Palm Beach Newspapers Archives

April 8, 2016April 8, 2016

Pat Stephens: 51 Years at The Post

Pat Stephens started at Palm Beach Newspapers in 1965, the year I graduated from Cape Girardeau Central High School. My first newspaper photo was published April 18, 1963, so I started in the ink-slinging business a little before her. The main difference is that I took a buyout in the fall of 2008 and put the newspaper business behind me.

Two days before I walked out the door for the last time, I wandered the building shooting pictures of the people who were special to me. Pat was at the top of the list.

Pat, 69, was on The Post’s payroll right up until the day she died, Thursday, April 7, 2016. That’s 51 years working for the same company. In contrast, I passed through nine papers (counting high school and college pubs) in four states in 45 years.

Post reporter Sonja Isger wrote an excellent obituary that Pat would have thought was “too much.” [I hope it doesn’t get trapped behind the paper’s paywall.]

The headline was appropriate: “Remembering The Post’s Constant Caretaker.” She was one of those unsung heroes the public never knew about, but was a big reason your paper hit the stoop in the morning. Reporting, writing and editing the paper is all well and good, but if the ink doesn’t get squirted on the toilet paper, it doesn’t matter.

An early member of the 20-Year Club

She started in the production department back in the days of hot type, and shepherded it though several confusing iterations of publishing and pagination systems.

Pat shows up in the middle of the middle column listing the earliest members of the Twenty Year Service Club. Click on this, or any of the photos, to make them larger.

Pat became office Mac expert

When the paper transitioned from manual to electric typewriters; from hot type to cold type and then to computer-output pages, Pat went along with the ride. The editorial and advertising systems were on Macs, and she became the office expert on them.

As a PC guy, I would mock Macintosh computers (Know why a Mac mouse has only one button? It’s because that’s as high as a Mac user can count.), but never to Pat. It just wouldn’t have been right. She took pride in her equipment.

She loved her one-eyed horse

She loved her aging, one-eyed horse, Baxter, and would talk about him often when things were quiet.

Winner of the Purple Cow

Her hard work won her the company’s Purple Cow award, displayed proudly on her bookcase.

I worked a lot of long hours at weird times, but I don’t think I was ever in the building when Pat wasn’t. If some department manager (usually a new hire with all the answers) would decide that all the world’s problems could be solved by shuffling workers from one cube to another, Pat would show up with her gray rolling cart to swap pieces-parts and huge, 24-inch monitors that were so big that you could put four wheels on them and they’d pass for Volkswagens.

At times like this, she might be heard uttering her opinion of such tomfoolery, but then she would mock-slap her face twisting her head from the “force” of the blow.

The pressure relief valve

Every paper I worked for had one place and one person you could visit when the pressure lid was about to blow off the cooker. Judy Crow’s morgue was that place at The Missourian. (In these more sensitive times, the morgue has been rebranded “the library.”)

Pat’s office was the relief valve at The Post. Pat would listen patiently as you blew off steam, nodding appropriately at the right times, all the time plying you with her ever-full candy dish. Her office was full of plush animals and pictures of horses and wildlife that would have been kitschy in any other context, but were oddly comforting in Pat’s Place.

I always liked this shot of Pat’s menagerie keeping an eye on her.

Heaven’s candy jars will be full

Pat Stephens was probably one of the last generation that could go to work at a newspaper right out of high school and stay at the same place for 51 years. I am proud to have been her colleague and her friend. Heaven will be a better place now that there is someone there to ride the horses and keep the candy jars full.

January 3, 2015

Rerun: Telephone Talk

If you grew up in Cape, you were in the land of EDgewater. If you lived over in Jackson, you were a CIrcle person. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are probably also going to be surprised to see that the telephone has a round thing instead of buttons.

Here’s where you can find out a little bit about EDgewater, CIrcle, RAmond, LOcust, TUlip and GRanite.

See, back in those days, the phone company, Ma Bell, was the only game in town. You leased the phone from them (and because of that, they made it so bulletproof that telephones and cockroaches were going to be the only thing left after The Big One was dropped). You didn’t have modular jacks: the phone was wired directly to the jack and the phone company was responsible if anything went wrong with it.

Like with the other rerun posts, click on the links to see more photos and get the full stories.

Extensions cost extra

You were charged by extension, and the phone company could tell by the voltage drop how many ringing phones you had connected, and they would periodically run tests to check for bootleg equipment.

