The Newsroom -- 1977

            The noise is what gets you first: the uproar generated by dozens of angry, desperate, hopeful reporters banging away on ancient manual typewriters, the keys nearly blasting through the inky cloth ribbons, tearing into sheets of innocent paper -- all at the same moment. The reporters wrestle their man-sized typewriters into submission, forcing them to cooperate on deadline…or else. It’s more a battleground than a newsroom. Faces are flushed, mothers are rebuked, and curses fill the air.

            But it isn’t only the sound of grown men (and a very few women) having the temper tantrums of young children. There are also the incessant cries of copy at which point a handful of young men rise as one from a strategically-placed wooden bench. The quickest among them runs over to the reporter holding a piece of paper, or copy, high in the air – one page of a story the reporter is writing for tomorrow’s paper.

Sometimes, the high-pitched voice of the one-armed, skinny copy chief Chili pierces the air but he never utters the word “copy.” He prefers to yell “boy” for his needs. That a comely young woman is now rushing toward him makes no difference  – in Chili’s eyes, she too is “boy.” He’s obsessed with grammar but unaffected by gender. There is a newspaper to put out and his role is integral, or so he believes. He commandeers the U-shaped copy desk, and jams proof-read sheets of paper into a canvas belt that endlessly circles his desk. The corrected copy makes its way down to the 6th-floor composing room, where it is transformed into hot type by dozens of brittle old men sitting at blacker-than-black linotype machines. Nearby are giant, forbidding-looking vats of bubbling molten lead, the raw material for those Dickensian machines.

Here at the New York Daily News, information is a chameleon, changing shape before your eyes. Photographs are no exception. They whoosh through pneumatic tubes from the darkroom to the picture desk and ultimately to the composing room floor to join with the printed page.

            But back to the vast 7th-floor newsroom, this glorious newsroom which has been the inspiration for many a movie. This is the real thing -- a diorama of the word deadline. Everyone is in a hurry. Doors are banging, people are running, intensity fills the sweat-soaked air. The newsroom is primeval. People chomp at each other and fight over anything, everything, especially chairs, a childish currency of tribal importance. Men mark their seats like warriors, not only with names but with odd-shaped symbols, and there is a price to pay for anyone daring to breech clear signs of occupation.

Grown men grapple, pulling chairs out from under one another. These are men who will tell politicians go fuck yourself but are afraid even to venture as far as the nearest rest room, lest they lose that chair.

In the middle of this orgasm of bad behavior and even worse manners is the switchboard, and manning that switchboard is me.