The best job in town:
Columnist Shelley Fralic looks back at the day she was hired by The Sun and how that clerical job morphed into a journalism career that changed her life.
IWhen city editor Jack Brooks offered me a summer reporting internship in 1979, I couldn’t believe my luck, and when managing editor Bruce Larsen offered me a full- time job that fall on the condition that I would rotate among various editorial departments, starting in sports, I told him I’d be happy to do windows, too.
was 22 years old, had a nine-month-old son and family finances that were desperately in need of an infusion to keep the bill collectors at bay. So, in September of 1975, I answered a newspaper advertisement for a part- time clerical position in the human resources department at Pacific Press and headed down to Sixth and Granville for an interview.
The offer was two nights a week working with the company nurse, and thrilled as I was to get the job, I couldn’t have possibly imagined the places it would take me, the people I would meet, or the legacy I would become part of.
I soon got to know the pressmen and compositors and janitors and newsroom characters who prowled the darkened building after hours, and who would come to visit us “girls” on the first floor on their way to an assignment or between-editions refreshments at the Vancouver Press Club across the street.
I came to love the smell of the ink, the rumbling of the presses in the basement and the thud of the bundled newspapers landing in the trucks lined up in the loading dock. I would sneak off every shift to the first- floor viewing window that overlooked the press room to watch, spellbound, as the newspapers flew off the massive Goss Headliner letter presses.
At some point, I don’t exactly recall when, it hit me: I needed to be part of that, needed to be working on the third floor in The Vancouver Sun newsroom ( it was the paper my parents subscribed to, so the other title coming off those presses, The Province, was not an option) alongside all those clearly capricious scribes who drank and smoked and wrote amazing stories and made two years in a local journalism school seem a rather small sacrifice.
When city editor Jack Brooks offered me a summer reporting internship in 1979, I couldn’t believe my luck. And when managing editor Bruce Larsen offered me a full- time job that fall on the condition I rotate among various editorial departments, starting in sports, I told him I’d be happy to do windows, too.
Who knew that 33 years later I’d still be at The Vancouver Sun, or that I would spend more than half my life in that newsroom, or that it would be — without question — the best job I didn’t know I wanted.
How to describe that exhilarating chaotic first day, star- struck as the greats such as Denny Boyd and Allan Fotheringham and Marjorie Nichols and Moira Farrow wandered about; and being scared spitless by editors hollering profanities and threatening unforgiving deadlines; and by labour reporter George Dobie, who told me to keep my back to the wall; and by the vaunted chain- smoking Dave Stockand, whose typewriter and desk I was using, and who left a small fire for me in his wastepaper basket.