One of my buddies had an illegal extension in his house. The phone rang and a Bell tech asked how many phones he had in his house. Fibbing, he said, “Just one,” and he ran to unplug the extra one.

The phone rang again. Same tech. “You just unplugged it, didn’t you?” he said.

I acquired a couple of spare phones over the years, but I hooked up toggle switches on the ringer so they (a) wouldn’t wake up the kids and (b) wouldn’t show up to that sneaky tech.

It’s all AM and FM

Most of you think I was always a photographer. I spent the last 13 or so years of my newspaper career as a telecommunications manger, a job I really liked, but was totally unqualified for to start out. I got it because I was a good project manager, understood construction, got along with other departments, knew how to live within a budget and, most importantly, had a staff who really knew what they were doing to keep the phones humming.

When I was invited to speak at a telecommunications manager conference, I said that most kids want to grow up to be firemen or rocket ship drivers or other dramatic things; very few proclaim, “Mom and Dad, I want to hang a butt set off my belt.” Most of us fell into the job like I had.

My first crisis

I had Mike, my No. 2 Guy, to ease me into the job and to kick me under the table when I’d start to say something dumb in a meeting. My first big crisis occurred when we had a planned building power outage that caused the whole place to go dark. We had one critical phone switch that suddenly decided that it LIKED taking a nap and didn’t want to wake up.

About four in the morning, two hours before the call centers were supposed to open, I asked Mike the question that all techs hate to hear: “Any idea what the problem is?” The obvious, unstated answer is, “No. If I knew how to fix it, we’d have all been in bed two hours ago.”

Mike, one of the best troubleshooters I’ve ever worked with, turned to me and calmly spelled out the facts of telephonic life. In fact they apply to every aspect of real life, too.

You’re going to have to follow this link to read his words of wisdom.

Before cell phones

I was more comfortable with this level of technology. I mean, how can you beat unlimited voice and data plans and no need for batteries?

Dropping a dime

We didn’t have phones in our dorm rooms when I first moved into Scott Quad my junior year. If we wanted to call home, we had to find a phone booth that worked, a real challenge because the phone company wasn’t diligent about emptying the money out of them. When they were full, they were full.

Like Buddy Jim Stone points out, we didn’t have helicopter parents back in those days because we weren’t connected 24/7. By the time you were able to call home, you had probably already worked out the problem yourself (or had forgotten it).

If you look at a closeup photo at this link, you can see that the price of a call had just gone up from a nickel to a dime.

Car phones coming to Cape

The big news in 1966 was that car phones were coming to Cape.

How times have changed (I hope)

The 1944 Cape County Telephone Directory contains a jarring classification. Follow the link to see the not-colored restaurants in Cape.

Cheating Death to make phone ring

I’ve mentioned Lester Harris quite a few times in this blog. He was one of those dedicated Bell techs we all took for granted.

There was a telephone cable that spanned the Diversion Channel just east of I-55. From time to time, some nimrod couldn’t resist the temptation to take a shot at it. If he was halfway accurate, phones in Scott City and the airport would go dead.

Lester would walk the roadway until he found fresh shell casings that would give him a rough idea where he was going to find the break. Then, he’d strap on his tool belt, and climbing spikes to shinny up a pole to where he could hook his cable buggy over a wire cable that supported the phone wires.

Let’s put this in perspective. Phone wire is softer and more delicate than steel cable, but what is to say that some stray bullets haven’t nicked some of the wire strands that are holding Lester 60 feet above the Diversion Channel? In a perfect world, they would catch the shooter and send him out of the cable buggy to make sure it was safe before Lester got on it.

Lester was featured in the stock car racing post the other day.

Microwave towers

The horizon used to be dotted with long-haul microwave towers like this one on Ridge Road in Jackson. Fiber optic cable has made them obsolete, and many have been torn down or repurposed as cell towers.

October 24, 2014

My Office Heirlooms

I was talking with a former newspaper colleague tonight – Foodie and Road Warriorette Jan. I was having one of our favorite discussions about food.

“If there is a stick of salami in a Ziploc bag and it feels sort of sticky-slimy when you pick it up, and the exposed end is kind of gray, and the insides have the same kind of gray extending as much as a quarter inch toward the middle, do you think it’s OK to eat if I trim out the heart of it?”

“It probably WON’T kill you”

There was a silence, a long sigh, and a “Well, it probably WON’T kill you, but you could have an unpleasant day tomorrow if you eat it.” Deep down in her heart, I think she really DID want me to eat it.

