Dean Shalhoup

You know on those rare occasions you get lucky enough to be invited to some type of event on the higher end of the socio-economic scale and you walk in to a sight for sore eyes – a nice, long, professionally presented buffet style layout teeming with top-notch culinary delights, ready and waiting for you and your plate to dig in?

Soon a slight problem arises – because the plates they give you are only 8, maybe 10, inches across, you suddenly realize there’s no way you’ll be able to balance any more than, say, half of the luscious-looking buffet offerings on your plate before things start sliding off the other side.

So you make an executive decision on the fly: You take your full plate back to your table and munch away until you see the white of the plates show through.

Then you take a couple sips of beverage and, not because you’re a glutton or one of those people who totally pig out just because it’s an “all-you-can-eat” buffet, you return to the line and select samples of the luscious offerings your plate had no room for the first time around.

Although it may seem so, this little scenario isn’t just some random thing that popped into my head for no apparent reason, but rather a carefully-constructed analogy to fit the theme to this week’s essay.

So numerous (and so much appreciated) were the responses I received regarding last week’s column that I was inspired to follow it up with a bunch more of my recollections from my first formative months as a “cub reporter” and general “go-fer” at the circa 1972-73 Nashua Telegraph.

I won’t call it a “sequel,” because too many sequels don’t live up to the hype the original version generates. “Follow up” seems a better fit.

As I toured in my mind the smoky old newsroom of 1972-’73, I spotted a couple of people I failed to mention, perhaps because their work station was in a little nook at the far east end of the oblong-shaped newsroom.

Janet Schuster and Flora, or Flo, Stancik were our full-time proof readers, the human versions of auto-correct and Spellcheck who, I will say without hesitation, caught far more typos and misspellings and missing words or sentences or paragraphs than those impersonal gadgets imbedded in today’s software ever could.

A slight woman with a ready laugh, Flo was a fairly heavy smoker, a habit that she, and all smokers, were allowed to engage in without leaving their desks.

Yep, I’d say things have changed over 50 years.

George Woodes, the regional editor I mentioned in last week’s essay, was the very definition of a chain smoker who spent much of his day enshrouded in little clouds of smoke from his non-filter cigarettes.

George lived less than a half-mile from the office and walked to work, which he didn’t seem to mind until winter arrived. We couldn’t tell if he disliked snow more than cold or the other way around. He complained about both.

The new kid contributed to the newsroom’s smoky ambiance for the first few years; I quit when I was 23. Why, I can’t remember, but I’m more than glad I did.

The change in seasons had more of an effect upon the original 60 Main St. newsroom than it did on most businesses and offices. Some sections of the building had at least fairly effective air conditioning. The newsroom wasn’t one of them.

So with the arrival each year of the best heat summer had to offer we resurrected the playbook from the previous year – complain, hope, complain more, lose hope, give up, go to Plan B.

Ah, Plan B – that’s the one where we gather two or three guys and go around muscling open as many of the gigantic, weather-beaten, rain-and-snow-swollen wood frame windows as possible.

The two that opened the easiest, as I recall, were both on the north side of the newsroom, overlooking the Nashua River, most of the Main Street Bridge and the building housing Isidore’s Beauty Salon, Chuck’s Barbershop and Inga’s Boutique (where Peddlers Daughter is today).

Just upstream from our riverbank perch was Nashua Corporation, the bustling manufacturer of “coated, gummed and printed papers,” aka multi-color wrappers and packaging for candy and other products.

It’s hard to imagine this today, but just by looking out at the river from the newsroom we could tell what colors they were printing on any given day.

Yep, I’d say things have changed over 50 years.

On particularly hot days, the river had a habit of reminding us it was once ranked among the state’s most polluted waterways: The funky odor that floated through those giant open windows left us with two choices: Deal with it, or shut the windows and risk heat stroke.

A year or two before we newsroom inhabitants moved up to the second floor, I think sometime in the late 70s, the company wheeled in this behemoth of a machine the size of a commercial refrigerator and set it up at one end of the newsroom.

Obviously second-hand, maybe even third-hand, we discovered it was an air conditioner, and were quite delighted when it did in fact begin pumping cool, comfortable air into the room.

But “cool and comfortable” didn’t float everyone’s proverbial boat, as I recall. Because the giant AC didn’t come with adjustable vents, three or four of my colleagues whose desks happened to be in the cool air’s direct path complained of being chilled; sweaters, they said, simply didn’t cut it.

It was the beginning of the end for the old newsroom’s first – and last – experiment with air conditioning.

Going forward, there will be occasions on which I utilize this weekly allotment of space to trot out and share some favorite memories of my first months, which quickly became years, then decades, here at the Telegraph.

With a nod to the late great Jerry Garcia, “What a long, strange (and fun) trip it’s been.