By Charles Melton
Melton’s Musings
I remember listening to the old-timers tell stories about how things used to be when they popped in for a cup of coffee and to check the day’s grain prices during my summers working at the grain elevator just up the road in Bavaria, Kan.. I never dreamed that I’d become just like them, though. But here I am getting ready to tell stories about how newsrooms used to be.
The first newsroom I remember is the one in Cedar Park, Texas, where my grandfather was editor of the Hill Country News back in the early 1980s, and as a 6- or 7-year-old kid, I thought it was cool, but it didn’t exactly set my world on fire either.
A little more than a decade later, I found one that did: the Texas Tech University Daily newsroom in the Journalism Building just behind the Mass Communications building in Lubbock, Texas. That building gave birth to this going on 30-plus-year journey in communications in one form or another that continues even though I’m “retired” these days.
The only thing I remember about the first month as the UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences, College of Engineering, and College of Architecture reporter was wondering if I’d ever write fast enough to meet deadline. Having your story in by 4 p.m. without the luxury of a cell phone, email, or personal laptop seemed impossible initially, but I soon found the speed required to meet deadline.
The news staff and production crew holed up on the second floor of the building, while the advertising staff and administrative staff had the first floor, and the photographers did their work in the basement, because it was the only place dark enough to properly develop photos in a darkroom. Did I mention that the building is haunted? Haunted by all those who toiled meeting deadlines over the decades of producing great editions of the UD.
Although indoor smoking had been banned years before I came on staff, there were times when you could catch the faint smell of Pall Malls and Marlboro Lights seeping from the walls of the newsroom. If your nose was sensitive enough, you could pick out a few hints of a good cigar or two. Maybe even one my grandfather smoked because he was the last student-elected editor of the Texas Tech student newspaper before World War II.
Daily production at the UD was far more mechanical and labor intensive than it is here at The Hutchinson Tribune. Pica poles, X-Acto knives, beeswax, cropping tools, Macs, and the Superman booth where we logged any long distance calls we made, all played important roles in helping us get the paper out before midnight Sunday through Thursday nights. Spot color and full-color pages when an advertiser forked out the dough for them meant those pages had to go early, and coordination had to be made between the newsroom, photography staff, production staff and press crew to ensure we made deadline.
During my year as copy editor of the UD, I was the “Hey, can you go cover this and get it done for tomorrow’s edition” guy thanks in large part to my versatility as a reporter, who could go from writing about the price of cotton to covering down on a Board of Regents meeting to covering a midweek Texas Tech baseball game and never miss a beat or a deadline. I even delivered papers at 4 a.m. my last year in Lubbock. I’ll save the stories about the strange things that you see on a college campus in the wee hours of the morning for another column.
At the time, I didn’t realize how priceless those days were with Megan Clark, Amy Osmulski, Laura Hipp, Carrie Killman, Brent Ross, Gary “Boom Boom” Black, Linda Carriger, Darrel Thomas, Jason Lockwood, April Castro, Arni Sribhen, Brent Dirks, Chris Parry, Sebastian Kitchen, Laura Hensley, Kent Best, Gina Augustini, Carla McKeown, and countless others whose names are on the tip of my tongue but I can’t quite remember them were, but I damn sure do now. All of us have gone on to do great things since those days, and it doesn’t seem like it’s been 30 years ago that we were proud UDers. We’re still proud UDers; we’re just a little older now.
Maybe that’s why I appreciate more than most just being able to sit here in The Tribune office, watching cars go up and down Main Street in Hutchinson as I write this column on New Year’s Eve, just letting the words flow and looking forward to all the wonderful people, places and things I’ll get to cover this year.
Charles Melton is the news editor of The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at charles@hutchtribune.com.