Anyway, that got me thinking about my old office. It’s hard to believe I’ve been retired since about this time in 2008. Before I packed everything up, I shot some pictures to remind me of what it looked like.

The “In Case of Emergency Break Glass fire alarm” (with broken glass) came from a yard sale. The “Matt and Sarah got married and all I got was this lousy cup” came from their wedding. “I Don’t Do Perky” came from Nancy Allen, one of my help desk people. I’m not sure why she thought it was an appropriate gift for me.

A lump of coal

The dark object on the left side of Dad’s dragline ashtray is a lump of coal photo lab tech Mary Ann Bates gave me for Christmas. There’s probably some kind of message there, too, but I never could figure it out.

The Potashnick sticker came from a yard sale.

The BS grinder

I’m not sure where I got the wooden object with the crank handle.

Lon Danielson, the general manager came into my office while I was on the phone one afternoon. While he was waiting for me to wrap up the call, he started looking at my heirlooms.

“What’s this?” he asked after I put the phone down, picking up the object and idly turning the crank.

“It’s a BS grinder,” I replied.

I noticed that every time he came into my office after that, he would pick up my BS grinder and start cranking it. There was probably a message there, too.

You’ll recognize the Indian head from a story I did about slot machines and gambling raids.

“You’ve got to show me”

I had little patience with vendors who wasted my time. When a new one came in, I’d point to my bulletin board to set the ground rules.

Click on the photos to make them larger. By the way, you can see more shots of my office and hidden areas that only techie types could get into if you follow the tour of the Hula Parrot.

December 21, 2012April 12, 2021

Did the World End?

Just in case all this Mayan Calendar stuff is real, I decided not to spend a lot of time working on a post for Friday. I’ll just revisit the last time the world was supposed to end in the Year 2000.

My boss, the IT manager, saw it coming a long way off, so he started working on modifying the mainframe computer programs years before the crunch was going to hit in 2000. Suddenly, though, our corporate folks started running around with their hair on fire hiring consultants and making us fill out reams and reams of meaningless CYA forms. At one point, I can remember saying, “We have a choice: we can either be prepared for Y2K or we can fill out the forms.”

By the time 2008 came around, the stickers on the window looking into my office had faded, but they still proclaimed I was Year 2000 Compliant. Above it was a sticker with the word “SWEAT” that once had a circle around it with the international slash symbolizing NO, as in NO SWEAT. Telecom was ready.

New Year’s Eve 1999

All of the IT staffers, including my telecom techs, had their days off cancelled as 1999 ticked down. Mike Turpie, my #2 Guy and I were going to be at the office. Telecom Tech Terry Williams was on standby with orders to have a sober New Year’s Eve in case we needed him. I thought at least ONE of us should get a good night’s sleep in case Mike and I were swatting flies through the wee hours of the morning.

We were confident: most of our equipment had been replaced in 1998-99 with new gear that was certified to work in 2000 and beyond. People with Nortel phone switches like ours were members of a big international users group and had been comparing notes for months. The canaries in the coal mine would be the people on the other side of the globe who would see the New Year hours before we would in Florida. As the day went on, they kept checking in with AOK messages.

An hour before midnight, we dropped off the commercial power grid and switched to generator power “just in case.” I photographed Mike sitting under the clock as we got closer and closer to what I said was going to be either the most boring or the most “interesting” night of our lives.

Seconds before midnight, Mike placed a call – probably to his wife – and waited to see what happened.

Nothing unusual happened.

We turned to a carefully prepared checklist: dialed into all our remote switches; placed local and long distance calls; looked for alarms, made sure voice mail was up, confirmed that the call centers would open in the morning, and waited about half an hour to see if anything started smoking. Life was so good.

Then we looked outside

When I designed the switchroom, I made sure it didn’t have any windows so it would be pelican-proof in hurricanes. To see what was going on, we had to go down the hallway to the fourth-floor lobby where we could look out west over the city. When Mike and I got to the end of the hallway, the city was dark. I mean like, REALLY dark. No lights as far as we could see.

This was Not Good in capital letters. Here we were in a four-story lighted tower of light surrounded by primeval darkness. I expected angry and panicked West Palm Beacheans to charge us with torches and pitchforks at any moment.

With a bit of trepidation, I picked up my two-way radio, switched over to the newsroom channel and said, “545 to Base 30, Uhhhh, any idea what’s going on? It’s realllllly dark out there….”

“Base 30 to 545. A drunk took out a utility pole.”

And that’s the way of the world ends. Not with a bang; not with a whimper, with a drunk hitting a power pole.