A seat at the horseshoe desk

Easy Does It

Last week, a daily train commute to New York City. This week, welcome to the horseshoe desk. If definitions are your thing, a horseshoe desk is shaped like the letter U. I was one of a half-dozen editors who sat around the outside of the U editing stories from reporters.

Inside the curve of the horseshoe, the executive editor checked our headlines for content and accuracy before suction-tubing them to the typesetters.

The next morning, the newspaper landed on the desks of Wall Street bankers and financial institutions in dozens of capitals all over the world.

We lived and breathed banking news. It took priority over everything else. No comic page, no Dear Abby. The President of the United States hiccupped, so what? The Comptroller of the Currency sneezed, and the headline was so big it was continued on page two.

The staff slept, ate, breathed finance: Bank foreclosures, monetary decisions, Wall Street promotions, executive movements, up, down and sideways.

And so it went for me, this commuter rush for success. We all dressed for success in three-piece conservatively gray or dark blue suits, sharp creases in our immaculately gray or blue trousers, subdued black or pale blue choking neckties showing above our gray, pin-striped vests with silver key chains gleaming from a watch pocket in our vest and properly looped across slim stomachs. Our polished black shoes reflected a mirror image. We spoke in whispers when the need arose to converse. Held board meetings, mimicked bankers, wrote daily accurate stories about them under triple-decker, perfectly centered and balanced headlines.

We wrote our headlines on the latest Underwood typewriters. The headlines fitted perfectly in the column widths. That’s because we used Former Bank President Sued as a model for length under which we typed the real headline to assure a perfect fit between columns.

Larger headlines, we used as a guide McCoy Endorses to make a perfect headline fit. We were always on the lookout for someone named McCoy who was endorsing something and a former bank president who was being sued to reduce the labor demanded of us.

At 12:30 every afternoon, I carried my brown bag lunch of a single peanut butter sandwich, cut in half, never quartered, and two Oreo cookies to Battery Park to seek out a shaded bench with minimum evidence of pigeon and squirrel occupancy.

There I’d enjoy my lunch while angling my body to catch the weakened rays of sun that squeezed between the high-rises before I had to scurry back to my place at the horseshoe desk.

I had been at this conservative newspaper less than a year when rumors began circulating that the rag had been sold, and everyone should be prepared to meet the new editor.

Cue the new editor. He came, he saw, he conquered. The rumor was true. New management, new (how to put this politely) changes?

In a speech the new editor announced he would be working for about a week at each department to decide “possible improvements.” This was my uh-oh.

Mr. Big galloped to the horseshoe desk. The chair next to mine was empty. He sat in it. He shook my hand, introduced himself. That was easy. Or was it?

As the days passed, he would lean over and ask me the count on various type sizes. I told him about the former bank president and the guy named McCoy. Trade secret, I thought, but he was one of us, wasn’t he? I relaxed, until that last lean-over.

I expected a question about headline writing. Instead, he said, “When you come in on Monday, you’re editor-in-chief of the horseshoe desk.”

Moving from outside to inside the U? The seriousness of the thought produced chills. “I’ve been here less than a year,” I confessed. “The fellow over there, 25 years. The guy next to him, 35 years.”

The editor remained bent over a headline. Without looking up, he repeated himself. “Starting Monday, you’re in charge.”

He was serious, no kidding around. I was learning the ropes, and suddenly outranking people twice my age? In charge of them? When I said “but,” the new editor repeated himself. A third time?

Why I hate Mondays, horseshoes, and especially workplace wars.

yrdezdoesit@comcast.net