Former copy chief on ‘job I loved’ for 50 years
The March day I walked into the Chattanooga NewsFree Press building looking for a job as copy boy in 1968 was very different from the day I retired from the Chattanooga Times Free Press earlier this year.
Over a half-century, production and personalities constantly changed. There were both challenges and fun times while putting the latest and most accurate news into the homes and hands of thousands of readers.
Immediately, I fell in love with the urgency and excitement of the deadline-driven newsroom, the clacking sound of two dozen teletype machines, the barking of orders from journalists, such as tough City Editor Bill Hagan, and seeing a fresh display of current events roll off the press every day about 11:10 a.m.
The six-days-a-week job took me into founder and Publisher Roy McDonald’s office every day. He was an unforgettable character. Lee Anderson, the wise, mild-mannered editor-in-chief who became my mentor as well as my Sunday school teacher and the most influential person in my life outside of family, was in an adjoining office.
A number of “Mr. Roy”’s kin played roles at the paper for decades; it was by any measure a family newspaper. And I liked that.
When news broke that the University of Chattanooga was going to become a University of Tennessee campus, I attended a gathering where UC President William Masterson addressed students. On a lark, I wrote an unsolicited story about that meeting. The next morning I showed it to the city editor, and he recommended it as a sidebar to the main merger story. My first byline was on Page 1!
Just a few years after my arrival at the paper, the contract with the typographical union ran out. To be prepared for the possibility of a strike and to prepare for more modern printing, a number of us trained behind locked doors with new “cold type’’ machinery that spat out stories on paper.
A strike did happen on Jan. 24, 1972. The union knew we could produce pages, so it
convinced the pressmen to go out in sympathy, figuring we couldn’t get those pages printed. But foreman Skinny Owens was loyal to Mr. Roy. The press rolled the first day of that strike. The union knew then that it was all over, but picketed for five years.
The Times and News-Free Press had shared in a joint operating agreement (JOA) since 1942, with only the news departments being independent. By the mid ’60s, the afternoon News-Free Press sought to separate from the morning Times in the first dissolution of a JOA in American history. From 1966 to 1970, the morning Times published an afternoon paper — The Chattanooga Post — as direct competition to the News-Free Press.
Money was tight. A number of executives mortgaged their homes to make payroll. I had been buying common stock since day one. When I wanted to buy my first house, the paymaster in the business office was not at all happy when I asked to cash in that stock; things were that tight.
The paper took its predatory pricing case to the Justice Department. The government found for the News-Free Press on Feb. 24, 1970, and the Post was vanquished in the settlement. A check for $2.5 million in punitive damages came to Mr. Roy that many of us got to hold in our much-relieved hands. Years later, a new JOA was formed.
I joined the copy desk crew in 1972 as a copy editor. Our task was to edit news copy, write headlines, select photos to run with stories and proofread the pages of each day’s first edition.
After Elvis Presley died on a Tuesday in August 1977, we produced a large section on his career the next Sunday. The papers sold out, and more had to be printed. So the next Sunday we came out with Elvis II. Once again, it sold out. On the third and fourth Sundays, we had Elvis III and IV. I was given the assignment to lay out those four sections. The wonderful upshot was that many Elvis lovers started subscriptions.
In 1993, the paper’s look underwent a major makeover, and its original name was returned — Chattanooga Free Press. One day when executives were huddled with a designer pondering a great variety of type styles for the remodeled paper’s logo, I wandered by and made a suggestion that they liked and wound up using. It remains today only in the masthead on the Free Press editorial page
When I succeeded the copy desk chief, who oversaw 10 men and women, it fell to me to either choose, or authorize, the stories that went on Page 1. Ha! Arriving at 2:30 in the morning was the downside!
In the late 1990s, family executives determined that it would be wise to sell the business. The owner of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas, Walter E. Hussman Jr., bought the afternoon Free Press in March 1998, then closed on the purchase of the morning Times in January 1999. The two fierce competitors were merged on Jan. 5, 1999. In 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession, a number of newsroom folks, including myself, were laid off. After a stint in local tourism, I was rehired as a proofreader in 2013. Six and a half years later, working complications borne of coronavirus distancing, prompted me to decide it was time to hang up the job I loved for a half century.
A silver lining is that I went out as the longest serving of all current employees.