Deadline Dick, Peerless McGrath, and Broadway Abe

This past weekend—one day before the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer printed its final paper edition—I spoke to my
father, Matt Graves, who has worked for daily newspapers for 40 years.
He was stricken. He retired a few years ago but still writes
occasionally for the Albany Times Union, where he spent two and a half
decades on staff. He told me that given all the news lately, he’d been
at the building the other day—and found himself imagining it
empty. He was spooked. He’d also read a Time magazine story about the
10 big-city papers going under (or online-only) this year.

My dad is one of the lucky ones. He has nothing left to lose. He won
the Red Smith Award twice, and he retired before it got truly ugly. The
freelance income he gets now is paltry—he does it mostly to stay
connected—and he’s been crowing about going on Social Security
next month, anyway.

But he is sad. He’s worried for his friends and colleagues, but even
more, he’s sorry about the death of the environment he knew so well:
the daily newsroom. An online newsroom might come about, but it will
never have the catch-and-release of that evening deadline—the
social life that engendered, the time for breathing and learning
instead of just chasing and reporting and then chasing some more. The
characters.

My dad’s nickname in the newsroom was Deadline Dick. He never missed
a deadline.

JG: You type with two fingers, don’t you?

MG: Kinda.

Still pecking.

Let’s move on to the pertinent information, shall we? Now we’ve
established I’m a two-fingered journalist. And I’m old. I’m old,
otherwise you wouldn’t be talking to me.

All right. Let’s go to the beginning.

My first job was as a reporter for the Troy Record, which was then
two newspapers, a morning and an evening. You either worked for the
morning or the afternoon.

They had two staffs?

Well, not completely different, a lot of the stuff was carried over.
But they had two editors in the sports department, for instance. You
wrote two different kinds of leads: An a.m. lead was a news lead, a
p.m. lead was a feature lead. But that only lasted as two entities
through the mid-’70s. Then they went to just a morning paper, which had
a circulation of between 45,000 and 50,000. It now has a circulation of
about 13,000. Pretty sad.

I don’t think I ever visited you at work in Troy. I was 6 when you
went to the Times Union, right? I still remember the orange lights of
the press room. Is that still there?

Oh yeah. They just put a new press in there. They just spent $20
million or something on a new press, but this was before the economy
went south.

What do they say is going to happen there now?

They’ve been without a contract for six or eight months. They’re
talking about a 20 percent reduction in expenses is what is necessary
to keep things moving. They’re not saying how that would be
accomplished, but most people are interpreting that as a 20 percent
staff drop, too.

We have been the most profitable newspaper in the Hearst chain for
years. But that doesn’t mean we’re safe, either.

Remember that time you came to visit me when I was in my first job
[at the Denton Record-Chronicle, in 1997]? I was still using a metal
pica pole and making drawings to lay out the pages, and then the press
people in the back room would print out the stories, coat the columns
in wax by sending them through a waxing machine, and then if you wanted
cuts made, they’d do it with an X-acto.

Yeah. You would point to a spot and say, here, cut it there, and
that’s how they would edit it, on the floor. And some guy would come by
after you were done and sweep it up.

But when I first started, we were using hot metal! The letters would
all be cast in hot metal and then cooled and placed into forms.

After the paper went out, they would disassemble the
pages—after a few weeks or whatever. They would break down the
frames—they were clamped together, to hold them
together—they would unclamp the frames, take all the letters back
out, melt them back down, and make more type.

When I started at the Times Union, I believe the guy told me they
had 120 printers. Now they have two people—or one—on the
floor. The typographical union was a very strong union, and they have
pretty much gone the way of a lot of extinct animals.

It’s very sad. It used to be a tremendous industry. It really was
exciting. And trying to meet deadline on a daily basis was a great
challenge and a lot of fun, but also very stressful.

People talk about the death of journalism. But to me it’s like the
death of the daily deadline. The way things work now, it’s like print
deadlines don’t matter. Put a story in print and by the time it hits,
you’ll have to update it on the web.

Yeah, I have to write a blog now in addition to my game stories. I
hate that. It’s extra work, and I’m resistant to the computer to begin
with. I guess I have to say I’m resentful of the fact that this
generation is so consumed with getting their quick fix. Everyone wants
to go online and be quick and get it done. The advantage newspapers
used to have, they’re not allowed to have anymore.

What do you consider your first great assignment?

