The Ink Doesn't Wash Off

I remember the first time Dad escorted me through the press room.

He was Managing Editor of the Oroville Mercury-Register, a daily newspaper in northern California, and although the back of the building wasn't technically in his bailiwick, it was most definitely part of his empire.

Dad was a formidable man. A dead ringer for Ernest Hemingway, one look from beneath his hirsute brows could make a reporter cower. His suit jacket generally hung over his office chair, his tie loosened sometime during the day, probably while dealing with a recalcitrant columnist. His sleeves were rolled up against the ink of the proofs, and his cigarettes contributed generously to the permanent cloud of smoke that hung over the newsroom.

The owners and publisher could afford to be benevolent when they made their suited progress through the building. Dad was responsible for getting the paper out. Benevolence was a luxury he didn't always have.

But in the press room, things were different.

There, Dad was still the boss, but he was also a fisherman. He chased game fish off the coasts of Mexico and California and possessed the stories, true and otherwise, that come with the territory.

The men didn't particularly care who signed their paychecks. A good pressman was worth his weight in gold, and knew it. But they liked Dad's fish stories, and he liked telling them.

The press itself roared away in its cave, a monstrous contraption that seemed to occupy the entire building. Outside the double doors was the insert room.

And that, apparently, was where I belonged.

It was 1979. I was fifteen, a straight-A student with a considerable opinion of my own abilities, and Dad had arranged my first official job.

Unbeknownst to me, he was about to be promoted to Editor. Perhaps that explains his determination to avoid even the appearance of nepotism. Rather than putting his bright daughter somewhere she might learn about reporting or writing, he assigned me to stuffing advertisements into newspapers.

I don't recall being consulted, but $2.90 an hour would buy me books and music.

The insert room was hot, noisy and ugly.

The block walls had once been painted an industrial green, but decades of hand trucks and ink-smeared newspaper bundles had left little of the original color. The ceiling was baffled against the noise of the presses, an optimistic architectural gesture rendered useless by the swinging double doors.

You couldn't shush the thunder of a printing press. You could only become numb to it.

The women waiting for the next stacks of newspapers were sweating in the California heat. Halter tops, tube tops and T-shirts were acceptable work clothes, along with shorts of every length and varying opinions about the necessity of a bra.

I don't remember Dad introducing me. I remember him disappearing.

There I stood, suddenly alone among women who knew their jobs, knew one another, and apparently knew exactly what they thought of the managing editor's daughter.

I smiled hopefully.

Only one smiled back.

A young woman with a smoker's croak looked me over.

"Girl, you're going to get ink all over your nice top. You need to wear something old."

"Oh, it is old," I replied.

I was fifteen, naïve, and telling the truth. Most of my clothes were relatively new because I was in my final growth spurt, but the T-shirt wasn't particularly special.

The woman stared.

Another girl repeated my answer in a mocking little voice. The look they exchanged was unmistakable.

"Right," the first one said. "I just don't know why some rich kid wants to work here."

She turned toward her friend, but not before I caught the words, "...cutting into my hours."

Better and better.

You don't work at a newspaper if you love money.

I had never considered myself a rich kid. I was simply Dad's daughter, and until that moment it hadn't occurred to me that the distinction might matter to anyone.

Nearly fifty years later, I don't remember every detail of that Saturday. I won't pretend I do. But I remember the heat, the noise, the embarrassment, and the dreadful realization that I was unwelcome.

And I remember Cricket.

I never knew her real name or how she'd earned the nickname, but she wasn't unlike a cricket. Small and spry, with dust-colored hair and bland, light brown eyes, she seemed ancient to me at perhaps thirty-eight.

Cricket was the woman who had smiled.

She showed me how to arrange the newspaper sections into separate stacks: news, sports, shopping supplements, coupons, and those slick, brightly colored advertisements that seemed almost as cheerful as the Sunday funnies.

The job required a rhythm. Take a section from one stack, another from the next, add the advertisements, assemble the whole business, and move on.

Experienced hands could do it almost without looking.

Mine could not.

I scattered my carefully arranged piles. I dropped sections. I lost my place and had to begin again. Every mistake seemed to take place under the disapproving eyes of Denise and her friend.

