editor to worry about such trifles as future employment. But graduation loomed, and I went looking.

I dropped off resumes and actually interviewed at a couple of television stations in Baton Rouge, and my father suggested I talk to the people at Shell Oil in New Orleans. He did a considerable amount of their printing and mailing work, and I knew most of the people in the PR department from making deliveries and picking up mailing labels. So I did, and actually got to talk with an institution there, a woman named Carolyn Sonnier. Other people might have had better sounding titles, but she ruled PR in New Orleans. There were no openings, but she said she'd send my resume on to headquarters in Houston. (Ten months later, Shell in Houston called; they had a job and the recommendation by Ms. Sonnier clinched it.)

Things were now looking desperate. It wasn't just a job for me; there was this girl I'd met and we had started talking about getting married (we did, almost four months later). One afternoon, as I walked past the bulletin board in the J-School, I saw a job posting. Things being what they were, I took it down. No, I tore it down and hid it in my books so no one else would see it.

It was an opening for a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise, a daily newspaper with three editions (East Texas, Southwest Louisiana and Home). There was also an afternoon paper, the Beaumont Journal, that operated out of the same building but had separate ownership. I called the contact name, the managing editor, and got an interview right away. I should have wondered at the speed at which that happened, but I didn't. I thought he sounded anxious, but I was exceedingly thankful.

My girlfriend/fiancee and I drove over to Beaumont from Baton Rouge, and she waited outside (in the heat) while I did my interview. Downtown Beaumont then looked nothing like downtown Beaumont today. Then, it was still living off the dreams of the 1901 oil gusher at Spindletop, and the dreams had played out about 30 years earlier. Downtown was in serious need of major urban renewal.

I remember three things from my interview.

First was the smell of the place -- like ink and newsprint and glue from paste-up. I never forgot the smell. It's universal to all newspapers, I think. It was the same smell at the Houston Chronicle where my wife worked after we moved there, and the same smell at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington Post, and several other newspapers I've visited.

Second was the receptionist. She was likely somewhere in her early to mid-40s. Her jet black hair was teased at least 18 inches above her head (the copy desk would often break out in a stirring rendition of "Stand By Your Man" whenever she was out of earshot). She wore white go-go boots. And a mini-skirt. Always a mini-skirt. Every day a mini-skirt. And she shouldn't have.

The third thing I remember was, after offering me the sumptuous salary of $125 a week, near poverty-level even for the early 1970s, the managing editor walked me to the copy desk to introduce me to the people I would be working with. They were polite. And in their eyes I saw pity.

Yep, another desperate sucker.

But I had a job. Before we drove back to Baton Rouge, I found an apartment, which I always referred to as the posh Northway-Gaylynn Luxury Apartments. There was nothing posh or luxury about them. Their chief selling point was that they were furnished, or mostly furnished. My apartment shared a building with three other units, and sat amidst scores of other identical buildings. Think of the complex as incipient slum. Mine was upstairs. My neighbor was a young woman named Kitt; I remember her last name, too. She worked at a nearby bank, and she was far more respectable than anyone who worked at a newspaper, including me. I remember she had a white Westmoreland terrier. We were both engaged, but I got married first. She was as nice a neighbor as you might find.

I graduated a couple of weeks later and drove to Beaumont the next day, a Sunday. I drove straight to the apartment office to get my key -- and naturally, the office was closed. This was when most places of business, including grocery stores, shopping malls and apartment complexes, closed on Sundays. I had a car packed with stuff, a rented apartment, and no key to open the door. And I had to start work the next day.

After a few hours, I managed to find the handyman for the complex (he often had to work on Sundays; broken air conditioners and hot water heaters didn't care a fig about the Blue Laws). He let me in. I had no key and no food, but I did manage to find an open convenience store.

But life didn't get better than that for an almost 22-year-old soon-to-be a copy editor -- my own place to sleep, some awful food on my stomach, and all of the books I'd brought with me. In fact, after I ate the food (a TV dinner, if I recall correctly), the first thing I did was set up my pine board and cinder block bookshelves. Then I worried about the sheets for the bed.

The next day promptly at 3 p.m., I walked in the door of my first job.

The awakening would be abrupt and rude.