BossMan

BossMan is leaving the mighty Mezz, thus ending a long and storied career, that began long before my relationship.
BossMan is Robert Matson (Houghton 1980), Executive Editor of the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper.
He’s leaving to become head-honcho of Public Relations at Finger Lakes Community College near Canandaigua.
BossMan started as a reporter back when the newspaper was owned independently by the Ewing (“YEW-ing”) family, and George Ewing Sr., was head-honcho.
The Ewings sold, and now the Messenger is owned by Gatehouse Publications.
When BossMan started, in fact when I started, the Messenger was just a small daily newspaper in Canandaigua; but since then it bought the Post weeklies, and built new offices.

—1) My relationship with the mighty Mezz began when Rochester Rehabilitation arranged a post-stroke interview to consider my working there as an unpaid intern.
The reason newspaper-work was suggested was because of my doing my bus-union’s “282-News.”
By then Matson was Executive Editor, and I interviewed with him.
I’ll never forget his comment “seems normal to me.”
This was despite any stroke-effects I may not have been aware of.
Shortly after I began I was given their weekly Community-Page by Editor Kathy Hovis (“HO-vis”).
The Community-Page was much like the 282-News, except I was paginating with Quark instead of Word.
Quark was much better.
Kathy was also allowing me to exercise editorial judgment.
To me this was a tremendous leap on their part.
Kathy would go on vacation, and the page was mine.
Kathy moved on, and the Community-Page might have been delegated to someone else — or vaporized (I forget).

—2) My employment began about two years after the internship, but was probably more Joy Daggett than Matson.
Joy needed another paste-up person — one was leaving — and I said “I bet I could do that.”
For a couple years I did paste-up, and apparently recovered at the same time. (E.g. I was no longer being cabbed to the Messenger — I got my Driver’s-License back.)
But I got doing beyond paste-up; mainly ‘pyooter-functions allied to paste-up.
We also began paginating the Sunday Stock-Pages, using an Associated-Press feed over a modem.
I would come in Saturday afternoon around 4 p.m., and do the Stock-Pages.
I’d hang around until 2 a.m. when the Sunday newspaper started rolling off the presses; so I could stop them if something was grievously wrong.
“STOP THE PRESSES,” I’d yell. “There’s a mug-shot smack in the middle of a story!”
We were also doing color-separations for the front pages.
Those seps came from our cranky old PC, that frequently needed rebooting.
I also got so I could reboot the mainframe. It would hang, and need to be rebooted.
The color seps also had to be registered to the pasted-up pages to make sure nothing obscured.
“Whoa,” I’d yell. “This pik is stepping on the copy. All color seps need to be resent.”
A page-editor would look at my find and dicker (i.e. relocate and/or resize the picture).
Finally I allowed to Joy I thought I could do OCR scanning, and she thought I could too.
So she showed me how, and I began figuring it out.

—3) The new offices were built, and the Messenger ‘pyooterized.
With that, paste-up was disbanded, and a few who had done that departed.
But not me.
I had OCR scanning to do.
The Executive Vice-President was fixing to lay me off, but I was giving Matson one-to-three Letters-to-the-Editor per day.
I also was OCR scanning a slew of other stuff.
A stringer-story would appear, and “Do you think you could scan this so we could run it today?”
Drop everything! Boom-zoom. “Here it is.”
So I think Matson interceded. “Why would I ever want to lay off this guy? He’s giving me reams of copy.”
I later went on to do the daily obituaries — a ‘pyooter function I could do with Quark.
Boom-zoom. Ready-to-run!
They also started me doing the Weather-Almanac info: sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset.
I was doing it from a Farmer’s Almanac, and thought it was imprecise.
One day I came out of our house, and said “what’s that moon doing up there? I had it setting four hours ago.”
So I Googled celestial events, and came up with the Naval Observatory site, with events for Canandaigua.
BossMan was impressed.
At last the Weather-Almanac was right; more than just filler.
No one had ever blown it in before, but “what’s that moon doing up there?”