By the end of the shift, I had demonstrated that nobody's hours were in danger.

But Cricket had made me her pupil, and I clung to her gratefully.

If not for Cricket, I might have gone home and refused to return. If not for Dad, I almost certainly would have.

His disapproval was scarier than a couple of bullies.

I wonder now whether he knew what he'd sent me into.

He understood the newspaper business from the editorial offices to the loading dock. He knew the men who ran the presses and the people whose work was invisible to readers. He knew that a newspaper wasn't made by an editor alone, however grand the title might sound.

Perhaps he wanted me to understand that, too.

Or perhaps he simply needed to find his daughter a summer job without anybody accusing him of favoritism.

Both explanations sound like Dad.

At fifteen, I couldn't have imagined that I was being introduced to a world I would eventually enter from another direction.

Dad continued making newspapers.

He became Editor of the Mercury-Register and remained in the business until his retirement in the mid-1980s. There was a tremendous party to celebrate the end of his career, the sort of occasion that suggested a man had left a considerable mark on his profession.

He died in 1999.

By then, I had long since established a life of my own.

I did not become a journalist.

I graduated high school, had a ten-minute Army career and a fifteen-minute first marriage. Met Mr. Right and we raised our family while I worked retail midnight shifts to stretch the childcare dollars.

When the kids were older, I built a career in banking. I learned other kinds of deadlines, other kinds of responsibility, and the difficulties of working with fraud victims who didn't always appreciate being told what they needed to hear.

All along the way, I wrote. Poems, short stories, letters to the editor, carefully worded notes to teachers. Words were my first choice of weapons, my favorite means of entertainment, and sometimes the only way I could make sense of the world.

When a particularly juicy crime occurred in our little corner of the world, I even published one terrible novella—wisely under a pen name.

It wasn't good, but it was mine.

Writing was what I wanted to do. What I'd always wanted to do. But there were children to raise, bills to pay, and a career that demanded my attention. I understood that seriously pursuing writing might have to wait until retirement.

So, I kept writing when I could, and earning a living doing something else.

The years passed. Our children grew up. My career continued and eventually I retired.

And at last, I could give writing the attention I'd wanted to give it for most of my life.

Then, at sixty-two, in one of those turns life takes without consulting anyone, I was offered the position of Managing Editor after seven months writing for a local paper.

The same title Dad held when he walked me through the press room nearly fifty years ago.

I accepted.

The newspaper business has changed almost beyond recognition since that Saturday in 1979.

The presses are no longer roaring in the back of the building. The cigarette smoke is gone. The photographs arrive electronically, and stories can be published online before the ink would once have dried.

But there are still deadlines. There are still reporters and editors trying to get the facts right, still stories that deserve telling, and still communities that need someone to pay attention.

There are still people doing the unglamorous work that makes a newspaper possible.

I think about Cricket sometimes.

I wonder whether she ever knew how much her small kindness meant to a frightened girl who had been deposited in a room full of strangers.

I wonder whether Dad knew.

And I wonder what he'd think of me now.

I wish I could tell him about the position. About the newspaper in a little West Virginia town he'd surely never heard of, and the people who work so hard to keep it alive.

I wish I could tell him about the stories I've written, the people I've met, and the surprising pleasure of finding myself in a newsroom at an age when most people are thinking about leaving the workforce.

Mostly, I wish I could tell him my new title.

I can picture those shaggy eyebrows shooting up, I can imagine the questions, the dry observations, perhaps some pointed advice about excellent writing and meeting deadlines.

I can almost hear his voice.

But almost is a difficult word when you've been missing someone for twenty-seven years.

Sometimes I think about that fifteen-year-old girl standing in the insert room, embarrassed and frightened, watching her father disappear through the double doors.

She had no idea where her life would take her. She certainly didn't imagine that one day she'd occupy a chair like his.

And he had no way of knowing that the daughter he'd sent to the bottom of the newspaper operation would someday find her way to the top of another.

It took me nearly fifty years to follow him.

Dad, I finally made it to the newsroom.

I wish you were here to see it.