The front page of the Oct. 2, 1972 Nashua Telegraph, the author's first day on the job.

I give up.

I really thought I could find a clever way to begin this week’s essay without soiling it with an abused and overused cliche.

But how else does one get the point across when the subject is reaching one of those life milestones you never expected to reach – or even make a serious run at reaching.

Sorry, but cliche or no, “I can’t believe it’s been 50 years” is the clearest way I can find to get across the message I share today.

“It doesn’t seem possible.”

“Where did the time go?”

“OMG you must have seen a lot of changes over the yers.”

“I bet working for a newspaper was a lot different when you started.”

“But you don’t look anywhere near old enough. What, did you start working when you were an infant?”

OK, I embellished that last one a tad. But a lot of people who drop their jaws when I respond to the inevitable question: “So, how long have you been at The Telegraph?” really do want to know how old I was on Monday, Oct. 2, 1972 – my first official day on the Telegraph Publishing Company payroll.

I was 18 and a half, and fresh off my three-year “mini career” as a groundskeeper, grave digger, designer of gravesites for graveside services, certified spring and fall raker, wintertime snow-shoveler, occasional dump-runner and lunch-fetcher for the foreman and his assistant at the best-maintained burial ground around – Edgewood Cemetery.

So, let’s see … 2022 minus 1972 … yep, that’s 50 years all right.

If one were to research my employment history, however, one would discover that I was offered, and promptly accepted, the position on Friday, Sept. 29, 1972, after an orientation session that consisted of my new boss, the late then-managing editor John Stylianos, pointing at a smallish table-desk hybrid and saying, “this is your desk.”

I would be sitting three feet away from the loud, smoky photo-engraving machine we called “the Fairchild” because that’s the name of the company that manufactured them back then. I was given a brief tutorial on how to run it – its purpose was to scan photos and engrave the image onto a blue, plastic sheet that, as I remember, was highly flammable.

I deduced, correctly, that engraving photos would be listed in what passed for my job description. So, I soon found out, would be developing film into negatives and making prints on special paper using the behemoth of an enlarger.

My primary job – at least that’s what I’d heard Stylianos (often called “Styli”) would be sportswriter, working under Ted Bryant, the sports editor who was the sports department.

My first assignment was covering the Nashua High-Lowell football game, which was played on the Sunday before my first day at work. I remember riding down to Lowell with Don Dillaby, a longtime Telegraph colleague who agreed to take photos of the game.

Don was best known for chasing fires, crime and such, writing the daily district court column on the outcomes of that morning’s cases. (Remember, The Telegraph hit the streets just after lunch in those days).

Besides Don, Ted and Styli, my first set of newsroom co-workers included my father, he was city editor; Max Cook, editorial writer and columnist; and George Woodes, the suburban, or regional, editor saddled with the daily chore of boiling down dozens of typewritten pages – literally hundreds of column inches of copy – from mostly elderly folks who “covered” the goings-on in their respective towns.

Marsha Clement was the editor of and writer for the “women’s page,” which once a week became a “women’s section” filled with, well, you know, women’s issues and the things women (supposedly) cared about.

I still can’t help rolling my eyes each time I come across a story or photo from those days in which women were featured or quoted or otherwise mentioned: probably 95 percent of the women who were married seem to have had no identity of their own. “Mary Smith” was identified as “Mrs. John Smith,” and so on.

Yeah, you could say that “working for a newspaper was a lot different when I started.”

As I remember, having taken numerous photos of women’s groups, organizations and so forth in my early Telegraph years, the women seemed fine with being “Mrs. John Smith.”

Which is just as well, because I have no idea how I would have reacted if one or more of the women insisted “I am MARY Smith, not Mrs. JOHN Smith … make sure you get that right in the paper!”

The team of reporters I joined that October day included Claudette Durocher, the City Hall reporter who would go on to become editorial page editor and retired after 44 years; Jim Pappademas, a liberal’s liberal who preferred “J. R. Pappademas” as his byline; and Pete Charest, a bright, clever Bishop Guertin graduate with a knack for photography.

Well, time to oil up the ol’ reliable Royal, change the ribbon – make sure to grab the all-black one, not the black-and-red one, those are for the bookeeping people – crank in a fresh sheet of copy paper, twist the roller knob and pull the silver “return” lever from left to right.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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