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My boss baked me a watch the other week.
“Aha!” alert readers are thinking. “We’ve spotted a typo. You must mean a cake.”
Yes, it was a cake. But it was shaped like an enormous watch, complete with strap, buckle, eyelets and Roman numerals on the face. And the icing was yellow orange, like gold.
Get it? Features editor Sarah Haase — bless her creative heart — made sure I had a gold watch as we celebrated my 35th anniversary of working at the Times Leader.
And my co-workers, many of them younger than 35, filled a card with nice sentiments. Thanks, everyone.
As we feasted on pizza and cake, I found myself talking about a few of the more unusual — dare I say bizarre? — highlights of my career, often with some sort of caveat about the olden days.
Gather ‘round, children, and I’ll tell you what used to happen before people began to send images to the newspaper electronically.
They’d use the U.S. Postal Service to mail a print you could hold in your hand, or even a tiny color slide, and often they’d tell us it was a sentimentally priceless picture, with no copies.
Years ago, one such image — a tiny slide of a historical re-enactor dressed as a lumberjack that I had asked to borrow — apparently sprouted legs and jumped off a newsroom desk into a nearby waste basket. By the time I realized what had happened, the contents of the waste basket were already in a large Dumpster.
Suspecting the lumberjack re-enactor would be really upset if he never got the slide back, I announced my intention to dig through the refuse and open one plastic bag after another until I found it.
The main reason I had a glimmer of hope about finding it was because of a clue a co-worker had given me, something along the lines of: “If you’re really going to dig through the Dumpster, you should know the slide is probably in the same bag with a yellow cupcake box. If you find the yellow box, you should find the slide, too.”
That’s exactly how it turned out, except I didn’t anticipate the part where another co-worker, who was “helping” me, tore open a bag to reveal a flash of yellow cardboard and promptly hurled bag and box to the other side of the mountain of garbage. Perhaps he had tuned out my incessant reminders about the yellow box, or maybe he was color blind.
In any case, we retrieved the slide, which had been in an envelope the entire time and, I’m thankful to report, remained fairly clean throughout the ordeal.
Back in the days of yesteryear, we didn’t have global positioning devices or Mapquest, either, so we often had to stop and ask a human being for directions. Suffice it to say, I probably never would have found my way to a certain address in the Hazleton area if I hadn’t been able to tell a person at a convenience store, “Yes, yes, it’s the place with mean ducks.”
But my favorite once-upon-an-assignment memory takes me back to a time before cell phones. I was covering a house fire in Ashley and wanted to update the newsroom.
When I asked a woman who was standing on her porch if I could use her phone, she let me into her living room, marched firmly past some children who were watching cartoons and turned down the volume on the television. “Be quiet!” she told them. “This lady has a very important job to do.”
Not everyone would agree with her assessment, but it sounded good to me. It sounded as if, at least in the eyes of this one woman, I had a high calling, and should try to live up to it — whether it took me to a duck pond, a Dumpster or anywhere in between.
