BEST job I ever had

Waterfront on Canandaigua Lake at Onanda Park. (Photo by Lynn Brown.)

“If I were to write anything for this newspaper at all,” I said to Kevin Frisch (same as “fish”), a hippie longhair editor at the Messenger newspaper in Canandaigua.......
“It would be about the fact presidents don’t wear hats.”
“So write it,” Frisch said. Instead of “Don’t be silly. You had a stroke. There is no way you could write.”
So I did, and the Messenger published it as an OpEd piece. Thus beginning the next phase of my recovery after a stroke.
I was still an unpaid intern at that time.

Joy Daggett is at right; her husband Roger is beside her. Joy is the one who hired me for actual paid employ.

Yr Fthfl Srvnt with Severe-head (Mark Syverud) at left.

Peggy Carroll with Steve Circh (“K”). I started with Peggy, and Circh and I would switch the office TV to Teletubbies so we could lob nerf-balls at it. Kenny Carr, who I really didn’t know, is at left. He worked out back.

Kathie Meredith with Chris Goverts. Goverts was office handyman, and I did a lot with Meredith, known by Matson as “the Detail-Queen.”

Two of my all-time favorite people: Syverud and Lenore Friend, both editors. The little boy is probably one of Lenore’s children.

Fabulous Fritz Cermak (left), talking to Elsie Race. I don’t know what Fritz did, but he was great to have around. I think he was Distribution — he worked out back.

Another one of my favorites, Sarah Allen, now Connor, a newsy I occasionally worked with. At right is MaryAnn Gumaer, an office-person.

We attracted police attention. Anne Johnston, at right, was police-reporter at the Messenger, so she and the deputy knew each other. The deputy was doing marine patrol.

The organizers of this shindig: AJ (Anne Johnston) and past reporter Rachel Dewey. Rachel is holding the vaunted “Quote-Book,” full of salient phrases uttered by Messenger staff. —Organization was mainly Anne; Rachel came in at the last minute to help.

I had driven bus 16&1/2 years for Regional Transit Service (RTS), the supplier of transit bus service in Rochester, NY and environs.
My stroke October 26th, 1993 ended it. It was because of an unknown heart-defect, a patent foramen ovale (“PAY-tint four-AY-min oh-VAL-eee”), that has since been repaired.
My entire left side was paralyzed, I was crying constantly, and my speech was monotone gibberish. I was talking way too fast — my timing was ruined.
Bus-driving was supposed to be temporary while I continued searching for employ as a writer (“word-slinger” I call it).
But I stayed with it because the pay was pretty good, and the job wasn’t awful.
As a bus-driver I was pretty much on-my-own, free of office politics. The only danger was our clientele, but that could be avoided by judicious run picking.
Toward the end of what turned out to be my final year, I fell into producing a voluntary newsletter for our bus-union. I was doing it with Word© on our home computer.
Our union more-or-less walked away from it, so it mainly became an outlet for my writing. A fellow union-member passed it out to politicos who funded Transit, and they loved it because I could spin a pretty good tale = my bus-stories.
It was an immense amount of work, but I loved doing it.
I’d scribble my bus-stories on whatever scrap-paper I could find: Transit time-sheets, even the tiny transfer slips we issued to our riders.
It ended up being the house-organ Transit often lacked.
Transit Public-Relations was supposed to publish a bimonthly house-organ, but often failed.
And of course my newsletter was pro union. Those politicos would call Transit Public-Relations wondering about something they read in my newsletter: muggings of bus-drivers, etc.
“What’s going on down there?” they’d ask. “You told us everything was hunky-dory.
“Don’t read that newsletter!” Transit Public-Relations screamed. “It’s written by union activists!” (Gasp!)
My post-stroke rehab wanted to get my job back driving bus.
I wasn’t interested. That newsletter was too much fun. It was the writing I always wanted to so.
So instead of going back to Transit, I was taken to the Daily-Messenger newspaper in Canandaigua to be considered as an unpaid intern.
“Seems okay to me,” said fellow Houghton grad Bob Matson (1980; I’m 1966), Executive Editor, head of the news department.
Despite how messed I was — although I wasn’t costing him anything.
I started with Peggy Carroll, typing “Names and Faces” into their system. Organizations sent us press-releases, which we converted to page-filler.
Of course the newspaper ran as much as possible, since that was what readers wanted.
Then editor Kathy Hovis-Younger learned of my union newsletter, that it was “paginated” in my home computer.
Hovis did the weekly “Community-Page,” the only paginated page in the Messenger at that time.
“Pagination” means generating an entire newspaper page within a personal computer.
For my newsletter I used Microsoft Word®; the newspaper used QuarkXpress® 4.0 I think, on a Windows 486.
Kathy had me try it. “Wow!” I said. “This here Quark runs circles around Word.”
I was assigned the Community-Page.
“Kathy, are you sure you want me doing this? I might crank something that shouldn’t be.”
Off we went. Kathy approved what I did, and when she went on vacation I was on-my-own.
Still unpaid of course.
The above exchange with Frisch took place and my column began.
Soon Messenger photographer Rikki VanCamp was taking a mug-shot to run with my column.
My column wasn’t costing them anything either, but apparently they thought well enough of it to publish it.
It ran once a week until I got the local flag-police upset by saying my dog was more alive than Old Glory.
I rescued my dog first — my flag blew to the ground, and my dog got herself hung on my 5-foot chainlink fence.
I was finally cleared to drive, so was no longer using a cab to get to the Messenger.
The newspaper’s paste-up department was looking to replace one who’d left.
Our newspaper was done an old way. News-galleys from a mainframe computer were waxed and “pasted” to full-size cardboard page dummies.
Complete, the dummy was photographed to make a page-size negative with which to “burn” a printing-plate.
I said to Joy Daggett, the newspaper’s production manager, “I bet I could do that paste-up.”
Did the Mighty Mezz have the moxie to hire a stroke-survivor?
I worked for that newspaper almost 10 years. I’ve said it many times: “BEST job I ever had.”
During that time paste-up was disbanded, and the Messenger went to full pagination within personal computers.
The Messenger also merged a local newspaper chain, and doubled its space by adding on.
My initials are carved into the concrete subfloor under the new entry. Along with many others.
With paste-up disbanded, some left, but I hung around because I was interested in computer-junk.
“I don’t know what he’s doing, but this macro is saving me hours.”
Before I retired I was doing the newspaper’s website, which I figured out on my own.
“Grady,” (see blurb at right); “yer doing too many photos.”
“It’s a visual medium,” I’d say. “10-15 minutes per picture; easy as pie!”
After I retired the Messenger had to transfer ownership.
It was owned since 1956 by George Ewing, Sr. (“you-ing”). No one within the Ewing family could make the investment needed to take the Messenger to the next level of computerization.
Senior also retired, and has since died, as did Bob Matson, the guy who took me on. Heart-attack.
The Messenger is no longer the great place it was for me; I’m sure I woulda been laid off.
Last weekend two long-gone Messenger employees organized a reunion of old Ewing employees.
I went — how could I resist?
The Mighty Mezz was the BEST job I ever had. The main reason I recovered as well as I did from a stroke.