posted 3/ 20 / 13
Before the beginning

When Stephen started "Boston After Dark" I was in kindergarten, but definitely was aware of the paper during my childhood because my dad frequently brought it home. We were a multiple-newspaper household, since my dad had a very glamorous job as the film critic for the Boston Herald Traveler -- then the top newspaper in Boston. (We were a three-newspaper town back then, and on Sundays, I remember we always got the Herald and the New York Times and the Worcester Telegram, and then my aunt Irene's copy of the Hearst-owned Record-American, which she got for the racing news and which my brother Hal Cragin preferred because how can you beat three pages of color comics? We liked Hirschfeld's "Nina" drawings, but didn't see the point of the NYT otherwise).

I never understood "B.A.D" or why one spelled out the letters, versus saying them outloud, but I remember meeting Stephen at intervals during my childhood and young personhood at opening nights in Boston. My mom always joked that he told her he liked her best because they were eye-to-eye (literally -- my mom is about 5'2").

In May of 1979, I finished freshman year at Boston University, and made plans to spend the summer at my dad's Henchman Street flat in the North End. I'd been a typesetter at the Daily Free Press, so I had some skills, but for some completely idiotic reason, I decided to look for waitressing jobs (figuring there were a lot more restaurants, there were tips involved, and completely forgetting that in the 2 years I worked at the family dry cleaning business, I loathed dealing with the public). Fast forward a few frustrating weeks later. My dad, in his inimitable way, got movie passes to the opening of "The Bell Jar," a godawful movie about Sylvia Plath. There was Stephen, and I discovered that I, too, was eye-to-eye with him. He asked me what my plans were and I said I didn't have a job, but I'd been typesetting at the Freep. His eyes lit up. "You should come work for me!" he said. I remember my mood lifted appreciably. (to be continued....)
posted March 17, 2013
GETTING TO THE NIGHT SHIFT

On June 4, 1979, I was assigned space on the day shift. What I didn't know is that the day shift was actually over-populated, and though there wasn't a lot of work for me, apparently the word had come down to give me some hours. Typing then was the opposite of typing now. Now, you can see your letters, change your font, the size, flushing copy right, left or center. Back then, those commands all needed to be input with specific codes, and the Phoenix typeface then was Palatino (it later changed to Malibu). Those codes needed to be input along with the words. We worked at desk-top metal Compugraphic machines with a reel on the right side. These were similar to a movie projector with no "uptake" reel. A large spool of yellow paper tape fed through a slot above the middle of the keyboard, and then, as you typed, each letter or number was "punched" in a different six-dot vertical configuration. This punchtape looped on the floor in a heap, giving unmistakable evidence of one's industry (or glaring lack thereof).

I remember my delight realizing after months that I could "read" some of this gobbledygook, making it easier to find one's place (experienced typesetters suggested you finish the damn paragraph before taking a bathroom or smoke break). After you finished typing, you had the pleasure of threading your heap of paper tape onto an empty spool mounted on a metal pedestal with a handle. All that typing -- what seemed like hours and hours of typing -- instantly spiraled into a yellow paper disc. It was always so tempting to fling it in the air and yell  "Happy New Year!"  It was very, very, very tempting to spin that spool many more times than it needed to create a little "whippita-whippita" sound as the end of the tape flew, but I stopped that after my finger caught in the spool and I screamed in pain. A very odd day-shift typesetter named Jane Sexton laughed, and thought that was really funny. I thought I didn't like the day shift very much. But there I was. 

Once we had rolled up our spiral, we wrote the name of the story on the end because that little length of punchtape resembled all the other little lengths of punchtape produced in the course of an evening. These precious little streamers were hung on hooks on a board, until they were ready to be edited.

Had enough of typesetting history? Oh, wait, there's more. What did you do if your length of paper tape had errors? Or, like mine so often was, perforated with errors, mistypings, making a misteak making a mistake and so forgetting forgettttttting where you ended typpppping and starting over again?

