Remembering The Register

What it was like to be a cub on a great small-town newspaper -- that is no more

This photo was taken around 1979, many great people included, many from that creative troupe outside of the frame, some still with us, some not. The guy with the goatee, to the right of the parking sign, is a young me.

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The Register, as a newspaper, is no more.

Published continuously on Cape Cod since 1836, its pages had been filled with everything from doings of the abolitionist movement to county fair blue ribbon winners, codfish and bean suppers, shipwrecks, cotillions, notes from trenches in World War One and ship decks in World War Two, the minister’s weekly messages, small-town political harangues, lists of honor roll students, cranberry prices, planning board decisions, village gossip, elections town and national, high school sports, engagements, weddings, classified ads, legal notices, obituaries. And then some.

My first job as a journalist, 1976, was as a cub reporter for The Reg, which already was 140 years old when I showed up as an idealistic, arrogant would-be journalist who years later became its editor-in-chief for a little while. So the death of this print publication is personally tragic, and I know scores of journalists, graphic artists, and ad reps (for whom The Register was an early rung on brilliant career ladders) who would agree.

They say The Register will continue online though its print life ended two weeks ago. But the paper already was so diminished, no longer locally owned or independent, journalistic resources gutted, that it had long been on life support, vital functions barely Registering (so to speak). I don’t believe whatever maintains will be an impactful participant in this community, certainly not offering hard-won insights and national awards for work like unraveling complicated land deals or revealing interlocking nursing home ownerships.

Much has been written about the dire condition of American journalism, especially print, so I won’t pile on. Instead I’ll get sentimental and share memories of what it was like to work for a small, ambitious, country newspaper not long ago, though it seems I’m harkening back multiple generations.

For starters, there was a funky little newsroom.

It was an aerie on the second floor of a weathered, shingled Colonial in the historic section of Yarmouthport along Route 6A, above Arthur Connelly’s General Store where Jack Smith lovingly insulted everybody at a small lunch counter, wafts of grilling burgers a serious distraction. So too was the clatter of four standard typewriters, bells dinging at the end of each line, returning carriages slammed, fresh paper ratcheted into rollers as stories grew page by page.

We were would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins bringing truth, justice, and the American Way to communities begun by Puritans, covering historic towns confronting subdivisions. No advertiser was gonna tell us what to write, no selectman was gonna tell us what not to write, and no developer was gonna bulldoze the First Amendment. But we knew enough about our readers to print the week’s elementary school lunches and impending church potlucks.

Dana Hornig the editor and Barry Paster the publisher must have had second thoughts hiring me. In my first week Dana gave me a press release about a Memorial Day ceremony I was supposed to turn into newspaperese. I got out my pen and pad of paper and started working. Soon Barry peered down at me, standing beside my little desk, tugging nervously at his short brown beard.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Working on something about Memorial Day.”

“No, I mean what are you doing with that pen and paper?”

I just looked at him because it was obvious what I was doing.

“Don’t you compose on the typewriter?” he asked.

“Never have,” I said. “I write it out and then type. I create better that way -- actually, it’s the only way I’ve ever done it.”

He shook his head. “You won’t have time for that, man. Write on the typewriter.”

When I turned in my “story” Dana read it, marked it up with a fat red pencil, and said, “That’s fine, except I’m cutting the last two paragraphs about how ironic it is that we celebrate Memorial Day because so many soldiers died in vain and so many more would rather forget their horrible experiences and how it’s certain that most of the people marching in our parades did nothing heroic.”

“But all that’s true,” I protested.

“I appreciate that,” he sighed, “but let’s pick our spots, OK?”

I took the copy, as I learned it was called, and tromped down steep stairs to deliver it to Ruth in the production room behind the general store. She was a Thatcher, which meant she belonged to as deep a European family as they go on Cape Cod. She spoke in a way distinct from Bostonians though similar, lengthening vowels, knocking off end consonants, giving voice to the landscape with her low rolling paragraphs and prickly pine punctuation. I came to love, admire, respect, and lean on her.

“He cut the best part,” I muttered.

