People are different, jobs are different, and times change. But for what it’s worth, some of my most distinguished contemporaries as science writers in the 1960 and 1970s had academic backgrounds in liberal arts and journalism rather than science.

The late Howard Simons of The Washington Post earned a B.A. in English from Union College and a master’s in journalism from Columbia before going to work as a reporter at Science Service. That led to a job as science writer at the Post, where he eventually was promoted to managing editor. He played a key role in the newspaper’s coverage of Watergate, which a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and when he retired he was named to head the Nieman Foundation. When I succeeded him as a science writer, he taught me invaluable tricks such as scanning the proofs of scientific journals for discoveries that would interest a lay audience and then phoning the authors to get them to tell the stories in English. The key phrase would be: “In an article in Nature [or whatever] and in an interview with The Washington Post, so-and-so described . . . ” This locution protected the researcher because he or she wasn’t going public in advance of peer review, and it freed the reporter from the constraints of scientific jargon. (As it happened, my last science course had been in high school, but I found most researchers willing and able to make their findings accessible to the lay public.)

When I was sent to cover a NASA space mission, Albert Sehlstedt Jr. of The Baltimore Sun was on hand to teach me another memorable lesson: Don’t be afraid to ask a dumb question. (It is the answers that matter.) Al had been a police reporter and night rewrite man for the Sun.

John Noble Wilford of The New York Times, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his science writing, earned a B.S. from the University of Tennessee—but it was in journalism. He went on to earn an M.A. in political science from Syracuse University.

Another contemporary was Victor Cohn, who became the dean of science and medical writers. I don’t know what he studied at the University of Minnesota, but he was editor of the school newspaper before going into the Navy, which first assigned him to write about technology. Upon discharge he went to work for the Minneapolis Tribune, which gave him the university beat—which he deftly segued from academic affairs into a science/medical beat.

The International Typographical Union (ITU) was a craft union, with its own practices and pride. Members had become journeymen after a long apprenticeship. Generically known as printers, they comprised typographers (who set type), compositors (who composed pages from this type), and proofreaders (whose job was to compare the type after it was set to the original copy). As a management negotiator at The Washington Post once explained to a Newspaper Guild bargaining committee, “printers believe people are fungible.” (He was a lawyer, using the lawyer’s term for interchangeable commodities like oil or wheat.) ITU members could show up at a shop where they had never worked before and expect to be hired if there was work for them. I once heard one ITU member who was ticked off at a Washington Post foreman say something to the effect of, “I don’t need this. As long as I’ve got that card in my pocket I can walk over to the Star.” By the same standard, if the work was in ITU jurisdiction nobody else had better do it. Traditionally if a makeup editor (who would not be an ITU member) touched type it was supposed to be thrown away. Although I never saw that done, I made it a point not to touch their type.

The American Newspaper Guild followed the industrial union pattern. Although its founder, Heywood Broun, was a writer, the Guild tried to organize everybody in the plant who wasn’t already in a craft. I have left the fact off my résumé in recent years but I used to be active in the Guild, as shop steward, Washington Post unit chairman and president of the local Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild.

The toughest Post employees for us to organize were in classified ad sales. The outside classified salesmen were men who tended to think of themselves as entrepreneurs and were likely to shy away from the union unless they thought they were in danger of being fired, whereupon they would leap aboard, and the inside classified sales force tended to be women who were used to being paid less than men and did not grasp our theory that they should be paid the same as the outside sales reps because they were doing the same thing. (By the way, most of them had regular clients just as the men did; the work of those who took random calls from people like you and me who might want to sell a car or a boat was called “voluntary” and was customarily an entry-level job.)