Why then, you threaded that punchtape into a larger terminal, this one with a tiny red squinty screen that may have had as many as 32 characters running across. This terminal created a new, perfect punchtape as you typed in corrections. If I had time, and people were on break, I'd get my ragged little bits into the machine (once I was told how it worked) and destroyed the evidence. Voila, a perfect "first pass" of typesetting.

The finished yellow punchtape was fed into another machine, which produced the "cold type" of galleys. These were put into a chemical bath and then hung, like laundry, to dry in the cubicle adjoining the photostat ("stat") camera. The stat camera was its own artform. This device reduced photographs to pixillated collage, and those could be expanded or reduced as needed. The stat camera was operated by MaryAnne Williamson (M.A.) who was masterful at making images for ads as well as turning movie 8 x 10s into images to run along Stephen Schiff or David Chute's film review.

My dad, the old journalist, was always looking for something to lament in the era of journalism I was coming to inhabit. "None of these people know about hot type," on the rare occasion I'd allow him to enter my workplace. "So what?" I'd think. What we were doing was completely hands-on. We were producing galleys, from writing that had been edited and re-edited in the other room. We'd hand-type it, and then Jeffrey Gantz, the mysteriously flawless proofreader would go over copy that had already had at least six sets of eyes on it and find errors! These, we'd correct with a line of type, and many of us had bits of waxed phrases or words attached to our clothes.

By the way, this system of turning words on pages ("hard copy") into words formatted into columns ("galleys") is incredibly frustrating unless you are an exceptional typist like Lisa Deeley Smith or a perfect typist like Karen Bitter. For me, it was disasterville, because I was used to my manual typewritter (a Hermes desk model), and the electronic keys were more sensitive. I learned I had to slow my typing way down, not to have it riddled with errors.

About 10 days into my tenure as a day-typesetter, I got a call from a nurse at New England Medical Center. She told me my father had had a massive heart attack and was in the ICU but he was currently stable. I had only just arrived at work, and I took this call from the phone on the wall directly above Jeffrey's desk. (How he endured all that cord-twisting that happened when people made calls around his monkish lair, I can't imagine). Jeffrey asked me if everything was okay and I said, "no, not really," and told him about the call. I said, "So, I guess I should go back to work?" (I was 18 at the time). He said, "No, absolutely not, go to the hospital. NOW!" For once, I used the subway (I had been used to walking from the North End to 100 Mass. Avenue to save the 50 cents the train cost).

I think Jeffrey must have told Karen who then told Dennis, the production manager and I didn't go into work for a few days and when they called me back it was for my true home: the night shift (to be continued).


March 18, 2013
TEENAGE TYPESETTER ON THE NIGHTSHIFT and RADIO WARS

Sometime in the summer of 1979, I was offered the opportunity to work part-time on the night shift: 3 to 11 pm. I think I did this four days a week, all the while attending geology classes at Boston University. B.U. had a nasty habit of raising their tuition $500 or $1000 a semester, and in my sophomore and junior years, this meant I was also trying to rack lots of hours. This was reckless, and ultimately a mistake, as I left school at the end of Junior year.

Of course starting at 3 pm wasn't really possible, what with late hours and the 90 minute walk from the North End to 100 Mass. Ave. (to save 60 cents on the subway). And "11" was seldom the case except early in the week. We'd go to midnight easily enough. The Phoenix published on Saturday, which meant that all the boards (finished pages), all the art, and those miles of classifieds (then part of the paper which was, my journalist father observed, probably the most lucrative part) had to be packed in their boxes before being driven to the printer (Deedee Freedberg can speak to this!)

