Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is adapted from the autobiography A Peculiar Treasure by Edna Ferber (@1960 by Morris L. Ernst, et al., Trustees). Passage B is adapted from the memoir Pull Me Up: A Memoir by Dan Barry (@2004 by Dan Barry).

Passage A by Edna Ferber

The printing shop and pressroom were separated from the front office only by a doorway, and the door never was closed. There were the type forms and tables, the linotype machine (a new and fearsome invention to me), the small press, the big newspaper press, the boiler plate, the trays of type, all the paraphernalia that goes to make up the heart of a small-town newspaper. The front room is its head, but without the back room it could not function or even live. The linotype and the small press went all day, for there the advertising was set up and printed, as well as handbills, programs, all the odds and ends classified as job printing. Mac, who ruled this domain, was the perfect example of the fictional printer. He had come in years before, his brown hair curled over a mild brow, his limp shirt seemed perennial. But his eye was infallible, and few if any shrdlus and etaoins marred the fair sequence of Mac’s copy. His voice was soft, gentle, drawling, but he was boss of the print shop from the cat to the linotype operator. Mac seldom talked but sometimes—rarely—he appeared in the front office, a drooping figure, with a piece of news by which he had come in some devious way. Standing at the side of the city editor’s desk he would deliver himself of this information, looking mild and limply romantic. It always proved to be a bombshell.

Such was the make-up of the Appleton, Wisconsin, Daily Crescent office.

In the past thirty years all sorts of ex-newspaper men from Richard Harding Davis to Vincent Sheean and John Gunther have written about the lure of the reporter's life, the smell of printer's ink, the adventure of reporting. It all sounds slightly sentimental and silly, but it's true—or it was, at least, in my newspaper experience. To this day I can't smell the scent of white paper, wet ink, oil, hot lead, mucilage and cats that goes to make up the peculiar odor of any newspaper plant, be it Appleton, Wisconsin, or Cairo, Egypt, that I don’t get a pang of nostalgia for the old reporting days. "I was once a newspaper man myself" has come to be a fun phrase. But practically everyone seems to have been, or to have wanted to be, a newspaper reporter.

Passage B by Dan Barry

Ink. The building smelled of ink, spilled and bled. It was a tart and chemical smell, the kind that weaves into the fabric of your clothes and then under your skin, the kind that comes home with you, sits with you at the dinner table, tells you constantly what it is you do. Car mechanics know their smell, as do fishermen and hair stylists, nurses and short-order cooks. You are a man who chases halibut, a woman who perms hair. You smell of it.

I waded into that invisible veil of ink, inhaled it deeply, allowed it to wash over me. It smelled of words and phrases, rants and ideas, sports scores and felony arrests, announcements of marriage and notices of death. Maybe the chemical-like aroma was inducing hallucination, but I doubted it. In a squat concrete building, no different from all the others in a drab Connecticut industrial park, I was experiencing a moment of revelation—an epiphany, really, at the age of twenty-five.

This is what I do.

Pinned like a manifesto to a bulletin board in the center of this ink-perfumed building was a typewritten note from my new employer, announcing that on this day, October 17, 1983, I would begin working as a reporter for a daily newspaper. The note formalized my calling in life with a splash of perspective that would stay with me forever:

Dan is a former intern at the Daily News in New York and a graduate assistant for the journalism department at New York University. His writing has appeared in the Daily News, the New York Times and the Rocky Mountain News. Soon it will appear in trashcans throughout north-central Connecticut. Please make him feel relevant.

Reading the note, I thought, I'm home.

Finding my way had not been easy. The internship at the Daily News had ended, the graduate degree from NYU had been shoved in a drawer, and I had returned to living beside the sump pump in my parents' basement. I spent my days splitting sod for a lawn and sprinkling company alongside Eddie, who had taken to calling me "Professor," and my nights typing out professional love letters to the New London Day, the Asbury Park Press, the Poughkeepsie Journal, the Stamford Advocate, the Anywhere Clarion-Bugle-Star-Record-Sentinel, and every other Northeastern newspaper that I had never read.