The easiest recruiting that I recall came once when I was either unit chairman or local president. The janitors who swept up the composing room had decertified their union on grounds it was collecting their dues while doing nothing for them. For some reason I don’t recall, either the other unions or the company, or both, didn’t want to leave them hanging. Their natural home would have been the ITU, whose members were all around them, but it didn’t want them. The obvious reason was that the ITU was a craft union to which the janitors had no entitlement. A less obvious reason may have been that the janitors were all African American and although the ITU chapel had some black members most were white. The Guild, however, was an industrial union which theoretically subscribed to industrial democracy even though the writers and editors actually tended to look down on everyone else, including the “girls” in classified sales and their own bosses. So the Guild signed up the janitors. They had just joined the union when I was called to the composing room because they had staged an informal work stoppage. The janitors were refusing to tend the huge furnace where scrap lead from the hell boxes was melted down to be used over again in the linotype machines. Neal Greenwald, an assistant production manager, explained that he wanted me to intercede because the work needed to be done and he couldn’t have it stopped. The janitors explained that the printers had a habit of throwing paper, cigarette packs and whatnot into the hell boxes, and when thrown into the furnace it would burst into flame. One of them had just escaped serious burns. Their position seemed reasonable to me, I told Mr. Greenwald, and I stuck to my position despite his argument that the old janitors’ union would have just ordered them back to work (which of course was one of the reasons it had been decertified and the Guild picked them up as members). The composing room adopted more careful safety practices thereafter, and the janitors were happy they had signed up with the Guild. One served on a later bargaining committee.

Copyright 2010, J.V. Reistrup

At first glance the image is almost repellent, as if these bodies are being treated with disrespect. The men alongside are trudging down the mountain road in “route step,” rather than marching in cadence, and they appear casual. One has a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. But the photo tells a deeper story: The men on their feet are bringing out their dead after a setback that could have become a disaster. Suddenly surrounded by Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir, the First Marine Division fought its way out. Survivors called themselves the Chosin Few.

It is easy to imagine other troops in this situation tossing out the bodies and jumping on the vehicles so they could ride instead. These men have had no such thoughts. They never doubted that their role was to slog alongside while their dead comrades ride. Marines bring out their dead.

In its own way, the picture is as iconic as Joe Rosenthal’s famous photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. But that image is a celebration of triumph. This one is a tribute to loyalty. These Marines are paying the highest imaginable price to make good on their motto: Semper Fidelis, “Always Faithful.” As a retired Navy chief petty officer said of the Marines at a World War II commemoration I was once assigned to cover, “They have never, ever let you down, and they never, ever will.”

Beneath the surface of David Douglas Duncan’s striking picture of fidelity is yet another lesson: Heroism vindicates only itself. It cannot justify foolish policy. The men in the photo were forced to fight their way out of an untenable position into which their top commanders put them. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur later rationalized his decision to push up to the border of China in the face of warnings the Chinese would respond in force. “I myself felt we had reached up, sprung the Red trap, and escaped it,” he wrote in his Reminiscences.

Sometimes it happens that warriors leave something lasting behind — perhaps a monument like those scattered all around Gettysburg, perhaps the unadorned memory of their heroism. The spot at Thermopylae where 300 Spartans kept hordes of Persians away from Greece was marked by a simple stone that said, in translation, “Go and tell the Spartans, you stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”

In the tradition of Sparta, that inscription was succinct. By contrast, citizens of the rival city-state, Athens, traditionally honored their heroes with lengthy funeral orations. The historian Thucydides wrote down one he attributed to the Athenian leader Pericles after one of the first battles of the Peloponnesian wars in which Athens and Sparta fought for supremacy in their peninsula. The speech survives as a stirring reminder of the duty of Athenians to their city-state and to their fallen.

But often the efforts of heroes leave little trace. Two centuries after Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon and his squad of Marines stormed the shores of Tripoli to thwart the Barbary pirates, Muammar Qaddafi runs Libya and pirates again prey upon international shipping. The banana republics where Marine hero Smedley Butler won two Medals of Honor, before concluding “War Is A Racket,” still seem restive. The Japanese flag again flies over Iwo Jima.

