…from the treasure chest that is my Guest Blog inbox today, comes a terrific gem from my pal, Mary Miraglia… the piece revolves around the idiosyncrasies of an instantaneously recognizable workplace environment, whether yeez have ever been on a journalist’s chair or any other workplace office… hilariously bang on the button… LUV IT! … enjoy…
I went to work at The Ridgewood News when I was 25, had a 4-month old infant, and realized I was going stir crazy.
I knew somebody who knew somebody who told me about this job that paid ridiculously low wages, and it was two days a week. I attended the job interview with my baby boy on my knee.
Fortunately, the woman’s editor was a wonderful woman who loved kids, and she was also ready to hired just about anybody breathing who could construct a sentence. I had NO EXPERIENCE, nor had I ever even taken a journalism class. But it worked out.
It was the craziest place to work. This is the first of a series of sketches I intend to write about the more unusual people and events there. The next one will be about the executive editor, Joe King. He was a notorious drunk but he could out-write all of us at the same time.
I hope you like it.
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Pete the Janitor — A Tale of Characters from a Small-Town Newspaper
By Mary K. Miraglia
Whenever I think of The Ridgewood News, I wonder how I ever — anything. Ever landed there, ever was at home in the barely controlled chaos, ever prospered. It was big, noisy, and very, very busy. But there was purpose, announced with cloying regularity on deadline days by a loud, piercing bell on the dumb waiter to the composing room upstairs.
It was sink, swim, or stay under the radar.
The most under-the-radar person in the building was Pete the janitor. Pete wore overalls. In the 40+ years I’ve been on the East Coast, Pete is the only person I have seen wearing overalls to work. He wore a striped railroad man’s cap. And I guess a plaid shirt. Pete was Pigpen grown up, but with hair. He walked around with puffs of smoke over his head like the character in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
Pete traveled through the building as if he were 105 years old, and had nothing to do. After some time, I came to realize he was about 40-something. And he was the champ at never being where he was supposed to be.
Ridgewood News had a policy that turned into large piles of newsprint copy accumulating in just about every available unused space. There were essentially three departments: news, sports, and women. Oh and a corner for cultural events called, painfully, “Events.” This copy was kept in case of errors, and was supposed to be discarded after three months, but it almost never was. It just piled up until the stack was so high you couldn’t put any more on it.
Now, I’m not a neat freak but these piles bugged me, especially after they’d accumulated a half inch of dust. So I would throw them out and dust. I came to believe that I was moved from one desk to another, just so I WOULD clean up, because surely no one else did, especially Pete. In fact, when we were having candidates for governor in for a pre-election Editorial Board interview, the assistant news editor cleaned the single bathroom herself, just in case.
I’ll never forget the first time I asked Pete for a dust cloth. It was my first job at RN, and I was the food editor. I had to interview a local cook once a week, hopefully an interesting local cook. I had to get a recipe, and assign a photo for the Sunday feature. And most importantly, the cook interviewed had to live in one of the 14 towns in our coverage area. The stories were very popular, especially with our grocery advertisers. In between I was allowed to edit announcements submitted by an insatiable public. Those announcements came in the mail, were doled out by the assistant news editor, and put into newspaper “style” and readable prose by gnomes like me. After publication, they turned into those dust-covered piles.
The woman I followed in the job had almost never sat in the woman’s department, which was two desks in a bumped-out corridor between the Print Shop and the news room. There was a lot of foot traffic and a lot of dust from constant people passing through, and from the diesel buses that stopped outside. I didn’t like getting my cuffs grimy; I was cleaning up.
About that time Pete ambled through with a roll of cloth towels, destined for the single restroom. “Pete,” I said, “can I have a dust cloth? I have to get this mess cleaned up.” He stopped, a look of utter disbelief on his face. And looked. Finally he said “Got a scissor?” I handed him a big pair of office shears and watched him cut the selvage, rip off the end of the towel, and hand it to me.
Whatever works.
