As I ended last week’s article “Working at the Star,” I was offered a management/artist job for the East Side Herald (newly acquired by the Star). I thought long and hard about the decision to leave my comfort zone down at the Star. My work partner Joanie had been moved on to Real Estate, so work life just hadn’t been the same and I knew we would stay friends no matter where I went (and we have). My other two good friends and previous co-workers, Susie and Margie (Margie passed away a few years ago, but I see Susie regularly), had gotten jobs at the Star because of my recommendations. I kind of felt like I was abandoning them. But I went to the old Herald offices on East Michigan and talked to the previous owners and our Star management and decided to go ahead and give it a shot.
The East Side Herald had been in publication for 70 years by several different owners. They printed 32,000 newspapers per week and had 3 versions of the paper: a downtown metro one, eastside and north-eastside. The fronts and backs were local to those neighborhoods, but the inside of the newspapers were all the same.
The previous owner stayed on a week to show me the ropes. I had built ads, but I had never laid out a newspaper. She did it the old-fashioned way of printing out proofs of the ads and then waxing them (pasting them down) and placing them on layout pages and rearranging until she got a layout for the entire newspaper. The writer/editor, Ethel, was to give me printouts of the content and those were laid out page by page. I had done paste up work years before, and it was time consuming; with the computer age, I didn’t see the point. I did it the old way for one week before switching to computer layouts.
Another switch was that the previous owner used a PC and I had always worked on a Mac. All the files were in Pagemaker program on the PC. The Star IT guys rigged up a system were I had one screen, a PC mouse and a button to push to switch me back and forth from PC to Mac. I’m an artist, not a computer wiz, so this wasn’t the most comfortable way to work. Also at the Star we had used Quark for layout design, but were just changing over to InDesign (which I only got a brief training on). I really wanted to stay with Quark for my ad building, but when I realized that it was much easier to convert these Pagemaker files to InDesign, I had to learn quick. Like most of us on computers, we’ve learned more from trial and error than from formal training.
The first week on my own is still a blur. I know I left very late every night and usually cried all the way home, thinking what the “h… have I gotten myself into.” I worked over 70 hours that first week and was totally stressed out. I had a hard time sleeping, lost weight and was totally absorbed in the task at hand. I felt like I had been put out to sea in a small boat with no oar.
Everyone has their own system to get through a job. Some are very organized and precise, while others just wing it — I’m somewhere in between. The previous owner went through a huge pile of customer orders each week to see what ads were still running and which were out. At first I had to keep things going the way they had always done it, but soon I had my own system going.
We were a busy place with customers coming to our front counter to place classified and home service ads and the phone ringing off the hook.
Being a community paper, we had a small town feel and we had one customer who was used to trading out fresh vegetables for his ads (green beans). Personally, I thought it was a good idea, but the finance department at the Star was not amused. One month I put green beans in a manila envelope and mailed it with a paid invoice to the accounting office at the Star, who didn’t think it was funny.
The very first week there was a total power failure one night and I was by myself as usual and there were no emergency lights. I felt my way back to the back door and finally found the keys I had left on the counter. We soon got an updated power box and emergency lights.
The old concrete block building was 3,000 square feet of dust and dirt. About once a week, I took a mop to the place. (Gannett would not budget for cleaning people). I have never seen such black mop water in my life.
That poor old building had so many issues. We had water pipes burst in one of the bathrooms that the landlord kept locked up. Our sales lady, Jeanne, jimmied the lock, so we could turn off the water. The roof was flat, so every good rain we would get leaks. We had to start putting trash bags over our computers at night, so they wouldn’t get wet. I had a mouse die inside my printer and we had to pitch the whole thing.
One night while I was working late, someone threw a brick through the only window that wasn’t glass block. I had the radio going and didn’t hear it until a neighbor across the street offered to fix it the next morning. The neighborhood around the building had really deteriorated over the years. I had lived only a few blocks away, 25 years before, when it was just an old neighborhood, not old and scary. Another night, while trying to go to press with the newspaper, a woman started beating on the front window by my desk, yelling she had been robbed. I yelled back that I’d call the police, which I did. I continued to work; she yelled again later wanting me to let her in. There was guy with her (who obviously wasn’t holding her at gunpoint or anything) so of course, I didn’t go for that scam. She finally jumped into a car, as a police car rolled up right behind them. The police never came to the door and I heard no more commotion. I didn’t have time for such goings on.
One day during a good snow in February, a crazy, drug-addicted woman ran down Michigan Street stark naked, right in front of our building, while our supervisor was having a meeting with us. We couldn’t see her through the glass block, but we got the story later from neighbors and TV coverage.
Every night as I left, I looked both ways from the back door, keys in hand and ran for my car. Luckily, the business did come with a little shack of a house out back, occupied by a quiet man, who home delivered our papers from a grocery cart (he pulled a sled in the winter). He had come with the business. He had a dog too, so there was a little bit of security, even though I rarely saw him at night. He kept the grass mowed, shoveled snow and took out our trash.
During one of the really bad snow storms, my car got stuck in the parking lot behind the building for three days. My supervisor wouldn’t let us close, so I had to hold down the fort and get dropped off at the front door.
My supervisor was up at The Topics newspapers with his own problems, so I saw him seldom and talked to him even less. I soon learned only to e-mail him one sentence a week of good things that happened, never the bad things, because that only made things worse.
The sales ladies Jeanne and Judy (sisters) were not thrilled with the Star taking over, needless to say. They enjoyed working for the family-owned business. They went from commission-only to base pay and half the commission, which is just not the same. Also the Star brought in a sales manager to set the rules, set goals and give them more paperwork than they had ever dealt with before. Computers were added, which was helpful, but they were as stressed as I was.
My first issue (July 15, 2005) we had to fill up 20 pages with content (poor Ethel, our writer, I don’t know how she did it) and have three different fronts and backs for the 3 areas we delivered in. We didn’t have columnists, except for a Sports writer and a Nascar writer. Ethel found content for the rest somehow.
Next next time – the end of the Herald and the birth of the Voice.
