The good old days

Glenn Stanford says it was one of the best jobs he ever held, that of a summer relief reporter at what was then The Evening Telegram down on Duckworth Street.

Fun times they were, apparently. So much so, Stanford would often head down to the office after his soccer games. On his nights off.

The boys back then were good at their jobs, no doubt about it. Some were Hall of Fame athletes. All were Hall of Fame scribes.

They worked hard, and, yup, they played hard, too.

Deadlines were different. There were no recorders or laptops, just scribblers and typewriters. No hits to bang out for the website. No Twitter.

So long as copy was ready for the next morning when Bob Badcock, the Sports Editor, got in, it was all good.

Bernie Bennett, Bruce Reid, Joe Walsh, Billy Abbott and the boys would scramble early in their shift to cobble together notes and scores. That quest accomplished, it was tallyho off to The Sting, down near the War Memorial where they’d toast the night away.

Back to the office they’d gleefully toddle well after midnight, bang out a few stories and call it a day at five or six in the morning.

And do it all over again that night.

Speaking of tweets, I was reminded of this after reading the following on Twitter this week. In the early part of the 1900s, reporters on the local political beat often converged in “The Reporter’s Room,” located in the basement of the Colonial Building.

It was inside this room, reputedly, the scribes had a grand time.

A March 14 letter to The Evening Telegram disclosed, “Now, Mr. Editor, can this be wondered at when it is well known that the Reporter’s Room has been used, not so much for quietness in getting up their reports, as for smoking, drinking and card playing, draw poker in particular, some members of the Assembly and even outsiders, entering into the spirit of such doings.”

It’s a different sports game today, a far cry from a time when Ray Guy sat with a bottle on his Duckworth St. desk, much less the gang living it up in the basement at the Colonial Building.

This is a game where whoever gets the news out first wins. A game where Tweets and web hits matter, which sure enough has led to some media outlets throwing stuff at a wall, and hoping it sticks.

There was a time when social and media meant a drink and the paper, when the Feildians were the big draw in town, when a Guards-St. Bon’s meeting was something akin to a holy war.

I’m young enough to still be pecking away at the keyboard, but old enough to recall a noontime Athlete of the Month luncheon winding up late in the boozy evening.

And we didn’t whip out a smartphone and Tweet the winners.

I’m not saying it was better then than it is now. Or vice versa. But it was a different time, maybe a more relaxed time.

For in our haste to get today’s news out yesterday, maybe we’ve lost the luxury of sitting back and relaxing every now and again.

Or in the case of The Telegram’s sports department back then, every night.