That was when they sent me up to Saratoga racetrack to cover a horse
on a daily basis. It was my first time covering the sport, and the
horse’s name was Secretariat. He had just won the Triple Crown and he
arrived in Saratoga with great fanfare. I had to report on how much he
ate, if he walked, everything.

What did he do? How was he?

He was great. Everybody wanted to be near him.

What was he like?

He was a horse. I asked him a lot of questions. He ignored me. And a
lot of times he just pooped in my path.

No, it was very exciting to be around him because he was so famous.
You don’t often get to cover something where the main character can’t
speak, so it challenged your creative juices because you had to make
the stories out of the people around him but also still keep him the
center of attention.

And then I covered the World Series several times. I got mugged in
Boston covering the Boston-Cincinnati series in 1975. I was crossing
the street going back to the hotel, it was late at night on the very
first rainout of World Series history, and some car pulled up and
pinned me against another car, and the guy had a gun, and they put me
in the back seat.

They drove me around and I pleaded for my life. I had my money in my
pocket; I gave him my wallet, and when there wasn’t any money in it, he
got upset. And all of a sudden my memory came back to me and I said,
oh, no, my money’s over here, and then they let me go. Took me a few
blocks away and dropped me off in an alley. And then the paper made me
write a first-person story about it.

When was the story due?

The next day.

How much money did you lose?

I think it was 183 dollars. Luckily I got a hundred back on my
homeowners’ insurance, but I got nothing from the [paper] except a
“Yeah, right, sure you did.”

What I’ve loved about newsrooms are the characters. In Texas I
worked next to a nearly deaf elderly receptionist who took calls all
day from nearly deaf elderly callers. There was a white-haired Southern
man who was full of real, actual wisdom. There was a big-haired
middle-aged cops reporter who always wore stiletto heels, carried a gun
in her purse, and once called me a communist.

But farther back, what was the scene like?

Oh god, you’d put the paper to bed and you’d go to the local
watering holes until the middle of the night. And everyone smoked: It
was disgusting.

But there was a lot more communication than there probably is now.
People talked a lot about story ideas and about executing them. There
were a lot of the stereotypical things like editors screaming about
reporters. A lot of those things you saw in the movies really happened.
But those guys, you also learned tremendous amounts from those people.
Editors in those days were tremendously knowledgeable. Today there’s
not so much of that.

Newspapering seems to have become more of a profession.

Yeah. There’s less teaching going on at newspapers now. We used to
have seminars all the time—writing seminars, reporting workshops,
all kinds of things on how to improve on different aspects of your job.
It’s pretty much a business now, and less of an art form.

Who was your first boss?

My first boss was a man named Jack “Peerless” McGrath, that’s what
everybody knew him by: Peerless. He was at that time the
longest-standing sports editor in the country. He was the sweetest man.
He called everybody kid, K-E-E-D.

Another guy, Tommy, you didn’t want to get on his bad side. You
could hear him all around the building. He was a screamer. Yip.

Copy boys used to run the copy from you to the editors, or from you
to the composing room. You actually did hear people say, “Copy!,” and
then somebody would come flying. And a lot of those people would start
at the bottom and become reporters.

We did have one tremendous character in Troy. We called him Broadway
Abe. You could always find him walking up and down Broadway. He was the
oldest copy boy in America, probably. He was in his 70s when I got
there.

He weighed about 90 pounds and was about five foot three and had an
incredible disdain for the Yankees, and it was just a circus waiting
for him to explode. Whenever the Yankees would win, the guys would come
in and start in on him and he’d just lose it and throw things at the
teletype. When he was on the street, he was totally the opposite, this
kind, sweet, old gentleman who’d kiss the ladies’ hands. But when he
was in his environment, he was the mad bomber of the Yankees.

Before there was a lot of technology, they used to announce the
baseball scores out the window of the Troy Record out onto Broadway in
Troy, and people would be down on the streets waiting for the guy to
give the update. I guess he did some of that. You can imagine it was
pretty colorful. You probably had to close the windows in most of the
houses.

Blogs don’t quite work that way, do they? What did they call
you?

Deadline Dick. I always made deadline. Yeah.

Always? Every time?

Well, sometimes games would go overtime, overtime, overtime, and
then you’d miss it. But otherwise, well, maybe once or twice. You
forget a lot of the things you did.

How long is this here going to go on? Nobody’s gonna want to read
this.

Okay, Daddy. We’re done. Thanks.

Sure.

I’ll call you later.

Yeah. Okay.