TEENAGE TYPESETTER ON THE NIGHT SHIFT: ASPIRATIONS

Sometime in the fall of 1979, I decided I wanted to write too. Mostly, the music critics were guys, except for Ariel Swartley (who was married to Kit Rachlis, the music editor) and Deborah Frost, who occasionally wrote lifestyle pieces. Ariel looked like a folkie, with smock tops, long brown hair and a nice smile. Deborah was, literally, the antithesis, with a shock of black hair, one lock bleached pink. She wore a black motorcycle jacket, black jeans, and usually dark glasses. Her copy was more frequent than Ariel's and usually had her own scrawled additions in the margins, along with Kit's edits, which meant one occasionally had to tilt one's head 90 degrees to get all the words in. Deborah (who later  became a friend) was extremely intimidating, but she set a good example on how to enter a room (scowling and talking). There was a photobooth snapshot of  her that hung in Ande Zellman's cubicle office on which she'd scrawled: The Fabulous Debulous par Scavullo! For the first few times I saw it I actually believed it was Francesco Scavullo's work -- she had that kind of style.

Another music critic was a tall graying fellow with glasses who looked like he could have been a poli-sci professor, but who was, in fact a lawyer: Mike Freedberg bonded with Milo early over a shared interest in dance music a/k/a boogie, get-down, R&B and is still a friend to this day. Bob Blumenthal was also a lawyer, although more clean-cut, and usually came in wearing a suit (which totally set him apart from the newsroom males, all of whom were dressed up if a shirt tail was tucked in). He had bright red hair, wire-rimmed glasses and a deep and intense knowledge of jazz. James Isaacs was still writing Cellars by Starlight then, but you never saw him unless Ande Zellman was working late.

The Phoenix, under Kit Rachlis's editorship covered a variety of music, Lloyd Schwartz wrote about classical music, Bob and Mike covered traditional and adventurous jazz (so did Paul D. Lehrman occasionally, more about him later). Pop, mainstream and edgy was also of interest. Kit had connections at Rolling Stone, and had written reviews, so we had pieces by John Morthland. Kit was also in intense competition with the eminence grise of pop criticism, Robert "Bob" Christgau. I don't believe Christgau ever, ever wrote a piece for the Phoenix, but I know he got it every week because Kit was canny about making sure subscriptions were sent to him as well as anyone who mattered in the music business. In my time as a teenage typesetter, I once picked up the phone and found legendary Columbia producer John Hammond at the other end of the line. He was calling for Kit and thank god I had the presence of mind to say, it is very cool to speak to you, the work you've done is just amazing (a rare moment of gush, since I tried to keep a game face in that place).

I also once typed a piece by Lester Bangs, which was memorable in that the type was so faint, one suspected Bangs last changed his typewriter ribbon sometime after the Beatles broke up. Yet the piece had been typed so vigorously that the circles in the 'o's and 'g's and 'p's were just angry dots. Under Kit's meticulously steady pencil excisions, this piece was about eight pages, but reduced to four and a half pages of copy as whole paragraphs had been sheared away, like calved glaciers,. I wish I'd saved the Bangs copy -- it was spirited off after it hit the manila file of "typed" items. Still, I can see it in my mind. He used the the wood-chip inflected paper that was usually used for carbon copies. Typing Bangs's copy, after reading his hysterical pieces about Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and heavy metal bands in my brother's copies of CREEM brought me tantalizingly close to someplace I did want to be. The Comp Shop was close to all that, and as much as I'd prefer to have been lurking around Kit's desk at the periphery, listening to the conversation, I had to earn a living, and so typing is what I did.

EATING
At night, there were a few places open. We frequently went to Despina's on Mass. Ave, a Greek subjoint. Because I was poor, and saving my money, I would basically eat half of a half of a sub, which meant someone had to buy the other 3/4s, and Milo was usually obliging. I remember living on apples back then, but also smoking more than was probably good for me. Despina's was good about getting you food quickly -- we had 45 minutes tops -- mostly, a half-hour, so we usually had a dinner break around 9 pm. That meant, if we didn't hustle back, the night would be even longer.  Milo and I were never organized enough to bring a meal in. And the prospect of spending the entire night in the Comp Shop wasn't attractive.

