Originally Published in the "Current" section of the "Hudson Reporter"
Until the early '90s, there was not one but two daily newspapers in Hudson County - the Jersey Journal and the now-defunct Hudson Dispatch, which published in Union City. The Dispatch, with its trademark logo of a rooster and slogan, "First Thing in the Morning," was a fixture in the area for more than 100 years. I worked on the night copy desk on the Dispatch during the mid-1980s, and here are some of my memories: (Editor's note: the author changed the names to protect the innocent!)
The Dispatch's main office was on Bergenline Avenue, but I was hardly ever there. Because we co-published with the Paterson News, we copy editors worked in Paterson. The Dispatch's copy desk mainly consisted of young men in their 20s and early 30s; the News' copy desk mainly consisted of young women around the same age.
Still, there were no romances that I remember, possibly because the night editor of the News was a tough, no-nonsense broad who regularly sent memos to her staff pointing out the errors they had made the night before. There were quite a few interesting people on the Dispatch copy desk. Take Tim M., who may have been a copy editor but his main passion was sports, which he would talk about for hours. When any of the reporters submitted a sports story, he would grab it and claim editing rights. He sometimes came to work in a full New Jersey Devils uniform.
Then, there was Ed L. Ed's father was an old-time beatnik who used to read the East Village Other and knew people like Tuli Kupferberg and Allen Ginsberg. Ed himself was an aficionado of '40s and '50s blues and R&B singers. Many were the times that, while editing copy, Ed would be singing songs like Hank Ballard's "Annie had a baby, she can't work no more..." Once, a new, very preppy female copy editor asked Ed whether he knew the name of "that famous black singer, you know who I mean, he's always into liberal causes..." She meant Harry Belafonte, but Ed kept me in stitches, asking her, "Who do you mean? Big Joe Turner? Howling Wolf? Bullmoose Jackson? T-Bone Walker?" naming every old-time blues singer he could think of.
The guy who actually routed the stories onto the pages after we edited them was Joe T., who, at the age of 38 or so, seemed old to us. Joe, one of the few people on the desk who had actually grown up in Hudson County, also served in the National Guard and would take weeks off at a time. He walked with a limp as the result of an old Vietnam injury, but he was a hard-boiled, no-nonsense SOB. Once, an angry reporter called him on the phone and asked him why he had cut his lead into two sentences. "Because it's too long, that's why!" Joe growled. "Then take my name off it!" the reporter said. "Fine," Joe said and then slammed down the phone.
Only one editor was older than Joe - Mike O'Leary, who was almost 70. Mike had many monk-like traits - for example, he had a germ phobia. Whenever he touched a doorknob or someone shook his hand, he would wash his hands about 10 times and then shake them into the air because he didn't trust the cleanliness of the paper towels. His parsimony was legendary - although he reputedly had accounts in a dozen banks, he only owned two pairs of pants and three shirts, each of which he wore for a week at a time.
His politics were ultra-right wing - he objected to the Martin Luther King holiday and defended Joe McCarthy. When I challenged him, he told me, "Look, I know you're Jewish and you're an OK guy, but you're too young to remember Jewish Communism." I tried to explain to him that even in its heyday, around 1936 or so, "Jewish Communism" only represented a minority of the Jewish community, but that didn't seem to register with him. Mike definitely seemed to have a thing about Jews. "Years ago, when I was workin' as an insurance agent, I found myself on Kings Highway in Brooklyn," he recounted, "but those Jewish neighborhoods didn't have any bars! I had to settle for one of those egg cream joints!"
Still, everyone respected Mike. He was meticulous when it came to grammar and spelling. Most of us, myself included, were only working as copy editors because jobs in journalism were scarce and we would rather have been reporters or "regular" editors. But Mike was a copy editor's copy editor.
Occasionally, the publisher, Louis J., would come in. Louis, a young guy not much older than most of us, was tall, thin, immaculately dressed, and handsome. Although he was born into the wealthy family that owned the paper, he had insisted on starting out as a reporter and working his way up. He was the recipient of many awards, including one from the Police Athletic League for coaching a softball team.
But, I soon learned, he wasn't always impartial. A supermarket in Hudson County went on strike. This supermarket was one of our biggest advertisers. Louis, who normally didn't interfere with the news people, insisted on seeing every story about the strike.
When the final vote was on the table, he personally wrote the headline: "It's Up to the Strikers Now," implying that the whole thing was basically the union's fault. Most of us on the desk were at least liberal, and a few were still influenced by the radical politics of the then-recent '60s and '70s. We resented Louis for doing this, but we went along with it because we had to. The next day, the strike was settled.
Louis seemed to have everything - until the day we came in and learned that he had been found dead in his car the night before. The rumor was that it was a love-triangle kind of thing. More than one of us thought of Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Richard Cory."
Prophetic phrasing
In addition to editing reporters' local stories, we worked on wire stories. Our main criteria for editing wire copy seemed to be stressing any local angle and bringing it to the top. "Hey, if the World Trade Center blew up and 100 people died," one guy joked, "our headline would be, 'Two New Jersey residents die in World Trade Center!'" This was in 1985. Years later, I wondered, if the paper had lasted until the real 9/11 tragedy, whether we would have covered it in the same narrow-minded way.
No, all wasn't fun and games at the Dispatch, at least not for me. Within a few weeks after I had started there, I began to resent the 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. schedule because it didn't allow me much time for a social life. Worse, you didn't always get the same days off every week, at least not during your first year or so. We worked in a fairly dangerous neighborhood and there were no good restaurants around, so I had few alternatives to the vending machine with its chicken patties and "microwave pancakes."
The schedule threw my system off and may have contributed to my making constant mistakes, some of which moved the chief editor to put me on probation more than once. I began looking for another job, and almost two years after I started at the Dispatch, I found one, on a trade magazine in New York City.
The staff threw a goodbye party for me at the Hoboken Clam House, one of Frank Sinatra's old hangouts. The Clam House isn't there anymore, and neither is Sinatra. Interestingly, Al O'Leary used to tell me that one or two members of the Hoboken Four, the group Frank sang with as a teenager, were still living in the mile-square city in obscurity during the '80s.
I'll leave you with a headline I once wrote for a story about the way a snowstorm affected one of the smaller Hudson municipalities. I thought it was the best headline I ever wrote, but the chief editor felt otherwise, so it was never published. Here it is: "Little Guttenberg Fights the Big Snowstorm."
Hudson Dispatch, rest in peace.
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