Metro Pulse/Secret History/Copy!

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Memories of a friend, and a long-ago summer

by Jack Neely

I'll think about Mike Flannagan every time I walk past the big, dead News-Sentinel Building, especially in the summertime. It was in the summer, 23 years ago, that Mike showed me how a newspaper works.

We were the two juniormost members of the copy-clerk staff. Copy clerk was the politically correct term for what we were usually called by reporters, which was "copy" or "boy" or "copyboy."

None of us were, by any legal definition, boys. I'd finished four years of college, though I was in no imminent hazard of graduating. My early interest in journalism was nearly scuttled by the electric typewriter. I was adept on a manual, but they told me at UT that I would have to learn to use a Selectric. It was, I was told, the future of journalism.

To me, a Selectric was a crazy, unpredictable freak. I'd press, or just touch, the wrong key, and the thing would type about four dozen semicolons or the carriage would go flying like a missile to the east. After turning in some journalism-class stories that looked like free verse by e. e. cummings on quaaludes, I dropped the class.

Then I quit journalism. Then I quit college, and got a job in journalism. Well, sort of in journalism.

I got a job as a copyboy. I got it by walking into the office and talking to the managing editor, Harold Harlow. "Now, I want to be sure you understand, this is not 'Lou Grant,'" he said. I didn't tell him that I didn't have a TV, and didn't know for sure what he meant by that. Some years later, when I saw 'Lou Grant' in reruns, Lou Grant reminded me a little of Harold Harlow.

In the summer of 1980, there were five of us copyboys, working daytime, evening, and graveyard shifts, in unpredictable patterns, morning one day, night the next, usually about two of us on duty at a time. We sat at a battered table in the newsroom and waited for someone to shout "copy!" Our job, in those days before e-mails and faxes, was to run errands of the sort that the building's antique pneumatic tubes couldn't handle. We'd carry stuff between departments, down to the presses, up to pasteup. We'd tote mailbags to and from the post office. Sometimes we'd drive the staff car to the homes of the recently deceased to pick up a photograph for publication.

Every night we'd scan the lists of the recently dead and look up their files in the morgue to find out whether they were someone of note. We sometimes had some desk work, usually alphabetizing something, or gluing wire copy to pages of paper.

The only reporting I ever did was to check on whether an offending pile of trash in North Knoxville had been removed, and I did that as a favor for an overworked reporter who pledged me to secrecy. Copyboys weren't trusted to do any actual reporting, even if it was just checking on a pile of trash in North Knoxville.

Moreover, we were told frequently, especially by employed reporters, that things had changed, that it was a new world, and that people no longer worked their way up from the bottom. It was the '80s, they said, and in the '80s you'd never be able to get a writing job without a J-school degree.

We doomed, futureless copyboys tended to be introverted, embittered types. When I first got there, the staff included an aspiring novelist, a loony South Knoxvillian with some Bolshevik pyromaniacal tendencies, and a guy in a sweater who was so quiet I remember him uncertainly as "Steve."

The most outgoing, personable guy at the copyboy table was Mike Flannagan. From Chicago, he was, at 18, the youngest of us. I resented that fact. His capability at the job seemed to negate that my four years in college had any value at all. But he was such a hell of a nice guy that any 22-year-old college boy's disappointment in meeting a bushy-haired teenager and calling him a peer dwindled into nothing. Around Mike, resentment was unsustainable. Life was too short.

Maybe he knew that, because he seemed to consume every conversation as if it was a last meal. He was interested in nearly everything, and his enthusiasm was contagious.

He had the unenviable chore of showing me the ropes, and I followed him down the twisting stairways and angular passages of the weird News-Sentinel Building, which somehow combined hellish industrial scenes of deafening printing presses and fumey loading docks with bland office-carrel nirvana of the sales department, all within the same four walls. The bright newsroom, different from all the other parts of the building, was like a beehive, perhaps after the bees had been gassed, and showing some signs of instability and torpor.

Mike could find his way around the complicated place like a terrier. Thanks to his patience with a slow learner, after a while I could too.

I don't know whether all people in servile jobs consider themselves superior to their masters; I only know that we did. We had nicknames for several of the loonier reporters and editors, and some of us were accomplished mimics. I once drafted a memo to the staff informing them that most of us were drinking, voting, taxpaying adults, some of us had been to college, but Mike just thought it was funny. I came to enjoy answering their calls of "copy!" or "boy!" as an anthropological pantomime.

In the last 23 years, Mike hardly changed. I'm not surprised that some of his friends, upon reading that he died of heart failure last week, thought he was even younger than 41. It's been great to see his name in bylines; I know that he enjoyed his job. It's gratifying that he—as well as several other of my copyboy colleagues—made liars of the complacent fatalists who said that you could never come up from the bottom.