The frustrating and inconclusive conflict in Korea falls somewhere in between these examples. That country today is divided, as it was before the war began. For me, however, this photo offers a final, personal lesson: If it were not for troops like these, a woman who turned out to be my daughter-in-law would still be over there, at the mercy of North Korea’s Dear Leader, and two of my grandchildren would not even exist.

I hope they grow up to appreciate the Chosin Few.

Copyright 2009, J.V. Reistrup

The assignment to produce two differing design “comps,” or mockups, for our own website projects gave me the chance to try putting the dominant elements on both the right-hand and left-hand side of the page. Other than that, they have many elements in common:

Color scheme: I am my own client for this page, so I started with a personal preference for using both blues and greens in my design. I needed a contrasting tan to depict the file folders to enclose my writing and photos, so using a website called colorschemedesigner.com I picked a scheme making use of a triad of colors, rather than complementary colors. The scheme includes both bright and cool greens and blues along with some warmer browns. (You have to click on the link to get it; the “Snapshot” you see when the mouse passes over it is different.)

Another common element is the content. I wanted the work I produce to be the main focus, and although lots of web pages hint at file-folder-like tabs, as a writer and editor displaying my work I wanted to make an explicit reference to manila file folders. On the first mockup, the “Photos” folder is open to show a stand-alone photo with caption, a pair of young ospreys on a channel marker. On the second mockup, the “Features” folder is open to show the headline and first paragraph of a magazine article I wrote about unseen but important things under the Chesapeake Bay, such as footings for the Bay Bridge. It is illustrated by a photo I took while passing under the two spans.

I plan for the secondary element on each of these possible home pages to be a brief bio of myself illustrated by a head shot.

I could have used either blue or green for the footer across the bottom of the page, where the links for navigating the site go, but I picked green for a couple of reasons. One is that it picks up the color of the strip of shoreline behind the ospreys; another is that I like the contrast. Blue and green aren’t used together that often, except by the Seattle Seahawks — and Mother Nature.

I have long been told that it goes to the right side, and American newspapers generally have followed the practice of putting their top stories on that side of the front page. Inside the paper, advertising buyers coveted the right-hand pages — especially Page 3 — leaving the news department to fill up the left-hand pages. But as I noted in an earlier post, the practice is different in the United Kingdom and other parts of the British Commonwealth. There it is common for the top story to run down the left side of the front page. Who is right? How solid is their evidence?

My mystification was deepened when our instructor referred us to some exemplary websites, listed below:

http://www.markboulton.co.uk/index.php
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/
http://www.playgroundblues.com/
http://blog.criticalwebdesign.co.uk/
http://www.nclud.com/work/
http://www2.jeffcroft.com/
http://www.subtraction.com/
http://alistapart.com
http://unspace.ca/
http://www.designobserver.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/21/60-elegant-and-visually-appealling-designs/

As you can see, some of them — not all from the UK — put the most important material on the left-hand side of the page. Why? Others follow the right-hand rule. Why?

One website on the list follows no discernible rule. Across the top are a couple of strips of artsy, unintelligible stuff. Under them is text divided into three columns of equal width. The only hint the user gets about where he or she is supposed to start is that the size of the text gradually diminishes from left to right. Duh.

Copyright 2009, J.V. Reistrup

My answers:

Looking back, I believe my entire upbringing fed into my previous and current editing jobs. My father would read to me in bed when I was little. My parents later told me I would make him read my favorite story over and over again. It was "Johnny and the Three Goats" (or "Fwee Goats" as they said I pronounced it) on page 96 (nine ee six) of the first volume of a set of children's stories, My Book House. My brother, who was four years older, taught me to read for myself — maybe even before kindergarten — using a flashlight under the covers of our cots in the attic of our summer cottage at the Morningside College music camp where my father taught piano. We were supposed to be asleep. If I recall the title correctly, my first book was The Blue Pony.

