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© St. Petersburg Times, published March 28, 2003
At 9 a.m. Wednesday when I showed (okay, should have showed) up for work, I reached the milestone of having worked exactly 30 years at this newspaper, and therefore officially entered the domain of old farthood.
I'm not going to belabor the word that describes that state, but there really isn't another one that is as appropriate.
Every newsroom I have worked in during three decades has had a collection of old reporters and editors who gathered at the water cooler or coffee machine or the nearest bar and, well, groused.
I spent enough time ridiculing that group that it is only fair that I maintain the same attitude toward it now that I have joined it.
They groused about everything: women in the newsroom writing about things other than weddings and engagements, electric typewriters, college-educated journalists (There were fewer of them in the pre-Watergate era).
Dadburned (not always the word of choice) computers rate a whole paragraph to themselves. No matter what other technological advances we have resisted, computers were the scariest. I literally had my typewriter taken away by the techno-Nazis in the middle of the night.
That's probably the time at which I saw the first seeds of old farthood in myself, grumbling because I couldn't find the "on" switch on a computer.
But grumbling never has to be logical. I now reserve the right to shake my head in disgust and mutter under my breath at regular intervals without bothering to explain to anyone (like they are listening) what I am muttering about.
I have an image to protect, but the truth is that not everything new is bad. When I look around now I note that 44 percent of my colleagues, including several of my superiors, are women. When I started in the business most women at small papers worked in "Soc," for society, and rarely anywhere else. The first paper I worked at had one black employee, the janitor, a dignified man named Earl Mattocks whose brother went on to run the press room there years later. The paper had a Negro News column on the back page, which was the only place a black person could be named other than on the sports page (identified with what we dictated on the telephone as comma-negro-comma) or in the arrest reports. It never published pictures of black people.
Today, blacks and other minorities make up 13 percent of the Times news staff.
Gay men and lesbians at the first two papers I worked at stayed closeted. The first man to "come out" at one of them had his tires and overcoat slashed by co-workers because of his sexual orientation.
I know for a fact things are better at those places today.
Today I work as part of a culturally diverse workforce and for a company dedicated to making it more so, which has improved my understanding of life and my ability to write about it. The days of chasing down every petty crime and painstakingly documenting every single action of local government are gone and today's reporters work at identifying trends, sometimes using computers (that word again) and no longer occupying themselves counting trees while someone is torching the forest.
They will never know the joys of paying someone to "save" a pay phone outside a courtroom when the jury is out, rushing to put film on a Greyhound bus to St. Petersburg so that it can be developed for the next day's edition, or using rubber cement from the ever-present glue can on our desks to make fake boogers to flick at each other. (Did I mention there were some long afternoons back in those days?)
"We used the cement to glue pages of stories together so they wouldn't get ..." I began to explain to a young colleague one day.
"Pages?" he asked, a blank look on his face.
You've probably gotten the drift by now that I am not nearly as disgruntled as my new status requires, and frequently I have to hold my hand over my mouth so that nobody can see me grinning as I do what actors do and mumble "rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb," under my breath to make it sound like I am complaining.
This angry old guy stuff is much harder than it looks.