Sports desk’s bloopers and practical jokes
The first time I walked into the newsroom at The Baltimore Sun, in March 1985, I surveyed the scene and quoted Bette Davis to myself: ‘‘What a dump!’’
(That line is from 1949’s ‘‘Beyond the Forest,’’ by the way, for those of you keeping score at home.)
I was at Calvert Street to interview for an opening on The Sun’s sports desk. For the previous three years, I had worked at The Dallas Morning News, whose newsroom had just been remodeled. But even before the remodeling, it didn't look anything like the mess I saw in Baltimore: ancient wooden desks that looked as if Mencken himself had rested a cigar upon them, institutional metal furniture laden with bumper stickers, and exposed wires dangling from openings in the ceiling.
Those wires supported a balky editorial computer system, accessed by much of the staff via terminals with tiny screens you could cover with one hand. And you didn’t need Dr. J-sized hands, either.
I wasn’t looking for ambiance in a newspaper, however, and the chance to move near family, to have more influence in a sports department and to enjoy a significantly higher salary led me to join the morning newspaper as a slot man that May. (One condition of my hiring was that I start before the Preakness, so I was in place the week before the Kentucky Derby.)
It was a veteran desk when I arrived, with a few quirks. Stories were rarely cut by copy editors – if they didn’t fit, the trims happened in the composing room. Likewise, baseball roundups were pieced
together in composing. Each game story was typeset at full length. The lead game was usually whatever finished first. The Cubs, playing all those day games, led many a National League roundup, despite being mired in the lower reaches of the standings.
We had one older gentleman on the desk whose copy editing skills were such that we sought to limit his exposure. He had a perpetually hangdog face and moved around with a cane. On those occasions we would have to tell him he had committed mistakes on some piece of copy, his limp would become more pronounced when he got up from the desk.
However, when we let him leave for the night, if the arrival time of his bus home was near, he sprang to his feet, grabbed his cane and practically sprinted for the door.
Baltimore hadn’t yet killed off hockey in my early years at the paper, but we weren’t sending a reporter on the road to cover our minor league team, the Skipjacks. Reports on away games were compiled by having our man on hockey, Jim Jackson, listen to the radio broadcast at his desk. Jim was generally an easygoing sort, but one of the few things that would draw his ire was when the announcer didn’t give a complete accounting of a goal – he needed the time and those who assisted for his story.
(Another thing that would upset Jim is when someone would remove a reference book from his desk. He would loudly proclaim: ‘‘I hope whoever
Souvenir Ravens hat given out by The Sun.
Photo by Elizabeth Malby
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