As I grew older I worked my way through the My Book House set by myself. I also worked through some, most or all of another set of books, The Book of Knowledge. I started with the fiction — I still seem to recall a Charles Lamb story about how roast pork was discovered by a Chinese farmer whose barn burned up — and later gravitated toward the nonfiction included in the set.

My parents subscribed to The New Yorker and saved every copy, I believe from the first issue, in our attic in Sioux City, Iowa. I would go up there and read them — first the cartoons, later the funny stories, and finally the longer articles. I read the great E.B. White, James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, and even John Hershey’s memorable article on the devastation at Hiroshima. (I also developed the odd temporary trait of not laughing aloud at the funny things as I thumbed through these magazines alone in the attic.) Meanwhile, my parents read Jane Austen to each other, and before we could open our presents on Christmas Eve my father read aloud from Charles Dickens’ tale of Mr. Pickwick’s Christmas, along with the excerpts from the magnificent King James Bible about the birth of Jesus. So I grew up surrounded by, and learning to love, words.

Not surprisingly, I was always good at reading and writing and spelling, and I probably was on the high school paper although I no longer remember that very clearly. Anyway I worked on the Brown Daily Herald when I went to Brown on a scholarship. In my senior year I interviewed for jobs with a bunch of forgettable people and one unforgettable man, the late Leslie Moore. He was the executive editor of the Worcester Telegram & Evening Gazette, which were separate papers them — one morning and one evening. His practice was to make the rounds of the more selective New England colleges every year to recruit fresh, and inexpensive, talent. We immediately clicked and I took a job there for $70 a week.

It was a fine training process and many of its graduates went on to distinguished careers in journalism. We youngsters were assigned to bureaus around Worcester County under senior people who stayed put. They got the plum assignments like covering the Rotary Club luncheons and playing golf with local bigwigs (at least as I recall it) while we young reporters did the heavy lifting because the important things happened at night, like high school basketball games and meetings of the Boards of Selectmen. I was assigned to the Spencer bureau, covering that town and others nearby. We would come back and file our stories for the morning Telegram by teletype and then rewrite them, or at least put a nu lede on them, for the afternoon Gazette. We learned tricks like updating car-crash stories with the lede “Police today are investigating . . .” We would put the Gazette stories outside in an envelope for the Telegram delivery truck drivers to pick up in the early hours and take back to the office. The bureaus also had Speed Graphic cameras, and we were taught to use them and to develop and print our own photos.

It was a thorough grounding. Among things we wrote were obits and wedding stories. Although we did not have to go to weddings and funerals, we did learn how to spell stephanotis, because for some reason all the brides in central Massachusetts carried that plant or flower or whatever it is down the aisle. Les Moore also set up a course in Speedwriting shorthand, which I have found valuable ever since. At some point I got a call from the Gazette State Desk, whose editors told me I produced clean copy and offered me a job on that four-person desk. It involved arriving at the Worcester office at 6 a.m., opening the envelopes from the bureaus, and copy editing and writing headlines for their stories. Also I started to lay out section fronts at the Gazette. I was good at that, too, and after a while I began to fill in on the News Desk, which was a two-man operation on a six-day paper (the Telegram was seven but had a different staff using the same desks at different hours.) Eventually I even filled in as news editor, selecting stories for and laying out page one. By the time I left two years later, Jimmy Lee, a Gazette copy editor and its entertainment columnist, quipped that mine had been the fastest rise since Linc Stoddard was an office boy. Lincoln Stoddard was the son of the publisher.

I think the only time I ever went through a personnel department, known today as Human Resources, was when I decided I wanted to move to Washington and applied at The Washington Post. I got interviews and, again because of my copy-editing skills, I started on the rim of the U-shaped city copy desk, working at night. I then moved to the Business section, later the National, Foreign and Outlook desks, mostly as an editor but doing stints as a reporter, including space and science. My bosses apparently thought I was a better editor than a reporter, because I kept going back to that.