—4) BossMan’s most memorable act was almost doubling my pay-rate so I could get off Social-Security Disability.
SSDI limited my monthly income, so an increase in hours meant a large reduction in income.
Matson wanted to increase my hours, but SSDI made that impossible.
So finally, “What would it take to get off SSDI and go full-time?” BossMan asked.
An increase to my pay equal to what I was getting per month from Social-Security divided by the average number of hours in a month.
So we figured out what pay-rate that would require, and it almost doubled my pay-rate.
“Okay, we’ll do it!” BossMan said.
The people at Social-Security were completely buffaloed. Never before had anyone appeared before them wanting to discontinue SSDI.
But that’s what we did. To me this was an incredible leap on BossMan’s part.
I did full-time at the mighty Mezz for at least three more years — probably more.
During that time I set up a new system for doing the daily stocks, wrote various computer macros that streamlined functions, and started computer filing stuff that repeated so we didn’t have to retype it.
I also became part of the Messenger’s technical geeks, I suppose because I was more-or-less ‘pyooter-savvy.
I began doing the newspaper’s web-site: iterations two and three. (I think they are now on iteration number-five.)
Iteration three incorporated all the Post sub-sites, which was what I was doing at first.
But then the webmaster and I swapped, and he began doing the Post sub-sites, and I began doing the Messenger site.
It was a bucking-bronco. Often our web-service would crash mightily in flames (muck up, or worse yet lose our copy entirely), but that sucker was flyin’ or else. It better fly; that thing reflected my input. It also was our Internet face.

So now Matson is leaving. I sure hope without him that newspaper can be the class-act it was.
The fact he had the moxie to take on a stroke-survivor leaves me in awe.

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

“Houghton” is Houghton College in western New York, from where I graduated with a BA in 1966. I’ve never regretted it, although I didn’t graduate with their approval. Houghton is a religious liberal-arts college.

The “Post weeklies” were about nine suburban weekly newspapers from Post Publications. When the owner retired he sold Post Publications to the Messenger.

I had a stroke October 26, 1993, and did out-patient post-stroke rehabilitation at Rochester Rehabilitation.

For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY. We employees were unionized in the nationwide Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 282 thereof. During my final year at Transit I did a voluntary union newsletter called the “282-News” that caused weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth among Transit management. It was great fun; and I did it with Microsoft Word — although it required a lot of time.

“Quark and Microsoft Word” are both computer word-processers, although Quark is far more involved, and can be used to generate actual newspaper pages. “Pagination” was the actual generation of a page in a computer. “Paste-up” is attaching waxed text-gallies (and pictures) to a page-dummy, which is then photographed when complete, to make a large negative a printing-plate can be made from (“burned”). —Paste-up was much more antique than total computerization. Better yet is direct-to-plate (direct from computer to printing-plate), but such technology is incredibly costly. The Messenger was generating newspaper pages in a computer, and then sending those pages to the large negatives printing-plates could be burned from.

RE: “Cabbed to the Messenger......” —Because of my stroke, I was unable to drive; I no longer had my driver’s license. To get to the Messenger at first, I used livery services.

“Color-separations” (“seps”) are negatives for color inks — the Messenger used four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (“CMYK”). —The color seps at that time were computer generated, but the black was pasted up. (For that reason, they had to be registered on a light-table to make sure all were in alignment [e.g. the pasted-up copy wasn’t stepping on a picture].)

A “PC” is the Personal-Computer most everyone has these days; a Windows PC. The “mainframe” was our old monster from days of yore; a computer, but not what they are nowadays.

“OCR scanning” is Optical-Character-Recognition scanning, generating a text file from a computer-scanned document. A text-document is scanned, and computer software recognizes the fonts/letters therein, generating a text file.

A “stringer” is a reporter that doesn’t actually work at the newspaper’s offices — they were usually freelancers.

RE: “Three more years — probably more.....” —I was employed by the Messenger almost 10 years, then retired.

A “computer macro” is a recorded computer function, like typing, that performs that computer function when activated; a tiny program.

RE: “Sub-sites.......” —Each Post paper had its own sub-site that was part of the overall MessengerPost web-site. The Daily-Messenger site was also a sub-site.