The newsroom was really big with very high ceilings, and a support post in the middle of the room. Desks were somewhat organized by function, and the rest of the furnishings resembled a college student’s apartment. There were shelves made of wood and bricks or cinder blocks here and there, to act as storage for more “killed copy.” There were piles and piles and piles of it everywhere; I was the only person who ever bothered to throw any of it away.
After a year my days were increased, and I was made General Assignment reporter on the days I wasn’t interviewing cooks. GA is the best assignment in a small newspaper, but I didn’t know it. I’d get farmed out for anything and everything — Events, lame editorials, obits, the truly thankless job of reporting the town of Saddle River, and breaking news. Breaking news was a national development, like Nixon declaring peace or the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing abortion, that wasn’t specific to a town that had its own reporter. We’d take the copy off the UPI machine, get the facts, and then call local officials we knew we could count on for decent quotes. It was called a “roundup,” and was intended to give the “local angle” on big news. When I worked GA I sat in the big newsroom, with the real reporters — about 18 or so of them — the news editors, the assignment editor, and the executive editor, who was an old sports reporter from The New York Herald.
Sitting in the newsroom doing roundups, I could see Pete’s travels up close, and I discovered there was something Pete was very good at: avoiding work. Pete would never vacuum unless the newsroom was busy, preferably very busy, and that meant deadline. On deadline day he’d drag out the ancient vacuum, set it up between the main door and the switchboard, and vacuum the same 2’ x 3’ spot, apparently oblivious to the fact a lot of people were trying to go in and out the door. After about 20 minutes Gordon Murphy, the assignment editor, had enough. “Pete!” he’d bellow. “Knock it off and come back later.” And he would — two weeks later.
The Events editor was my good friend, and way overqualified. She landed at RN the same reason I did — her husband was a professor at a state college. She had a graduate degree in English from the University of Chicago. So it was predictable she was promoted to News Editor, and the Events desk was empty. That was where I usually got to sit on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Since the building was built on a steep hill, the height between the floor and the windows varied with the slope, and the radiator under the window in Events was a tall one. On top of the radiator was a wooden plank, covered with piles of “killed copy” close to three feet high. They were perilously close to falling over, but I was on my fourth filthy desk in the newsroom and hadn’t gotten to it yet.
This afternoon I was minding my own business working on a community news editorial, meaning I was greatly put upon writing something I thought should never see the light of day, but someone was paying me [very little] to crank it out, so I was.
About 2 o’clock Pete suddenly showed up with a very tall step ladder, set it up by the radiator between the Events desk and the proofreaders’ area, climbed it and started screwing around with the cords on the ancient venetian blind. He looked at the mechanism, squinting through glasses, then started pulling the cords this way and that. His face started to get red from the exertion, but nothing worked. Not pulling, not releasing, nothing. Pete continued to yank on the cords, and I decided to move away.
I hadn’t the chance to sit when I felt a disturbance behind me and turned, just in time to see Pete go off the ladder. I could see where he was heading, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. He came down at the end of the radiator, hit the plank with his butt, and leveraged the whole mess into the air. Papers, dust, wooden plank and Pete flew into the air, papers and dust filling the air. There was stunned silence throughout the room as everyone heard the commotion, stopped working long enough to figure out what had happened, and then pretended to get furiously back to work to cover up clandestine laughter.
I’m sure Pete was bruised but luckily he wasn’t badly hurt. Gordon came over to help him up and see if he was injured. Everything settled down, back to normal. On the other hand, a couple of years’ worth of junk paper was scattered all over that end of the office.
Guess what? I didn’t pick it up!
Mary K. Miraglia
Photojournalist
NNJ Content Management Professionals
mkmiraglia@yahoo.com
NNJ Content Management Professionals
mkmiraglia@yahoo.com
…fabulous post, many thanks, m’Lady, Mary… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…
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Wonderful 🙂
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You painted a fabulously humorous and interesting picture of the Ridgewood News workplace, Mary. That was great. Thanks, Seumas, for having Mary as your guest. 🙂 — Suzanne
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