A Lost Time: Deadline Artists with Typewriters as Brushes

What are young print newspaper journalists missing out on these days, stuck at home as they are? Glued to their phones and iPads and laptops, seeing no more of the wide, wide world than the view out of their apartment windows? Perhaps watching the documentary Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, about Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, might give them some clues. Then again, I have to confess that “shoe-leather” reporters chasing stories were a thing of the past long before the pandemic hit.

Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists has been out there more than three years now, and I still haven’t seen it. Shame on me. But a former colleague from my days on The New Zealand Herald in Auckland has just watched it on Sky over the ditch (the Tasman Sea) and posted on Facebook about the doco today. “I've never had much time for aged guys (it's always guys), waxing lyrical about the good old days,” he wrote. “But this doco did stir some surprisingly powerful memories for me of when newsrooms were noisy and often fun, most interviews were face to face, and alcohol was part of the mix.”

Comments on the post were interesting. One said, “I always thought that if I didn't smoke, drank less and went for the odd walk at lunchtime, I'd likely survive beyond the age of my boomer colleagues.” Another recalled, “My first newsroom experience was as a kid on day experience from college. I sat down, and a young long-haired journo suddenly set into the older bald reporter in the room. Huge screaming match over god knows what. I decided then that this was a job for me.” A reporter from my home town added, “When I started … in 1963 the chief reporter Jim Caffin had a stock whip permanently fixed above his office door. The cigarette smoke cloud hung low from the ceiling. The typewriter clatter and yelling could be deafening. It was only quiet between 5pm and 6pm, when most staffers were in the back bar of the Dominion Hotel. I loved it all. It was just the place for a 16-year-old kid from Greymouth.”

This certainly brought back memories for me. In Townsville I saw a very fat dictionary thrown across a newsroom, hitting a sub-editor square on the head, and on another occasion a metal em rule was flung in the same direction, happily just missing its target. Owen Thomson, the Les Patterson prototype who was my editor on The Australian, told some amazing stories from his time of owning Truth with Mark Day. An old man who was very seriously vertically challenged went into the Truth newsroom one day, saying he and his equally diminutive brother wanted some publicity about reigniting their circus act. For no apparent reason, the “interview” ended with the circus performer and the young reporter assigned to the story wrestling viciously on the floor. On The Australian the acting sports editor Kevin Jones, a former Mr North Tasmania, dumped the greyhound writer, Gary Holloway, head first into a waste paper basket. In Cork I saw a male copytaker talking into his shoe (no kidding). In Dublin a sub called Charlie McCarthy (seriously) blew up big time because someone had taken a copy of the Evening Press into a cubicle in the men’s toilet and left it open at the ‘Dubliner’s Diary’ page. I was once myself called a prima donna. There was ‘Curl’ Menagh’s collapse off the Daily News subs desk in Perth, when ‘Bricky Bill’ Reynolds told the two Scottish subs who’d gone to his aid to leave Curl and get on with subbing, as deadline was fast approaching. There are countless John Camplin stories, including holding Col Allen by the scruff of the neck out of a seventh-floor window at The Crest in Brisbane. In Canberra Bob Macklin lost it when falsely accusing fellow staff members of stealing the bonnet hood logo off his Merc. And then there were the memorable Norman Abjorensen "youse can all ..." departure speeches. Ah, such sweet and sour memories. Of excitable people, living life on an edge and often falling off it. Of tensions tightening as the clock ticked toward deadline. Of offbeat characters drawn into a vertigo inducing profession, never for a second regretting the agnst it wrought. OK, I'll stop there. But I could go on. There are dozens of ’em.

One telling comment on the Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists post came from a very astute media commentator. “In 1998 Pete Hamill wrote a small book titled News in a Verb. He was out in his prediction of the future for newspapers (who in 1998 accurately predicted the effect of the Internet?) but his conclusion was goal-setting: ‘If newspapers do what only they can do, we will have better cities, better citizens, and a smarter, more humane country. At the very least, we will have avoided adding anything more to the appalling history of human lousiness.’”

Oh, how very true that was. Sadly, in the 24 years since Hamill wrote it, the chances have passed us by.