IT WASN’T JUST A JOB FOR INK-STAINED VET
As he prepared to walk out of this newsroom for the final time on Saturday, bringing down the curtain on a 44-year career, Dennis Duggan reflected on the colorful characters who took that journey with him.
“I’m tired, that’s all,” he explained. “There were mornings I didn’t want to get out of the car, which told me it was time to stay home and do some reading.”
So, at 66, the office boy hired in 1973 is gone.
Officially he retired as a copy editor, after computerization phased out the woolly world of composing rooms where, when he began, Dennis could often be found running errands.
“There must have been 200 guys on that floor, yelling, trying to make everything fit, while linotype machines were clicking away. It was a madhouse, but all that noise sounded like a symphony to me and I was thrilled to think I was now a part of it.”
If the comp room didn’t hook him on being a newspaperman, the newsroom surely did.
“I worked with giants, like Timmy Horgan, the top sports columnist in town. He’d write his column, then shoot the breeze before going back to make a few changes. After lunch he’d add something, or take out something, massaging it four or five times, even though the very first take of his stuff was pristine. He’d be checking it over and over, yet always had time to say ‘Hi!’ to a new kid like me.
“Back then there was cigarette smoke and a cribbage board everywhere you looked; in more than a few desks you’d find a bottle and a dictionary in the drawer. That wouldn’t happen now. It’s such a different time.
“Every Saturday night there was a big game of hearts with everyone cursing, flinging cards around; oh, it was beautiful!”
When he joined the Herald he joined a family.
“A newspaper is more than just writers and photographers,” he correctly pointed out. “I knew people in accounting, advertising, circulation; I knew printers, drivers and electricians.
“Those pressmen had the dirtiest jobs, covering them with smudges and ink stains. Yet they’d show up for work in white shirts and sport coats, then put on their grimy overalls and wear hats made out of newspaper pages.
“Then there was Dickie Thompson, an old-school photographer. You thought twice about getting into a car with him. One day there was a bomb scare at the Pemberton Square courthouse and minutes later Dickie was on the scene, calling in; he beat everyone there by flying the wrong way down one-way side streets.”
Dennis was here the day veteran newsman Archie Newman collapsed and died on the newsroom floor.
“I’ll never forget seeing Dan Connolly and Tom Berube on the floor with him, cradling him until the EMTs arrived.”
That allowed a Herald writer to tell Archie’s widow at his wake, “I hope it’ll comfort you to know your husband died in the arms of his friends.”
She assured him it did. “I have 11 aunts,” Dennis notes. “Back in those days everyone wanted tickets for the flower show. When Pat Driscoll, a legend in advertising, heard I was trying to find some she handed me a bunch with a smile. I really didn’t know her all that well, but I worked for the Herald and that was good enough for her.”
You can’t talk about Herald history without a mention of J.J. Foley’s, the landmark watering hole around the corner on old Dover Street.
“You never knew who was going to pop in from the paper,” Dennis remembered. “During the wee hours you’d see cops, firefighters, bus drivers coming in; that’s where I met Ray Flynn. I was still a kid and I couldn’t believe the world I was living in.”
But now the names he reels off are just echoes from a distant time and place.
“I think of newsroom guys like Sammy Brogna, Joe Heaney, Paul Sullivan, Eddie Corsetti, Eddie Gillooly; they were so good to me.”
That’s not to say today’s newsroom is barren of towering personalities.
“We came in at the end of a magical time,” Dennis says. “Kids coming in today can’t imagine what it was like back then. I don’t want to sound like some bitter oldtimer, because I’m not bitter; it’s just that the world I’m walking out of is not the world I walked into.”
You are going to be greatly missed. Best wishes, buddy.