The penultimate deadline met
This column thing started in a different time.
The acrid odor of molten lead — the life’s blood of the linotype machine — permeated the four floors of the old brick building at 410 State St., the headquarters of the Bridgeport Post and Telegram.
In the third- floor newsroom, the Royals and the Underwoods — those were typewriters, not reporters — clacked and clattered, building to a hail- on- tin- roof crescendo as a noon deadline approached.
Then the room would fall still. It was the ’ 70s, the final years of newspaper heyday. We said among ourselves that when publishers were moaning about money, they were just talking about the size of the wheelbarrow they were taking to the bank.
Jimmy Cullen, of the South End Cullens, would come every couple of months to service the typewriters, clean the clotted ink off the faces of the little keys, change the ribbons and oil the contraptions’ innards.
Al Gore had not yet invented the internet or Google. If a reporter needed to research something, he reached for the outdated set of Encyclopedia Britannica in the “morgue,” the newspaper’s library, or strolled — or sprinted, as the case may demand — down the street to the Bridgeport Public Library, where the encyclopedias were more current.
One day in the early ’ 80s, an editor named Joseph A. Owens asked me if I would like to write a column, a form far less rigid than the news writing of the time. I had no idea what a compliment it was, nor that I’d just been handed the keys to the car, even if the car was a 1982 Dodge.
Some 1,500 columns into it now — that’s 1,500 deadlines met — the ride has gone through high times and low, always with someone interesting in the passenger seat: 11 Bridgeport mayors ( counting Joe Ganim twice); a cavalcade of characters from Latin Kings to nuns, politicians, athletes — James Blake, to name one — musicians — Bridgeport- born John Mayer, to name one — and regular folk. Everyone has a story.
It’s hard to describe what a privilege — not to mention kick — it is to write a weekly column for a newspaper.
The ride is coming to an end, though. This column met the penultimate deadline.
Next Sunday will be the final deadline, though the column may resume on a monthly basis in 2021.
There have been a few really sweet assignments. On a junket to Beverly Hills years ago, I met with the mayor and tried to negotiate a “sister city” agreement with Bridgeport. I was too late, the mayor informed me, Beverly Hills already had a “sister city”: Cannes.
I filed columns — and blog posts replete with photos — from the trip of a lifetime: a crosscountry jaunt in 2006 from San Diego to Fairfield in a 1994 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. Those were days when if you were in, say, Colorado, you had to look for signs that said “WiFi available.”
There were horrific times, too, like the 10 days in 1987 at the site of the L’Ambiance Plaza construction accident, the sodden air heavy with the odor of wet cement and death.
And writing about the awful killings of Tim and Kim Donnelly in their Fairfield center jewelry store in 2005.
As luck would have it, our posse was at Mile 25 — not the finish line — of the 2013 Boston Marathon, waiting to cheer on our daughter Julia, when the bombs went off. I wrote about it.
But most of this columnist’s time was spent trudging along the streets of Bridgeport and environs, chatting and nosing around. Curiosity, I think, is what drives reporters and columnists. Let’s just say there was no shortage of material.
There was Dino Benedetto, just for instance, and his German shepherd, Brodie, whom Dino referred to as “Head of Security” at Dino’s gas station at the corner of State and Iranistan in the city’s West Side. The office was equipped with a loud speaker. An agitated Brodie sounded like a prehistoric predator when he barked. If Dino saw me stopped at the light on State Street in front of his station, he’d shout out greetings, suggestions, whatever was on his mind at the moment through the loudspeaker.
I listened to Dino. And to thousands of other people. That’s what reporters have to be good at. Listening. Really listening. Trying to understand the other person’s take on things. Like the Peace Corps or Teach For America, everyone should serve a short stint as a newspaper reporter. It’s fun. But it can be hard.
Next week: the final deadline and some final thoughts.