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Of Hounds, Turtles And Old Flags

Meteoric change in journalism – in technology, ownership, new kinds of competition for everyone's time – feeds nostalgia, an antidote to what is new and unsettling. Nostalgia abounds these days in sales of items recalling the past, from old front pages to reproductions of entire Harper's Weeklys of more than a century ago.

Nostalgia can be dangerous. It can drain the juices from one's encounters with what is new and should be exciting. Put a few drops of it into a mix with too much cynicism about The Sad State of Journalism Today, and you may be permanently anesthetized.

Maybe I should clear out my office.

On the shelf above this Gateway 2000 Pentium with its Windows 95 software is a chunk of metal bearing my byline in 24-point type, a keepsake set by a Linotype operator on the last day of hot type at the Detroit Free Press. Melted into it is a brass matri« from one of those great old workhorses of the composing room. (Composing room!) You can almost hear it rattling down the channel and smell the fumes from the hellbox.

Not to go on too much about this, but the same shelf holds the mounted flag used for page one of the first issue of the California Courier, a weekly that a couple of us wackily started back in the summer of '58.

And a memento from AP days bearing Mark Twain's words about the only two forces that carry light to all corners of the globe: "the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here." I like it almost as much as a UPI plaque that misspells my name.

Of course you don't want to hear the complete catalog of office oddities, but I might also mention the newsboy made from a piece of coal that was given to me by the Huntington Herald-Dispatch in West Virginia a couple of decades ago, the little green model of a Milwaukee Journal delivery truck (1940s vintage), a 1972 editorial-page masthead from the Charlotte Observer, a coffee cup from the Atlanta Journal ("Covers Dixie Like the Dew," I swear) and a pica rule.

The child labor laws eliminated newsboys like mine depicted in coal, and you don't see many pica rules advertising "Modern Linotypers, Inc."

But not all is lost. The California Courier still comes out every week with the same logo we chose back before anybody said "logo" (and I still have the cardigan sweater I took as payment for an ad from a failing haberdasher).

We might as well admit that the cult of the journalist rests in part upon foolish sentimentality.

Will memories of someone's first Web site move the soul the way the first byline did? Hmmmmm.

Soon nobody will know what an em space was. Or a turtle or a horseshoe or a hound. There are still bulldogs and lobsters out there, but I'm pretty sure the hounds are gone. The hound I remember was an abysmal Monday first edition that was actually printed on Saturday for far-flung circulation. The pathetic hound preceded the fat and sassy Sunday bulldog.

Things will never be the same. Shouldn't there be a real sense of loss about the disappearance of these old touchstones of the trade?

Of course not, you old coot.