ROBB TODD

The History of Newspapers and Duck Sauce

By Robb Todd

The first big news story of my career happened while I was at a tiny newspaper in the South. I had only been at the paper a few weeks when O.J. was on TV in a low-speed chase, cruising an L.A. freeway in his white Bronco. I thought he was going to kill himself. Then this old dude on the copy desk blurts out to the whole newsroom, “See, that’s why blacks shouldn’t git married tuh whites.” I kept waiting for it to be a joke but it wasn’t. Nobody said anything and he went outside to smoke a cigarette by himself.

I left that paper for another. There was this youngish but balding editor who printed out photos of high school wrestlers on the photo printer. This was before digital photography, and that paper was expensive, not to be wasted. He kept a stack of pictures under his desk. Sweaty young guys in tights, in all kinds of positions. Asses in the air, grabbing each other’s crotches, mounting each another. We never ran the photos in the paper, but the stack kept growing. A few years after I left, I heard he got busted having an affair with an intern. A young guy. There was money involved. Allegedly.

At this other newspaper in this tiny town on the Mexican border, I worked with a legally blind copy editor. He rode a bike to work. He was also one of the better copy editors on the staff. He’d press his nose to the computer screen and copy edit the hell out of some “furthers/farthers” and some “more thans/overs” and some “capitals/capitols.” The copy desk chief had to take him to the grocery store and the blind copy editor would sniff the cans before plopping them in his basket. That whole little town was crazy, and I miss it sometimes.

Somehow I ended up at a newspaper on a beautiful island in the middle of a vast ocean. Worked with the guy who took the photo of the Chinese student staring down a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. One editor wore black every day, head to toe, and hated the beach. Also worked with an old woman on the copy desk who took naps on her keyboard. On deadline. Or maybe she’d passed out. She drank a lot. The union said nobody could tell her when to take her break.

I left for a bigger paper in one of the biggest, hottest cities in the country. Worked with a guy who claimed to have been the last dude to fuck Janis Joplin. Another copy editor barely spoke English, but she would mark the hell out of some misplaced commas on page proofs. Another guy covered Elvis’s aloha concert way back when, the one where Elvis tossed his cape into the crowd. Well, this guy caught it. He was front row with a press pass. When I asked him about it, he almost burst into tears. He sold it a few years after the concert for a couple thousand. I think it recently sold for like a billion. It’s in Graceland now.

Left that big city for one of the biggest cities in the world. Worked at one of the country’s biggest newspapers, and shared a desk with a dude who was five-foot-something and weighed about three bills. I opened the deep, bottom drawer of the desk and saw nothing but duck sauce packets. There was a thick layer on top from dozens of Chinese delivery orders. I brushed some of the duck sauce packets to the side only to reveal more duck sauce packets. Layers and layers of duck sauce packets. It was like “The History of Duck Sauce” at the International Duck Sauce Museum. As I dug deeper, I saw the evolution of packet design, how the fonts and colors changed. The duck sauce got darker toward the bottom, which I think was circa 1970. I felt like an archeologist dusting off a dinosaur duck bones. The drawer was duck sauce packets top to bottom. Hundreds and hundreds of packets. Shit, could a desk drawer hold a thousand? I dunno.

So, yeah, I will miss newspapers a little.

-30-