Homage to “Boss-man”

Bob Matson.

A friend of mine suggested an “assignment.”
As a retiree I don’t normally take on “assignments.”
Anyone who follows this blog knows I just let let it flow.
My beat, as it were, is anything and everything; whatever comes to my head.
An “assignment” is to start “shoveling” — what I call writing, just slinging words together — with no phrases already in my head.
The assignment is to write a paean to the late Bob Matson, who died of a heart-attack last week.
Matson was Executive-Editor of the Messenger newspaper while I was there.
Yrs trly is a stroke-survivor, October 26th, 1993.
Prior to my stroke I drove large transit buses for Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and environs.
It was a stupid, meaningless job that paid well.
It was supposed to be only temporary, but I did it for 16 & 1/2 years.
There also was the joy of mastering operation of large motor-vehicles.
Operation had to be just so.
I used to say you were always driving the back-end.
The front-wheels steered, but were 33 feet ahead on the unsteered back wheels, which crabbed outside the fronts in turns.
You were always steering your bus to make sure the back-end didn’t hit anything — like a curb, telephone-pole, or car.
Large trucks do the same thing; especially tractor-trailers.
A car isn’t like that. Its unsteered back-end crabs, but not by much.
The wheelbase is short enough you can get away with not obsessing about where the back-end is.
But not if the wheelbase is 33 feet.
During what ended up being my final year at Transit, I fell into doing a voluntary newsletter for my bus-union.
I did it on my computer with Microsoft Word®.
It was great fun, and read by local politicians.
Those politicians funded Transit. For once the employee story was getting followed by politicians, not just the Transit management sugar-coating.
After my stroke my rehabilitation wanted to get me a job.
They wanted to return me to bus-driving, but I suggested journalism based on the fun I had doing my newsletter.
So they arranged an interview with Matson at the Messenger to take me on as an unpaid intern.
“Seems normal to me!” said Matson, despite my being a sputtering wreck.
So Matson had the moxie to take me on, when anyone else would have probably deferred — some did.
I always thought it probably helped we both graduated the same college, Houghton College south of Rochester.
Matson in 1980, me in 1966.
No matter how wonky I was, I’d have Houghton’s values, namely get it right.
Recovery from my stroke became miraculous, although I’ve always felt it was Matson taking me on.
Eventually I was hired by the Messenger; that was February of 1996.
It ended up being the best job I ever had — although I was always comparing it to Transit, which was horrible.
I first was in “paste-up,” before the newspaper computerized.
This lasted a couple years, although I always was taking on technical challenges allied with computerization.
When the newspaper computerized I gravitated toward it.
I learned how to OCR-scan stuff.
An Executive Vice-President was fixing to lay me off, but Matson intervened.
“Why would I ever wanna do that?” he asked. “He’s giving me two or three Letters-to-the-Editor per day.”
All OCR-scanned.
Later Matson wanted me to work more, but I couldn’t afford it.
I was collecting Social-Security Disability, and they had an income-limit.
Increased hours meant no more SSDI.
“So how much more per week would it take to offset your SSDI?” Matson asked.
He was in effect doubling my wage-rate during a pay-freeze.
Matson eventually quit the Messenger, although after I retired.
He became Public-Relations head-honcho for Finger Lakes Community College.
And now he’s gone, a great tragedy.
I affectionaly called him “Boss-Man.”

• “Transit” is Regional Transit Service.
• “Paste-up” is pasting galleys of copy to cardboard page-dummies a large camera would photograph to make negatives a printing-plate could be “burned” from. Computerization replaced all that.
• “OCR-scanning” (optical-character-recognition) is to scan a text-document (like a letter). The OCR software then “reads” the document and converts it into a computer text-file. (Most Letters-to-the-Editor we received were off word-processors, and could be OCR scanned. Toward the end, Letters-to-the-Editor were e-mailed; quicker yet — but by then I was doing the Messenger web-site.)
• “Boss-Man” comes from Transit. Various bus-drivers called people in management “Boss-Man” as a put-down.