They were probably right. Reporters were characterized in The Boys on the Bus as “shy egomaniacs,” and I suspect that while that may be true of good reporters, good editors are just a bit too shy. Anyway it was skill in handling copy that got me into an opening at the Toronto Star as features editor, and it was from there that I got into management.

Copyright 2010, J.V. Reistrup

Until relatively recently, most newspaper stories were about things that had just happened based on the facts the reporter had just gathered, with the writer looking up the occasional related fact in the library, or “morgue” for dead clips. Speed was paramount in getting stories into the next edition, giving rise to the careers of rewrite men and women. Police reporters, for example, would phone in the facts they had gathered at the police station and people like Harry Gabbett at The Washington Post would bat out a story in time for the next edition. I don’t think Al Lewis of the Post or Jocko Nolan of the Toronto Star ever typed up a story. They literally phoned it in.

Stories requiring deeper reporting were rare and might be disparagingly regarded as “thumbsuckers,” or think pieces. Even then reporters mostly did their own research. David Broder was a rarity at the Post in that he had a researcher even while he was a national reporter in the late 1960s and early 1970s before he became a columnist.

I once served as a de facto, post facto fact checker, though. I was a junior editor on the National Desk at The Washington Post late at night after the first edition had come out. The paper’s top editors had copies delivered to their homes, where they went through them. I sometimes took calls from one or the other of them pointing out necessary corrections, which were dutifully passed along to the composing room. And once I got a call questioning a putative fact cited in an article.

Ben Gilbert, who I think was then deputy managing editor, was calling to challenge the assertion that the length of the mid-ocean ridge was 40,000 miles. That’s impossible, he said, because the diameter of Earth is less than a fifth of that length. So I whipped back to the morgue and looked it up, probably in an encyclopedia in those pre-Google days. I found that the figure was correct because that geological feature wraps around the continents beneath the seas. I triumphantly returned the call.

To the wrong person. Instead of Ben Gilbert, I phoned the managing editor, Al Friendly, and informed him that the length of the mid-ocean ridge was indeed 40,000 miles. He was, of course, baffled.

Copyright 2010, J.V. Reistrup

Underwood

Old-timers at the The Washington Post like Harold Kneeland (Outlook editor) and Edward T. Folliard (White House reporter) stuck with them, and some took them home when they retired and the machines were being replaced. You could touch-type on them, but the old-timers tended to use the first one or two fingers of each hand. It wasn’t really hunt and peck, because they pretty much knew where the keys were and could type amazingly fast, glancing down now and then, but they didn’t use their pinkies or ring fingers.

Royal typewriters like these came into use in the 1960s:

Royal

Both designs had QWERTY keyboards resembling the one on your computer. Each time you struck a key, a bar came up and hit a ribbon that would jump up and down in front of the paper you were typing on. The shift key actually shifted where the key struck; a typical key would have both the capital and lower case letter. If you got out of rhythm and hit two keys at once, they would jam together and you would have to pause to pull them apart. Above the keys and to each side were two spools on which the ribbon would automatically wind back and forth. When it got too worn out you would replace it. If you were typing a document whose appearance was important and made a mistake, you would reach into the little space where the ribbon jumped up and down, either to erase the typo with with a gritty hard rubber eraser or to daub in some whiteout and wait for it to dry until you could resume typing. If you were writing a story, though, you would just backspace, xxx out the error, and go on typing.

IBM Selectrics were the next stage of typewriters, and the worst. Unlike back when the old-timers could cling to their Underwoods to the bitter end, we had to give up our Royals and switch to these monstrosities for technological reasons. We would type stories on four-ply or even six-ply no-carbon-required paper, instead of using carbons, and if I recall correctly the originals were being scanned somewhere, somehow, for some reason. It is a painful memory I evidently have been trying to suppress because of how maddeningly the Selectrics behaved. Instead of hammering at the keys like a real newspaperman you had to touch the keys very delicately or they would goooooooooooo crazzzzzzzzzzzzzyyyyyy and repeat letters ad infinitum. There was a whole bank of typists sequestered behind a glass wall who were hired expressly to operate the Selectrics. (To do what? Take dictation? Retype stuff that came in on real paper? Another almost successfully repressed memory.)

