Another typewriter silenced

Time ran out for a good man the other day. Lane Rogers was a writer and like most writers he didn't get rich but he lived a good life and made a lot of friends along the way. He wrote books and he wrote for newspapers and the latter job meant he was blunt and straight to the point. In the old days of hot metal and typewriters instead of computers there wasn't time to be any other way, not when you started your day with nothing but blank sheets of paper and had to fill every inch of that white space in five or six hours.
Most people would have found it an alien way of living, a pressure-cooker job where life wasn't measured in hours or days but in minutes. It didn't allow for idle moments or wasted words, not even for a please or a thank you. Those could come later when the pages were filled, the presses were running and someone in the newsroom would always say, "Well, we did it again."

Academics in their slower-paced world would sometimes say, "Oh my, he should have used 'were' instead of 'was' because they never had to pump adrenaline just to get those words on paper. No time for leisurely rewriting, looking things up or sitting back to ponder. Not when the minutes were ticking down to deadline. It was a wonderful way of life, but only for men and women without nerves or tender feelings. People who thought they were rude or lacked empathy or sympathy didn't know the nature of the job.
The majority of those I worked with have made their final deadline and now Lane Rogers has joined them. None were the sort of people who appreciated compliments because their praise came in a weekly paycheck. As long as those kept coming it meant they were doing OK. I'm sure, though, that none of them would mind hearing, "Good job." So good job, Lane.

www.dickstodghill.com