(Paul Duffy joins Bad Attitudes with the following description of his introduction to the New York Times. He went on to various editing jobs over the next five years before telling Abe Rosenthal he could take this job and shove it. Since then he has been a freelance writer.)

It was a heady time.

Kennedy was president — Camelot, Jackie, ask not, all that. I was fresh out of the army; and now I was going to work on the foreign desk of The New York Times. I was in my early twenties and there was no doubt I was about to make a mark on big-time journalism. I was deeply impressed with my own possibilities.

This sense of a golden future lasted until I reported for my first day of work. By the time I found the foreign desk in the vastness of the news room I was already late. It was 8:32 a.m. By 8:35 I was beginning to consider a career change.

I was replacing a young man named Al, who was doing the unthinkable: he was leaving the Times. But before he left, Al was going to break me in. Two minutes into his job description, I understood why Al was leaving.

My job was to make sense of all the foreign news copy that came into The New York Times from all sources, and to arrange it so that it made sense to others. First, Al explained cheerfully, I was to gather all the foreign copy that had accumulated in the wire room overnight and sort it by story or subject, then sort it by news service, then collate each service’s story, assemble all copy according to a preferred order, put the copy for each story into a separate folder, and write a summary of all the stories for the foreign editor before he came in at ten o’clock. In those days, any story worth the name would be covered by the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Canadian Press, and, of course, the Times itself, whose correspondents, then as now, found virtue in long-windedness.

The amount of paper entailed in this process is difficult to calculate and painful to describe. After I had collected the overnight accumulation of perhaps 300 pages and dumped it in the large wire mesh basket on my desk, this lode was periodically refreshed by copy boys pushing wheeled supermarket baskets overflowing with paper, most of it at that early hour earmarked for the foreign desk.

More than any other skill, the job demanded manual dexterity. I was issued a rubber thumb to enhance any natural abilities in this line. In the weeks — months — to come, I did develop considerable paper sorting/folding/clipping skills, but no matter how hard I worked or skillful I became, I was never able to empty the basket. Never.

At ten o’clock sharp a man with the face of a Basset hound appeared. He wore a dark, double-breasted, pinstripe suit of a distinctly British cut and smelled of expensive after shave. When he sat in the foreign editor’s chair, I concluded that he must be the foreign editor. He was.

He was also Emanuel R. Friedman — Manny to his intimates, of which I was, in a way, now one, in that Manny’s chair and mine were only inches apart, back to back. Although he never uttered a word to me other than “Copy,” I came to feel that we were as one in a noble enterprise. Our destinies were linked.

“Copy,” the one word Mr. Friedman did utter, he uttered every day at exactly 10:30, after he had looked over the morning paper and digested my desperate, typo-ridden news summary. “Copy” meant that he wanted my story folders.

These I had arranged in a strange looking rack that sat astride the back of my overflowing desk and contained many slots in which I had jammed the swelling files on Kwame Nkrumah, the Kurdish rebels, and the latest government crisis in Chad. Manny was keenly interested in these topics. More interested, perhaps, than any other person in the world including his many correspondents. As the day wore on he fired off increasingly testy messages to these headstrong adventurers, demanding the very latest on the makeup of the new Sudanese cabinet or an analysis of the reasons behind the fall of the yen.

But I knew nothing of these arcane matters until much later. Just then I was drowning in a rising flood of paper, my rubber thumb flailing in midair, and I judged, correctly, from the widening smirk on the departing Al’s face that the worst was yet to come.

Sometime toward noon I was told to move myself and my rubber thumb across the room to the foreign copy desk. This was a crescent-shaped affair perhaps 20 feet long at which copy editors attempted to make readable, and write cogent headlines for, the foreign news report. There were six or so of these intelligent drones laboring ceaselessly under the despotic direction of Jack B., copy desk fuehrer and certifiable manic depressive, obsessive compulsive, anal retentive, and raving lunatic.

I sat at one end of the crescent next to a large wire basket that had been bolted down against the inevitable deluge of paper. Behind me sat Frank B. (no relation to Jack B.) and next to him Nat G., the night foreign editor. Wedged into the midst of this ménage was another clerk.

All the foreign copy — New York Times, A.P., U.P.I, Reuters, Canadian Press — came to me via copy boys pushing rolling supermarket baskets, always full, from the wire room. I separated it all by subject and story, collated each report by wire service, and assembled several duplicate copies of the Times stories for fun. From me each sheaf of carefully, if frantically, arranged paper went in a half circle to Frank B., Nat G., the other clerk, then to Jack B., who would scream something unintelligible and fling the paper package at a cringing copy editor.

If I had got up and walked out the door — a course I seriously considered every single day for the six months I held this wretched job — I believed the foreign desk of The New York Times would grind to a halt and would not be able to sort itself out for months. I still believe this. But of course I didn’t walk out the door, not then anyway.

Instead, I flailed with my rubber thumb at the rapidly mounting pile of paper, trying desperately to reduce its size before the next dumpster-load reached me. No one had introduced me to any one of the many people who now inhabited the immediate region of the foreign desk. And none of them had showed the slightest interest in me except as a paper processor. In this capacity I was found wanting.

The first to identify one of my many disqualifications for the job was Frank B. He brought it to my attention that I was attaching paper clips incorrectly. Frank B. demanded that paper clips be affixed with the small loop showing. If you look at a paper clip you will see that it is nothing more than a wire bent into two loops, the smaller inside the larger. Frank B. hated to see a paper clip large loop up even more than he hated the way I sometimes put the A.P. copy under the U.P.I. when everyone knows it belongs the other way around.

When Frank B. saw a sheaf of copy with the paper clip large loop up, he would toss it back on my desk and have me turn the clip over so that it would be correctly attached, small loop up. I made this mistake more than I like to admit, even all these years later. Shame dies hard.

Once he got his paper clip where he wanted it, Frank B. would write tiny notes on a small square of pink paper and then slide the square under the paper clip, small loop up of course. He would then pass the annotated copy to Nat G., who would remove the pink square and throw it on the floor. Sometimes Nat G. would scribble something on the copy before he gave it to the other clerk. It was that clerk’s job to enter the story on a list before handing it on to Jack B. occupying the center, or slot, of the copy desk. Once he got his hands on it, Jack B. invariably began to shout and turn red before he in turn assigned the story to an editor.

That’s how it went, day after day, month after month. Did I mention that around 3 p.m. at the height of the foreign news frenzy, I would be sent up to the cafeteria to get everyone coffee, donuts, sandwiches?

This interruption cost me just enough time to make it a certainty that I could never, never, never catch up, and that Frank B. would never be satisfied, that Nat B. would never stop throwing things on the floor, and that Jack B. would continue apoplectic until the first edition was printed and he was back on his train to Scarsdale.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at December 19, 2008 03:46 PM

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