The nightshift crew consisted of Lisa Deeley Smith, a serene woman with long brown hair and glasses who was also a student at Harvard Divinity School, supervisor Karen Bitter, who was much kinder and more tolerant of my shenanigans than I deserved, and a guy from Livingston, Montana: Milo Miles. Milo had long hair, and a beard, and usually a corduroy jacket over a shirt with a swirly pattern, and flare jeans, and silver rings on many fingers and a genuine tiger-claw pendant on a necklace he'd show you if you asked.

 "Yeass, yesss, I've heard all the jokes," Milo would say, "Milo-" and Lisa would cut in: "Minderbinder," and someone would sing, "Moving to Montana," and Milo would retort, "Yeass, yeasss, going to raise some dental floss--yeah, great song, Frank Zappa, but if you haven't heard Captain Beefheart you don't know where Zappa's coming from..."

Milo was, in short, a marvel. Nowadays, the western world hears him opining on World Music for four or so minutes on Fresh Air periodically, but in the era of the night shift, he was the authority on all kinds of music. He'd worked for a record store when he was in college in Missoula, and was the first (so he told us) person to stock any African pop records in the entire state. Looking back, I'd love to know who his equivalent was in Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas but I'm quite certain that Milo stood alone as a rare music appreciator. He also appreciated other things: detective novels of the 1940s (not cool again yet), underground comics, dinosaurs (because the Miles family owned 3000 or something acres of farmland and his dad had found T-rex bones and cemented them along the driveway at the family home. He liked Indian food, Japanese food, Chinese food, and barbeque, all cuisines that had yet to arrive in my hometown of Lunenburg, Mass.

So...what's a guy like this doing in the production department, instead of out front, in the newsroom? There they had windows for goddsakes, whereas the entire production department languished in the interior of the building, with only the fire escape for those who needed fresh air, or a safe place to smoke a doobie.

Well, Milo had every intention of being IN the paper and not just responsible for producing it, and during the summer of 1979, he was working on getting an assignment from music editor Kit Rachlis. And I am proud to say I was there for that first assignment which was, I believe, a short review of "Lust for Life," by Iggy Pop. (In a bizarre example of 'small worldism," my brother Hal Cragin, started playing with Iggy in 1992, and recently produced a record of Iggy singing in Spanish. I haven't heard whether Milo likes this or not...)

Milo was interested in all aspects of pop culture -- and at some point during that traumatic summer, when my dad spent literally months having his coronary plumbing rearranged -- I stopped going home to Henchman Street in the North End, and found it easier to get to night shift typesetting from Milo's  three-room apartment in Cambridgeport Since it was the two of us, we weren't usually late, and Karen found it difficult to be angry with Milo, who was lively, charming, a decent typist and willing to out-mutter anyone.

RADIO WARS
WCOZ, WBCN, WXKS (KISS). How tragic that only KISS-108 prevails these 34 years later. The day shift  in the art department, which adjoined the production seemed chamber, seemed to prefer the uptempo, and unabashed disco of KISS-108. Whereas the night shift art department (including Caryn Hirsch, Cliff Smythe and probably Brian Codagnone, though he was the quietest) were more drawn towards the authentic Bawstin-rock of BeeeCeeYEN. Every now and then, one of the art department people insisted on WCOZ, but they'd always play some stinker of a song, or lard the airwaves with ads, that WBCN usually won out. I seem to remember (Ma)Donna Donovan, a fetching blonde who dated David Bieber was loyal to the station. This is before WFNX, which was, before that, WLYN, which I remember came along about the time that Production upgrade to VDTs (with square black screens and one could actually SEE what one was typing!). More to come...

Post-script
Oddly enough, I don't remember there being a record player in the joint. Strange, when considering how many dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes from Columbia, Polygram, MCA, Warner, Chrysalis, and then all the indy labels flooded into the mailroom. So many, they'd be stacked in leaning stacks. Kit Rachlis was the music critic then, and I remember seeing him carrying an armload back to his cubicle, and patiently and diligently slicing open the mailing tape. Once you got the day's haul of records out, you still had a giant pile of cardboard, and I don't remember any recycling back then.