My journalism journey, part 4

Adventures in Montana as my journalism journey continues

So I made it to Montana in one piece, after a long journey of 1,500 miles from Algonquin, Illinois. My little Ford Escort wagon didn’t like the trip over Homestake Pass coming into Butte. It groaned all the way and also seemed to overheat. But I got there, and the next day I got the rest of my money for moving expenses so I could find a place to live. I didn’t have any furniture other than a rocking lawn chair. I had a sleeping bag and a blow-up air mattress (nothing like the Aerobeds of today). That would have to do for a couple of weeks until I got my last check from my former employer to buy a bed.

I found an apartment from a sweet woman who owned a little grocery store. It was the first floor of a house. I gave her a month’s rent and promised her the security deposit when I got paid. She was very nice about it because she knew my editor, Wally Mundstock, and his wife, Margie. Wally and Margie and their daughters  would become my family, and Margie would be like a mom to me, even though she was just about 10 years older than me. We would become very good friends over the years.

I arrived right around St. Patrick’s Day, which I learned was a big deal in Anaconda. There was a large Irish population in Butte and Anaconda; the Irish settled in the area and worked the copper mines in Butte and the smelter in Anaconda. So on Saturday, I had my first assignment: shoot the Ancient Order of Hibernians’ parade up the hill to the courthouse.

Now, I had only been in town a couple days and Anaconda was at 4,300 feet altitude. I wasn’t used to being up that high yet. Plus, I wasn’t in very good shape. But I grabbed my heavy camera bag and chased the AOH guys up Main Street toward the courthouse. I was huffing and puffing while trying to keep my hands steady and take photos. The parade was just a few guys with some flags, but it was an important start to the St. Paddy’s day festivities. The big parade would be later that day, and I’d shoot that too. I was out of breath and wheezing most of the first week there as my body adjusted to altitude.

I came to Montana with such low self-esteem. The editor in Carpentersville had told me I was dirt, and I had believed him. I had no confidence in myself. After a week in Anaconda, I regained some confidence I had lost. People in town were coming up to me telling me how lucky they were I came to their town, what a good photographer I was, what a good writer I was. Sometimes I still didn’t believe them. It took awhile to build myself back up.

Plus, this was a very small newspaper staff. It was just Wally and me, and we did everything, from taking photos and writing stories, to developing the film and printing photos, to cleaning the darkroom and sometimes taking an ad or waiting on a customer at the front desk. Margie also worked in the office and typed obituaries, weddings, engagements, news releases and other things that came in the office that would need to go in the paper somewhere. She’d bring the family dog, Puff, a toy poodle, in at night when we’d work. The daughters also worked at the paper as carriers.

I was the sports editor, but also covered education, cops and courts, wrote features and covered just about anything else that moved. Wally covered city-county government and anything else going on that he wanted to cover. We both shot feature photos, because sometimes there weren’t any photos that went with stories, so we had to have standalone photos for the front page. He laid out the front page and most of the inside pages, sent the dummies to back shop and then supervised the paste-up guys. I did the sports pages, usually 2-3 pages. I had to negotiate an open page once I got there; there wasn’t one when I first got there.

For those unfamiliar with newspaper talk, dummies show the ads and news space on pages. Before copy editors designed pages on computers, we had to sketch them out on the dummies, writing the headlines on the pages or on the stories, send them to the back shop where there was a paste-up person, someone who would take the copy that had been set through the computer and cut out, then put through a waxer so it would stick to the page. The paste-up person would take the copy and follow the layout on the dummy, finish the page, then send it to camera, where a plate would be made for the press.

Now, it goes from the page designer to press almost. But back then, we used large floppy disks to send copy to the back shop, then cut it out, wax it and stick it the board for the paste-up guys. We had a big press in the back, plus an old Linotype machine, something I had never seen before. It was used for some printing jobs. The Anaconda Leader office made money in other ways, too.

Our office crew mostly got along: Pam was the office manager, Mick the ad manager and Debbie worked in the ad department. Some names escape me. The publisher, Dean Neitz, was a tall, lanky guy who would bring his Doberman pinscher, Peaches, into the office occasionally. She scared me at first, putting her paws on my shoulder. But then she licked my face and I realized she was harmless. Dean also would put on overalls and get under the press to fix it when it broke down. Everyone pitched in where they could.

The five years in Anaconda did wonders for me. I learned so much and did so much. I went on trips to trap bighorn sheep and elk to move them to other ranges with the local sportsmen’s club, with the National Guard on their summer camp to Idaho, on an archaeology dig to a site that was going to get interpretative panels, to snowmobile trails that would soon be marked (I got thrown from the snowmobile  -- my camera bag went one way and I went the other). I went to so many state tournaments, one of which wound up being the site of a mass shooting at a high school.

There are many stories to share. More in Part 5.

Reviews

[PoeGirl100]

i can tell this was an exciting time in your life. Your sense of adventure and discovery is clear. Your writing flows easily. I enjoy reading your accounts.