AKU AKU
This Polynesian restaurant was around the corner and it was not a good place to go for a quick bite for dinner. Before long, you'd settle into a seat, and someone would propose the first Scorpion bowl, and then you'd have to get another, while the crab rangoon and chicken fingers arrived, and there was no way you could type blind after that. Blind drunk, maybe. The Aku Aku had the dimmest lighting, the comfiest banquette seats and the Phoenix had a deep investment in the place in terms of scrip (scrip = credit in lieu of cash payment -- staff could save 40 percent or more by purchasing scrip from various advertisers). The "official" parties were staged her, as was the occasional Friday night blow-out. I do remember Aku Aku platters coming to the comp shop (probably left over from ad/sales or traffic) and dining on cold shrimp and feeling like I'd scored.

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TEENAGE TYPESETTER ON THE NIGHT SHIFT:  Clif Garboden, Supplements, Ellis the Rim Man and Me.
SUPPLEMENTS. No, not vitamins. By the dawn of the '80s it was clear that the Phoenix had a lot of business going on. Production did work for other businesses that needed graphic arts. We also typeset the Bay State Banner, and some college newspapers, including the Brandeis Justice. Milo called this the "Just Us," because the Phoenix, in some insane version of payback, hired out our typesetting and pasteup departments as mentors for Brandeis students putting together their student newspaper. I recall this as happening at least every other week during the school year, and it was really nuts, because these kids thought they could rewrite a story once it was on the boards. Some of them would stab themselves with the Exact-o blades (I remember screams, and blood on the floor), and our work included much babysitting along with getting their damn paper on the boards, in the boxes and out the door. The "Just Us" crew came in early in the week, before the real work started, but before long I noticed a disturbing frequency, and increase in number, of Supplements.

The Phoenix made money from ads, the Classifieds, the display ads, the movie ads, the record company ads, the Eastern Mountain Sports ad. Tons of ads filled the paper. But there were so many other customers out there that the Phoenix got in the habit of producing Supplements regularly. These were devoted to a variety of themes that Never. Seemed. To. End.

For example: Summer Preview -- easily three times as big as a regular paper. Or maybe the Band Guide (many, many thousands of free listings for bands, the tiny smeary columns of which were bordered by big, bold, smeary ads for music or pop culture related items.) Or Skiing. How about Audio or Automotive? We had a Tech Supplement that morphed into a PC supplement. All of these piles and packages of writing were stacked into the plastic envelopes bolted to the wall.

Behind the sea of  Supplements was a man I later came to know as a true hero, friend, mentor and sage. But as a teenage typesetter, my heart sank to see him. His advent in Production always meant More Effing Work. Yes, the Sea of Supplements was presided over by a young Clif Garboden, who first donned his natty beige invisible Superman cape and guided the gigantic teetering piles of copy into the Comp Shop, where we typesetters toiled (Rosie, Milo, Lisa, Karen), along with night-proofreader Donna Kay Williams, before her ascendancy to "8 Days a Week," an expanded listing feature.

Clif, like the other editors, wore soft-soled rubber shoes, and you only knew he was there by the cigarette smoke when he left. He worked incredibly fast, leaning over the tilted desk where the Boards were to scrawl a "cg" in the right top corner of each Proof. That meant, "take this one away, and bring on the next batch."

Other Supplements editors (Barbara Wallraff, then Tory Carlson, then Vicki Hengen) were hard working, but compared to Clif, they were mere mortals. I don't ever remember being at the Phoenix when a Supplement was hatching in Production and finishing a shift before Clif, who undoubtedly had been there all day anyway. He had some regular writers for the sections, though it wasn't uncommon to see an entire Supplement with just two or three bylines. (the most frequent bylines were those of E. Brad Miller, Paul D. Lehrman probably wrote 80 percent of all Supplement copy that was related to gizmos, gadgets, machines, and music items).

The concurrent proofing, pasting and checking had people hunched over the boards for long hours standing up. Somehow, a 24 or 32, 64, 128  page Supplement would be cruising alongside our typical week (Wednesday, Lifestyle and Listings, Thursday, Arts and more listings, Friday, news) like a giant white shark looming over a friendly pod of dolphins.

Back then, the Phoenix was free on college campuses, but cost a dollar in the stores. When there was a Supplement, people had to use two hands to heft these mighty wads of information from the shelf at Store 24. I tried not to huff and sigh along with Milo ("it's another gawd-DAMN supplement, grrrr" -- yes, he really said "grrrr" just like Scrooge McDuck, one of his heroes, along with Carl Barks). Mostly, I was grateful to have the work, ever-mindful that I was vulnerable, being the last person hired, the youngest, the "student," the expendable one.

