Best job I ever had!

Class!

On October 26, 1993 I had a stroke.
It suddenly ended my 16&1/2 year career of driving transit bus for Regional Transit Service in Rochester.
During my final year I happened to start a voluntary newsletter for my bus-union.
I was Editor and Publisher, and did a vast quantity of writing for it.
I did it in Microsoft Word® on our first computer, a PC (Windows 3.1).
It was a HUGE amount of work, but great fun.
We had Transit management running ragged.
A friend of mine was circulating that newsletter among local politicians.
For once the local politicos were getting other than the Transit line.
After about a year-and-a-half of post-stroke rehabilitation and recovery, a counselor at Rochester Rehabilitation wondered what I should do for a job.
“Something similar to my newsletter,” I suggested.
So we interviewed at the Daily Messenger newspaper in Canandaigua, where I was taken on as an unpaid intern.
That internship lasted a while, and then an opening occurred in the newspaper’s paste-up department. —The newspaper was still pasted up, not computerized. That’s pasting copy galleys to full-size cardboard page-dummies, and then photographing the whole completed shebang to make a printing plate.
(Later, computerization took out that step, and “paste-up” was disbanded.)
I suggested I could probably do the paste-up job, and they hired me.
George Ewing (“YOU-ing”) Sr. was the head-honcho at that time, and I’m sure my hiring had to pass him.
He hired a stroke-survivor who was severely messed up at first.
But I kept at it almost 10 years, And they kept me.
Best job I ever had!
And now my friend Kathie Meredith says he’s gone.
Meredith retired from the Messenger, where she had been editor of their “Steppin Out” tabloid.
“He was one of the good guys,” she said.
“Yeah,” I thought; “he hired a stroke-survivor.”

• A “PC” is a personal-computer — usually on the Microsoft Windows® operating-system. (But it can use other operating-systems, just not Apple Computers.)