“Queeny”

Queeny. (Photo by the so-called “old guy” with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100.)

The other day (Wednesday, March 19, 2008) we encountered “Queeny,” Lenore Friend, after parking our CR-V in the tiny shopping-plaza parking-lot where we park when attending the vaunted Canandaigua YMCA.
Queeny was probably my favorite Messenger coworker. She had her feet squarely on the ground, and was a fabulous news-hound.
When I started in January of ‘96, she may have still been just a reporter, although she may have been an editor.
She was elevated to Sunday Editor, and we were still pasting up.
There we’d be at 12:30 a.m. Sunday morning finishing the last non-sports page, which was 2A, because that had the lottery numbers. We’d get the lottery numbers from the office TV (the drawing was at midnight), Queeny would make the file, and then I’d paste it in.
Off would go the final page of the A-section, Queeny could go home, and I could move on to Sports, which had a 2 a.m. deadline so we could print late scores from the west coast — sometimes even scoreboxes, if we got them in time.
Queeny was like that: she wanted the mighty Mezz to be a class act. —And would hang around to make sure it was. (Probably a “Liberila”-Arts major.)
Later, after we finally went electronical, and paste-up was disbanded, we both fell into slightly different roles.
Once I got so I could drive the OCR scanner, I started getting presents from Queeny.
“If you can turn this over quickly,” her note would say; “we can run it on 1B” (page one of the Local section).
About a half-hour later she’d call me up.
“Already in QuickWire,” I’d say. “I left the fax on your keyboard.”
She’d glance my way across the vast newsroom, and there it would be on 1B, as promised.
That was a stringer story. Queeny was cultivating stringers.
The mighty Mezz only had a few reporters; and they only covered news in Canandaigua and perhaps nearby.
News in non-Canandaigua locales was covered by stringers: freelancers not actually in the office.
Queeny had quite a few, but I only remember one: Laurel Wemmet (“WEM-it”), the stringer for West Bloomfield.
Laurel had not yet advanced to e-mail, so we’d get these droll, boring faxes I’d scan. “When’s that girl gonna dump that Smith-Corona?” I’d ask.
Queeny would rewrite Laurel’s report; give it a flashy lede, and convert the turgid prose into something attractive.
I got to see the boring tome Laurel had filed, and what Queeny turned it into.
Later my role changed again: I began doing the Messenger web-site.
I’d call her up: “I thought ‘Prattsburgh’ was spelled with an ‘H.’”
“It is!” she’d shriek.
“Well, I got a photo-caption here that ran in the paper without the ‘H,’ which I can add on the web-site.”
Turns out the New York State Department of Transportation had made town entry signs into “Prattsburgh” without the “H,” and new town businesses were doing the same thing.
But the town platt-maps have the “H,” as do the town post-office and a number of old businesses.
A similar occurrence began when the Messenger bought the Post weeklies. They had a freelancer named “Cynthia Bassett.”
Some Messenger editor runs a Bassett story through their spellcheck, which of course throws out “Bassett.”
The editor promptly changes “Bassett” to “Basset” (as in basset-hound).
Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth; poor Cynthia had her name changed.
Of course all the Posties knew, so this horrible faux-pas was passed along. Who knows how many times I had to fix her name on the web-site?
“Hey, thanks for the tip!” Queeny said, as we walked up and she rolled down her window.
About a week before, Linda and I had been driving 5&20 toward the YMCA, and passed a giant auction of farm-equipment. 89 bazilyun cars and pickups were parked on the shoulder.
So I called the all-powerful Tim Belknap, City-Editor at the mighty Mezz, and noted same.
“Don’t know as it will amount to anything, but if the huge Lusk Farm has been sold, it’s the end of an era,” I said.
“Ya mean that phonecall prompted that story last Sunday about growing land values?”
“Yep. We sent a photographer, but didn’t run anything.”
(Turns out the Lusk Farm had been sold to another farm.)

RE: “‘Old guy’ with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100.......” —My macho, blowhard brother-from-Boston, who is 13 years younger than me, calls me “the old guy” as a put-down (I also am the oldest). I also am loudly excoriated by all my siblings for preferring a professional camera (like the Nikon D100) instead of a point-and-shoot. This is because I long ago sold photos to nationally published magazines.

“Queeny” because she was the so-called queen of the newsroom. She fired a guy because he wasn’t doing anything.

“The CR-V” is our 2003 Honda CR-V SUV.

The “Messenger” (“mighty Mezz”) is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over two years ago. Best job I ever had.

RE: “Paste-up” versus “electronical:” —With “paste-up” the newspaper pages were each pasted up on cardboard page dummies, which were then photographed generating giant negatives that were used to burn printing-plates of each page. “Electronical” page generation was done in a computer, and each page was then sent to an image-setter that generated the huge negatives for plate burning.

RE: “Probably a “Liberila”-Arts major........” —My blowhard brother-from-Boston loudly insists that all liberal-arts majors are reprehensible and stupid — unlike him, who majored in Engineering. (This is because I’m a History major.) —He also loudly insists “liberal” is spelled “liberila” (earlier it was “liberial”).

An “OCR scanner” is an Optical Character Recognition scanner; a scanner that can generate a text-file of the document it scanned. Faxes were fairly messy — the OCR scanner would mis-scan some; although a spellcheck often threw out the mis-scans.

“QuickWire” is the software application we saved everything in.

“Lede” is newspaperese for the lead sentence or paragraph of a story. “Ledes” had to attract the reader, which meant they couldn’t be droll.

RE: “Messenger bought the Post weeklies.......” —At first it was only the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, but then all the Post-weeklies went up for sale when their head-honcho retired; he sold everything to the Messenger. It became MessengerPost Newspapers.

“Linda” is my wife of 40+ years.

“5&20” is the main east-west road through our area; State Route 5 and U.S. Route 20, both on the same road. 5&20 is just south of where we live.

RE: “The all-powerful Tim Belknap.......” —Tim Belknap is an editor at Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked; one of about seven. I once posted something by Belknap, and my brother-in-Boston loudly claimed Belknap was the whole and onliest reason the Messenger was so reprehensible; unaware the paper has at least seven editors, and Belknap is toward the bottom. Belknap like me is a car-guy, so we continue to keep in contact.