Even with the extra work, after time, I noticed I was becoming a faster and more accurate typist with the punch tape. I learned how to input the codes, and became more adept on the editing machine, at least for simple galleys. The other typing, the galleys for ads that had a variety of type sizes and fonts, as well as line-lengths took a little longer. I got to work on those during weeks when there wasn't a Supplement, usually the dog days of summer. Superviser Karen Bitter eventually shifted to daytime work, and Mary Kinneavy, a tremendously sweet and kind person came in on the nightshift. Milo,  and Lisa Deeley Smith continued typing. Lisa did most of the ads the art department would hand over.

These, you had to translate, and read the font requests, the style (flush left, right, or centered), and any other particulars. There were "double truck" ads from businesses like Ellis the Rim Man who sold tires. Since there are a lot of different sized tires, these ads had hundreds of tiny numbers marching in antlike columns all over the pages. All those numbers had to be individually typed, and proofed. If the ad was reduced or changed in any way, it was shot on the photostat camera. You did not want an Ellis the Rim Man ad with lots of bits of type stuck to it with wax, which would eventually flake off.

Ellis the Rim Man, the Harvard Coop record ads and other big advertisers required skilled typing, which Karen and Lisa could do (amazingly, without once ever picking up a cigarette the way the rest of us did). So if you had a new Ellis the Rim Man ad, and a gigantic Supplement, plus the usual amount of ads from the art department, it was very, very tempting to go to the ladies room the long way, and walk through the newsroom and see what people had on their desks, or their walls. There, in the mostly quiet editorial room during the late evening, it was tempting to stand and survey the cluttered desks, each with a Selectric (except for Charlie Pierce who may have inherited Bob Sales' manual). What would it be like to be in Editorial, sitting at one of those desks, typing something that came out of your own brain? Not someone else's marked-up copy on a metal easel by one's side. I imagined this piece of writing that would, miraculously, leap over the pencils of editors to get on the Boards and onto the street.

But how to write? Where to start? The Phoenix had lots of short items that were contributed by staff. We also had a regular "listings" sections which encompassed everything from AA to Movie Listings, to Therapy. This was a broad subject under the aegis of the Phoenix as some therapists included a photograph in their ad which showed them dressed in thigh-high stockings and a theatrical mask. The text that was repeated, like Listings meant a particular piece of punchtape carried over from week to week, requiring only minimal editing for updates (bands for music venues, movies for theaters, or "cinemas," depending on where it was).

I could have looked around and decided to write something for Supplements. I'm sure Clif would have been open to it. But none of it struck me as an area I'd be comfortable passing myself off as an "expert." Certainly not Audio, nor Automotive (I'd wanted to live in Boston partly so I'd never have to drive). The prospect of a great big 800-word story on some aspect of fun in the warm weather for a summer preview piece was beyond my scope at that time.

Besides, Clif seemed to be full up. Each and every one of these gigantic sections seemed to spring newborn from his brain. He oversaw each Supplement with phlegmatic and low-key anxiety. Of course, he was always expecting something to fuck up, and he always knew he'd be the last man standing to get these damn things out the door. At one point, we had a Supplement on, of all things, Home Security -- it probably was Interior Design or something like that. Anyway, Clif had written a whole piece about locks on the home, window locks, etc. It was unusual for Clif to have a byline (beyond, of course the brilliant 7 pt Hot Dots television listing, which he also wrote for decades). Clif called the protagonist in his piece "Eric."

I think Milo was typing the piece initially, but I ended up reading it too since Milo kept chortling at the copy. This "Eric" seemed to have a lot of concern about making sure his locks were deadbolts and that his alarm system was reliable. Milo whispered to me, "Clif IS Eric." I remember looking over to the Boards. Clif was smoking -- as he always was -- holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger. If there had been a camera on the Boards pointing up at his face it would probably be clocking the rapid-movement of his eyes as he scanned copy he'd edited and proofed. Meticulous, exacting and tireless, Clif moved onto the next Board.

"He's fussy --" Milo whispered. "JUST LIKE ERIC!" And then Milo gave his characteristic snort of laughter. Clif probably looked up, registered an unusual sound, took the measure of the room as we hustled back to our terminals, and continued on with his page proofing.