Tue., Oct. 13, 2020, from "Connecting" newsletter of Associated Press retirees. Below posted by newsletter editor Paul Stevens:
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Good Tuesday morning on this the 13th day of October 2020.
Stripping the wire was once one of the major responsibilities in the newsrooms of AP and UPI bureaus and their newspaper and broadcast customers, back in the days of the Teletype.
The task often landed on the shoulders of the newest members of the staff. Or part-timers - like me.
Two of our colleagues – Tim Marsh and Paul Albright – shared their favorite memories of the task of taking stories off Teletype printers – and at newspapers, clearing and winding up the yellow reperf tape that allowed editors to set the stories into type instead of retyping them.
Got stories to share of your own experiences? Hope to hear from you. Yes, a trip down nostalgia lane...
https://conta.cc/37ebURl
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Tim Marsh - When I worked on The Observer daily newspaper in La Grande, Ore., the paper was UPI. Afternoon publication for afternoon/evening delivery.
We'd get to the office in the morning to rip the wire of stories that moved over the night. At the same time the stories were printed there was tape printed which was fed into (Compugraphic?) equipment which gave us hard copy to use in paste up.
But, sometimes the machine would jam. While the tape was printed OK, the paper feed would jam up and we didn't have stories to match up with the tape.
We'd call the UPI bureau in Portland and learn numbers associated with stories on tape. In other words, based on headlines and whatever else people at UPI Portland told us we'd sort of blindly pick stories to be printed for hard copy paste up.
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Paul Albright - My lasting impression of stripping the wires occurred in 1953 when I was a 17-year-old college freshman with a summer job as a copy boy at Denver’s “Rocky Mountain News.” A recurring task, of course, was for the copy boy to strip the AP, UP, and INS wires, shape the copy into a roll, and place it on the desk of the finicky wire editor. He would place the rolled-up wire copy in his lap and pull it forward to decide which articles were to be considered for publication and which were to be spiked.
All teletypes were in a small room between the AP’s night bureau and the newspaper’s telephone switchboard. The noise of ringing bells when bulletins and flashes were posted could be quite distinct across the newsroom.
I was stripping the machines on the night of June 19, 1953, when the teletype bells erupted with the Flash that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been executed. Then came more bells and short-sentence Bulletins reporting their execution at Sing Sing prison in New York for conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviets.
I recall being astonished at the bell ringing and the short dispatches. It was my first experience with breaking news. I hope I had the presence of mind to tear the copy off the AP printer and hand it to the wire editor. The rest is history!
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Photo: Mary Tyler Moore’s expression says it all for those of us who kept the newsroom teletypes in functional order.
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Source:
https://www.facebook.com/718157194/posts/10159802120352195/?extid=0&d=n