“That happens,” she said, and in the time it took me to turn my back she input my deathless three paragraphs into a clattering machine, fingers typing faster than shorebirds pecking at silverfish. Justified columns emerged from the Rube Goldberg monster, but even more amazing was the perfection. Typos were so rare they occasioned hushed wonders; maybe Ruth had a cold or something was bothering her at home.

I learned I could compose on a keyboard but needed to pace as I wrote. Fortunately I was the only one who did because otherwise we would have been bumping into each other. 

“Would you please just sit down and write?” Dana asked, slamming out an obituary before turning to an editorial castigating selectmen for conducting business behind closed doors.

“I can’t just sit, I’m sorry,” I said, scratching my beard. He wasn’t really exasperated; I wasn’t really sorry.

“I got film,” said John Riley, the other reporter, much older and more experienced, meaning he was like 28 and had a law degree. His comment was for me too, because as soon as I turned in my stories I’d head for the darkroom and open film canisters in a glorified closet, a blind man using a can opener like flipping a beer cap, pulling out exposed film and threading it by feel onto spools inside black plastic tubs, dunking them in developer that chewed away at the skin around my fingernails, fixing the film at 8 minutes and praying I didn’t screw up -- or we’d have no photos.

Dana would create a run-list, every story for the week, word counts included. Then he would “dummy,” meaning divide sheets of regular paper into three columns, 16 blocks per column, each block representing an inch of newsprint, each representing a page of newsprint, and sketch where he wanted stories to be placed from pages 1 to 32. Barry positioned ads on those sheets, offering people who were paying the bills good exposure without relegating the editorial work to second-class status.

Dummies complete, we’d deliver the templates down the steep stairs and join the art and production team, Jane or Laureen, Linda or Cressy, with stalwart ad reps like Heather and Janice, Ginny and Ann swooping in to proofread. We’d stand in front of makeup tables backlit with fluorescent tubes behind glass fronts, angled so you could stand and work.

Xacto knives, scissors, rollers, gluepots that would make you high if you kept them open, clotheslines hung with stories as they rolled off Ruth’s magic fingers. A modified hot plate heated chunks of milky wax to melting -- feeding copy face-up through its rollers applied wax to the back of the columns. You could then lay the copy onto flats, big sheets the size of real newspaper, wax allowing you to remove and stick again if everything wasn’t quite straight. 

Red patches lay where the photos I’d just printed would go, “stripped” into holes the patches made when the pages were prepared for plates. Boldface captions stretched like bits of string. When a page was complete a rubber roller pressed hard over a clean sheet of protective paper, setting the wax. Then the sheets were packed into a leather portfolio like artists used to carry -- the paper put to bed. 

Long past sunset, a six-pack empty, elbows rubbed, flirtations extended, pages made their way into the portfolio. Barry came to trust me so I would sometimes lay the precious package in the back of my Fiat, make sure I had enough coolant so the engine wouldn’t overheat from a blown head gasket, and drive dark roads, threading Colonial facades to Ralph Richardson’s home in Dennis. The expression of tears and fears, blood turned ink-black, was dumped in Ralph’s garage that never was locked.

He was the head printer of a shop in Orleans with offset presses that disgorged eight pages at a time, thunking monoliths that Ralph calibrated to tiny fractions of an inch so marching ants of copy walked clean. Early the next morning he would shepherd the flats to Orleans in his pickup, wondering what the hell trouble those kids in Yarmouth were getting into this week, who they were gonna piss off (someone he’d no doubt see at the coffeeshop the next day).

But he handled the paper like a godchild, and the delivery system never failed to the moment it became moot, buttons on keyboards replacing turn signals.

Doesn’t all this seem amazingly arcane, and impossible? Gluepots, waxing machines, red patches, xacto knives, standard typewriters? Yet that’s how it was, not for some long-gone Civil War folk but for people still standing among us.

And all that existed only so an amazing thing could happen: Small-town journalism.

NEXT: HOW THAT BRAND OF INTIMATE JOURNALISM PLAYED OUT

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