Wonderful Room Read Free Page A

their lips, smoke curling blue into the fluorescent lights. The heady aromas of ink and newsprint and coffee mingled with the cigarette smoke. Typewriters and Teletype machines chattered, telephones rang, reporters and editors laughed and shouted at each other.
    At the left end of the newsroom was a large desk shaped like a horseshoe, with another desk jammed against it, perpendicular to the horseshoe‧s closed end. The space inside the horseshoe, I would learn, was called the “slot.” There Mr. Latham (when he returned from his surgery) would sit most nights, ramrodding the making of the next morning‧s newspaper. To Mr. Latham‧s left sat Raynor, editing his regional stringers, and to his right sat the wire editor, Bill Cook, handling dispatches delivered by the Teletype machines of The Associated Press, The United Press and The International News Service. These editors‧ work places were the “rim.”
    The desk protruding from the horseshoe was the city desk, Engledow‧s place. He ran the reporters. Along one wall were the sports desk and the Sunday desk, little domains on their own, and at the opposite end of the room from the slot, the women‧s desk.On a table behind the slot, a police radio mumbled metallically and spewed bursts of static. Near it a pneumatic tube system rose into the ceiling. A copyboy was rolling up stories for the early edition, stuffing them into cylinders and shooting them through the tube to the composing room downstairs.
    The floor trembled under my feet. The presses in the basement were roaring out the day‧s last edition of the
Herald-Post
, and the
Times
cycle was getting underway.
    Although intense rivals, the two newspapers occupied the same Spanish-style building at Mills and Kansas Streets. Both newsrooms were on the third, top floor. They shared the advertising and circulation departments, and used the same wire room, composing room and presses. But the Scripps-Howard chain owned the
Herald-Post,
which published in the evening, and a local man, Dorrance Roderick, owned the
Times,
which published in the morning.
    A sallow, black-haired man, skinny as I and much shorter, saw me standing awkward inside the swinging doors. He rose from his first-row reporter‧s desk and sauntered to me, his dark eyes squinting. “Yes?” he said.
    His name was Lynwood Abram. He was one of the best reporters. “I‧m looking for Mr. Engledow,” I said.
    “Hey, Ed!” Abram said. “The mullet‧s here!”
    “What‧s a mullet?” I asked.
    “A useless fish,” Abram said, and walked away.
    Engledow was at Mr. Latham‧s place in the slot, rolling up his sleeves, preparing for the night‧s work. He was even darker than Abram, with even sharper black eyes, American Indian looking. His mouth seemed fxed in a permanent sneer.
    “You‧re Woolley,” he said.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You want to be a newspaperman.”
    “Yes, sir.” I was nervous, trying not to show it.
    “Well, you beat Latham back.” Mr. Engledow laughed, a high-pitched “hee-hee-hee” that didn‧t match his speaking voice. “But he was right. There aren‧t any job openings here.”
    My heart made a fist.
    “I‧ve made up one,” he said. “Come on.”
    He escorted me about the newsroom and introduced me to everyone who had arrived for work so far. Art Leibson, the city hall reporter, and Steve Barker, the courthouse reporter, both of them old hands. They glanced at me without curiosity, grunted and returned to their frantic two-finger typing. The other reporters were in their late 20s and their 30s. Nancy Miller was friendly, and Ralph Lowenstein, and Ramon “Pete” Villalobos, and the librarian, Baltazar Alvarez, a kind man.
    Raynor, a frail, gray-haired, gray-faced man wearing a green eyeshade, muttered as if I were a stranger. I would learn he rarely spoke to anyone except his stringers, and to them only on the phone. I would learn that he had liked my Fort Davis features so much that he suggested Engledow hire me.