At least we all got out alive ....

Too much time went down the drain yesterday while searching for a scrap of paper, carefully filed years ago, now apparently lost.

Here's a life lesson: Don't start new filing systems every few years then abandon them and box up the results with everything trapped inside.

But this snapshot did turn up, so there's been a small return on time invested. I have no idea quite how old it is, but it's been a while --- everyone here is older now, the vintage desks were sent away many years ago and the computer setup is obsolete.

This was the copy desk of the Globe-Gazette in Mason City, taken at a time when every aspirational newspaper had a copy desk. As editors, our goal was to make life so miserable for reporters that they eventually bent themselves to our will.

Many years later, I'm not sure that this many people even work in the newsroom of that newspaper and there is no such thing as a copy desk. What those who work there now write bounces electronically elsewhere (not to India, but that may be next) to be dealt with, everything's assembled somewhere else, the result goes to Des Moines where it is printed and the result is trucked back to North Iowa. When this was taken, the process started every morning in the newsroom and ended late that night in the press room at the other end of the building.

Everyone here got out alive as newspapers crumbled --- and we still are. We were (from left) Frank Myers, Doug Hines, Mary Ellen Miller, R. Webb Cole and Julie Birkedal. Frank and Mary Ellen are here in the south of Iowa, Doug I think still is in Waterloo, and Webb and Julie, still in Mason City.

Those were good days and I was happy to find the photograph. Now if only I'd been able to break John of the destructive habit of using the word "irony" incorrectly....