We are holding hands around a table in a dark room.
A candle sits in the center of the table on top of some shreds from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the Chicago Daily News and some lesser publications.
They are all gone.
“Call forth the news ghosts so we might know the glories of the past,” I say, and the room rumbles and shakes.
Suddenly, there are old white ghosts all over the place, guys named Art and Pappy and Ed and Joe, mostly badly dressed and looking badly kept, even for ghosts.
Pappy still has that embarrassing gas problem, Ed still hates Joe, and Art, the dapper one, actually was gay, although no one knew it.
“Tell us, news ghosts, of the glory days of journalism, when private owners bestowed great rewards on their reporters and editors and photographers and people put them on pedestals. Tell us of the glory days when all was happy and secure!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” grunts Pappy.
“I rarely had two nickels to rub together and when I did, generally they were borrowed. Owners! Parasites, sucking the blood out of their papers and spreading the largesse around among their nasty kids and cousins.”
But wasn’t it a happier time, much happier than now, with all this anxiety about our business changing and threats to our 401(k)’s and retirement programs and worries about health-care benefits and whether we will get raises this year and whether our careers will advance?
“What’s a 401(k)?” said Ed, jabbing Joe with his elbow a little harder than he should have. “Retirement? I worked until I died, remember? I just kept getting worse and worse assignments. Well, at least I made it to 54. Can we smoke here?”
Art, sweet old Art, certainly you have some fond memories?
“Spend 50 years in the closet terrified that some midlevel editor was going to find out you were a homosexual. You think that was happy?”
But wasn’t there at least some security?
“Oh, sure,” said Pappy.
“You could work as long as you wanted for $95 a week, maybe $100 if you were favored and could also write editorials. It was a miserable business. Hey, I know you are all worried, but you are a lot better off than we were. And your bathrooms, they are so clean. My house didn’t smell that good.”
Even my journalism friends around the table had to agree on that.
We live in the era of the buyout, where someone gives you a wad of money to disappear. The ghosts lived in the era of the die out, where hard living and lots of pressure joined up to achieve the same goal, but no one got any money and it was a little more, how to say it, final?
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“But what about the glory, what about the Pulitzer Prizes, what about the … the fame?”
They all just looked at one another.
Not a Pulitzer in the bunch, although Ed did once get a Chamber of Commerce award for writing a lovely profile of a town that was basically a toxic waste dump with some long forgotten Revolutionary War history. He wrote around the toxic part.
He got a plaque and a $25 gift certificate at a restaurant. He drank it in one sitting.
“We did have some happy moments,” said Pappy.
“Tell us, o journalism sages!”
“Well,” said Ed, “there was that day that girl named Jackie came back from covering the circus. You remember Jackie, don’t you Pappy?”
“Everyone remembers Jackie,” said Pappy.
“I don’t remember her,” said Art.
They all just gave him one of those, “Well, of course you wouldn’t” looks.
“She used to wear skirts so short and tight you wondered how she could sit down,” said Ed. “Anyhow, she brought the balloons from the circus and she lets them go in the newsroom and up they float to the ceiling and she has to climb up on the city editor’s desk to get them and we all thought his head was going to blow up he was so red with her long legs in his face like that.”
“Wait, that was it, a woman climbs up and you get to look at her legs?” I said.
“It was a different time,” said Pappy.
“Be careful what you wish for.”
With that, my pals and I sort of jerked our hands apart as though electricity had been sent through us. We blew out the candle and turned on the lights.
All that remained was some “essence” of Pappy and the thought that in modern journalism, life is just fine, with some challenges, of course.
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Charles M. Madigan is a Tribune senior editor and correspondent. E-mail: [email protected]