Memories of Marcy Street: The story continues
One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the red rug in my father’s office upstairs at 202 E. Marcy St. while he sat at his desk and talked on the phone. I must have been drawing pictures on a tablet, because I didn’t learn to write until much later.
There were only two offices upstairs. The smallest one was occupied by my father’s secretary, Mrs. Ruth Ormsbee. Nobody ever called her Ruth. She was an efficient and frightening person. She organized him, took dictation and guarded his privacy.
My father’s office had dark green walls, a dark red carpet and antique mahogany furniture. I learned later that employees had an explanation about why the carpet in his office was red: He fired so many editors and general managers there.
My first paid job at the newspaper was washing the floor-to-ceiling cabinets behind the classified advertising desk. The printing press was in the back of the building and everything, everywhere, was covered in ink. In one of the cabinets, I found a World War II commendation for Gene Piatt, the head pressman.
The newsroom was in the northeast part of the building, near the front. I don’t remember much about it from when I was a little girl, except that it was messy. Tony Hillerman worked there as editor. We had his desk for years; in preparation for the move, I gave it to his biographer, James McGrath Morris, who plans to auction it for charity.
In the center of the building were the linotype machines. I remember them being noisy and big. One of the linotype operators who lived in Las Truchas took my family to a penitente tinieblas service there during Holy Week.
Also, in the center of the building was where the compositors melted lead to make impressions for the printing press plates.
The press was in the rear of the building. I loved the loud, rhythmic sounds it made and loved the smell of ink.
There was a circulation fleet of station wagon-sized vans. They traveled to all parts of Northern New Mexico, Antón Chico to Questa.
Later, when I was a teenager, I worked with Dida Sisneros in the accounting department processing legal advertisements. We had a state
of-the-art computer that was larger than my father’s secretary’s office. Her name was Faye Moats, and everybody called her Faye. Daily I walked to the post office on Federal Place and collected the mail. I also took the bank deposits to First National on the Plaza, walking beneath the windows of the county jail, where the prisoners waved at me from behind bars on the second story.
By that time, there were no more linotype machines. The composing room consisted of banks holders where the compositors pasted up the papers. They photographed the pages on an enormous camera in a darkroom.
There was a revolving black metal door to go through to get to the press, which employees called “the tunnel of love.” It was a man’s world at the back of the building. I remember calendars with nude models, the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke.
After graduation I worked in the newsroom, which looked out over Marcy Street. The paper still published in the afternoon. I drove to work very early in the morning. I had a brand new blue Ford Mustang that my father gave me for graduation. The heater never worked, and I would arrive at Marcy Street very cold. My job was to strip the teletype machine, then decide on the wire stories and photos to run on Page A-2.
My father bought a new Goss Community press while I was in college. He had seen a demonstration model at a newspaper convention in New Orleans and bought a new press on the spot.
When my father sold The New Mexican to Gannett, he hosted a party for the new owners at a restaurant near the Roundhouse and required me to go. I was miserable. Then I came down with the flu and was so sick that I had hallucinations.
Gannett started the Empty Stocking Fund, became a nonunion shop, took the newspaper to morning and lost most of its market to the Albuquerque Journal and Santa Fe Reporter.
My father sued Gannett for breach of contract, as they decimated the newsroom as they had promised not to do and refused to endorse his friend Bruce King for governor. After a 13-week trial, his attorney Victor Marshall won the paper back for him.
By that time, the building was a mess, suffering from years of deferred maintenance. I remodeled it in the early 2000s after my father died, but after staff reductions in 2008 and the COVID-19 work-at-home trend, the building turned out to be too big.
I will miss the building where I grew up. But like my husband Meade tells me often, “Newspapers aren’t about buildings. They are about people.” The New Mexican is its staff, readers, advertisers and those public servants we are always watching like a hawk.