After the Selectrics, it was a blessing when computers were introduced, because for the first time you could do the following:
1. Delete your mistakes or infelicitously worded phrasing instead of tearing out that sheet of paper, throwing it away and starting that page all over again
2. Cut and paste missplaced material electronically instead of literally cutting and pasting or throwing the paper away and starting that page all over again
3. Not sit there and curse while your Selectric went madddddddddddddd — then throwing the paper away and starting all over again

I was at the Toronto Star in the late 1970s when the early waves of computerization came, and to his credit the publisher, Beland Honderich, decided to send some of the more experienced hands to newspapers farther along in the process to see how they were doing it and to report back. I was teamed with Keith Branscombe, the graphics designer, and assigned to visit Newsday and one of the Richmond (VA) dailies. I think the latter was farther along in converting from hot type to cold type, but Newsday was more memorable because management there had hit upon exactly the right psychological approach for introducing new technology. Instead of foisting newfangled equipment on surly and resentful reporters and editors, they simply wheeled up computer terminals beside each. These were hooked into a complete system–except that it didn’t produce any output. Reporters could take notes on the terminals, set up files of sources, etc., but then they would have to turn around and retype (or as we say today, rekeyboard) everything on their Royals or Selectrics or whatever. Pretty soon the staff was agitating for the newfangled system to be hooked up. When it was they could turn their backs on their typewriters forever.

Copyright 2010, J.V. Reistrup

To spike a story was to kill it. A disgruntled conservative journalist named Arnaud de Borchgrave once wrote a book called The Spike to set forth his theory that a cabal of leftwingers had seized control of journalism and were killing righteous reporting like his.

But spikes also had a more benign use. They were where editors stuck copy when they were through with it and didn’t want to mix it up with live copy that they were using or might still use. These were literally spikes — probably big long nails — set in lead from the composing room to weight them down. But in an emergency, you could go down through the stack on the spike and recover what you had put there.

The technique for spiking copy was to grasp it in the palm of your hand and jam it downward on the spike, spreading your fingers so the spike would go between them. The hand that killed the spike belonged to an editor with a palindromic name who worked on the Post foreign desk, Lew Diuguid. One day he grabbed a piece of copy in the palm of his hand and jammed it down on the spike in the accepted manner but neglected to spread his fingers, and he impaled his hand. He survived but the spike didn’t. It was thereafter banned from the Post newsroom, and we threw paper away in more conventional fashion.

We generated a lot of waste paper in those days, because the wire stories and news releases came in on paper instead of electronically. I don’t remember when The Spike disappeared, but I do remember when our waste paper went Hollywood. It would have been between the 1974 publication of the book All the President’s Men and the 1976 release of the movie of the same name starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The movie makers came around to interview Post staff about Watergate, meanwhile building an exact copy of our newsroom out on the west coast. But they were stymied at the effort to replicate the stacks of paper on every reporter’s and editor’s desk. So they asked us to put our waste paper into cardboard boxes beneath our desks. These were regularly collected and sent to California, where our waste paper was arrayed on desks to play its assigned role in the movie. You can see it for yourself.

P.S. Carl Bernstein has had the unique distinction among ink-stained wretches of being portrayed by two major movie stars. The first was Dustin Hoffman, and the second was Jack Nicholson, who was the male lead in Heartburn. That Nora Ephron movie was inspired by her marriage to Bernstein, who at one point threatened to sue her over the depiction but probably forgot about it. He forgot a lot of things in his career, including a car the Post was renting for him and an earlier wife he once left waiting at curbside.

Copyright 2010, J.V. Reistrup