The technology may have changed, but human nature has not

It was a Saturday in late May, 1979, that I walked through the front door of the Daily News not as a tennis columnist but an employee. I was there to learn … the COMPUTER.

I had been writing the column “Tennis Time” for the Fort Walton Beach Tennis Club about two years when I was approached by then sports editor Ron Balicki, who told me the editor, Jim Welsh, wanted to see me. Jim was a wiry fellow with lots of energy. Strangely what I remember best was his mustache, a big, bushy beast that lay across his lip like an attack dog awaiting the command to rip out my throat.

Jim needed a police reporter. Was I interested?

Incredibly, I wasn’t.

I still had delusions of becoming an English teacher, despite the scathing evaluation I’d received from my supervising teacher during my student teaching term at Pryor Junior High School. What scared me was the notion of writing under deadline, something I’d never been good at, nevermind the rushing out to crime scenes and car accidents, monitoring the scanner and possibly landing the newspaper in a lawsuit because of an errant quote or misstated fact. I said no and went back to substitute teaching, a different kind of nightmare.

About six months later Ron again directed to Mr. Welsh’s office. He had a different job offer: Would I like to work on the wire desk laying out pages? Now that sounded interesting, but even more interesting was the $235 per week paycheck I would receive. My savings were nearly depleted. I was living with Mom and Dad, almost two years out of college. I needed to do something with my life, even if it didn’t fit in to the grand plan of teaching by day and writing by night.

I said yes.

And so there I was that Saturday afternoon, two days before my scheduled start of work, learning how to use the computer.

Truth be told the idea of using a computer scared the hell out of me. In 1979 computers were as ubiquitous as unicorns. You could buy a Radio Shack “Trash 80” and spend two hours programming it to play 10 seconds of “My Dog Has Fleas,” and that was about it. As I dropped off my tennis columns to Ron I would stare in wonder at the “computer” on his desk – turns out it was only a terminal; the real computer sat in a cold room off to the side – and marvel that anybody could be smart enough to use it. Now, here I was, responsible for learning it myself.

Shudder.

My instructor was city editor Jim Shoffner, who is now the newspaper’s editorial page editor. Jim showed me the basics of how to navigate the folders, create a file, and mark up the file so that when it was sent to a machine that composed the type, it would come out the way it was supposed to. Miss one keystroke and you could end up with yards of wasted film in “Texas agate,” body copy text set in 30 point Helvetica type. That would earn you an evil glare from Ken, the IT guy, who was also a biker.

Shoffner gave me my first writing chore for the newspaper that afternoon. The newspaper published something called the Business and Industry page, B&I for short. The page was surrounded by ads and featured a space in the middle where a “story” and photo of one of the businesses would be positioned. This week’s business was Henry’s Fina, a gas station in downtown Fort Walton Beach that sold other items popular among a certain crowd. He gave me a sheet of paper with information provided by the folks at Henry’s Fina – a precious five or six lines of type as memory serves – and somehow I was to produce a 10-inch “story” from this information.

I padded. I included information not on the sheet. I think I came up with 6 inches.

When I was done I sent the file to Shoffner and after he read it he paid me a high compliment – “You did a pretty good job of getting the most out of this.”

I was loaded with a three-ring binder of “documentation” for the computer, most of which didn’t apply as Ken had customized it for the newspaper’s use. I left late that afternoon and would spend the night studying.

What I remember most about that day, however, is when Shoffner showed me the wire folders in the computer. They were divided into basic categories: Natwire, State, Foreign, Washington, Weekday, Weekend, Sports. When he opened a queue what appeared were hundreds of stories from The Associated Press, stories from around the world … 99 percent of which people would never see as we didn’t have room in the newspaper to publish them all. Out of those thousands of stories the newspaper might publish 50 – and that was in a day when pages and advertising were plentiful.

To this day I remember my initial reaction:

My God, if people had one of these terminals in their homes they’d never buy another newspaper.

Today when I look at Yahoo News, Google News, CNN, MSNBC and other online news sources, I think back to that day in late May, 1979. People do have that “terminal” in their homes. They have it on their phones, their TVs, even their refrigerators for crying out loud. News, i.e., “information,” is as ubiquitous as computers were not in the days of KC and the Sunshine Band.

Newspapers are struggling to survive in their printed form. Even their online counterparts are competing with a multitude of wannabes who would steal their advertising dollars. But there’s hope.

Just today the newspaper covered a brush fire that threatened the neighborhoods off Lewis Turner Boulevard. As the newspaper’s coverage appeared on its website one commenter wrote: “Good Work NWFDN! Breaking News is what this site should be all about!”

Clearly there’s a hunger for news, real news. The form doesn’t matter. The song remains the same.

I look at the jobs I do on a daily basis and marvel at their difference from the jobs I did on a daily basis in 1979. I am living in age of science fiction. I am grateful I can still do them.

But I am also grateful to recognize that although decades have passed, and technology has changed, human nature has not. We all want to know what’s going on.

With luck we can still tell you.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .