Monday morning dreaming

This morning’s dream was good old Marky-Mark of the Messenger newspaper and I slapping together the final page, the front page, of a Sunday Messenger at midnight the Saturday night before publication.
I don’t recall Marky-Mark ever being Sunday-editor, but he could have been.
This slap-dash process always surprised me as to the extent to which a mere grunt like me could determine the content of that newspaper.
I’m sure page-editors weeding through the blizzard of Associated-Press feeds off “the wire” (how many times did I sweep snow out of that satellite-dish?), were determining the content of that newspaper.
But when the final push came to shove, it wasn’t the dictum of the New York Times that determined the content of that newspaper: “all the news that’s fit to print.”
It was “whatever news fits,” so that in the end it was us paste-up grunts trying to fit everything into a reasonable facsimile of a newspaper.
Our front-page still had two unfilled holes, and I had three AP stories — on galleys.
One story was a slam-dunk fit for one hole; just overlap the white spaces a little.
An AP story could be cut, but a locally-written story (our reporters) couldn’t.
The second hole was small, yet my remaining stories were large.
I lined up one story with a hole, and suggested to Marky-Mark the last two paragraphs could be cut off.
“Do it, Hughsey; I’m goin’ home!”

For almost 10 years after my stroke (I had a stroke October 26, 1993), I worked at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired three years ago. Best job I ever had. “Marky-Mark” is Mark Syverud (“sye-ver-UHD”), an editor there, also retired.

We got our Associated-Press feeds off a satellite. (If it snowed, our dish receiver would fill up, obstructing the feeds.)

“Paste-up” was gluing waxed galleys to cardboard page-dummies, which when completed could be photographed, and the resulting negative used to “burn” a page-size printing-plate.

RE: “Just overlap the white spaces......” —Between the headline and the story-copy was about a quarter-inch of “white space.”