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September 2009 marks an important time in my life.

No, it’s not my birth month, which was in January so long ago that I don’t remember. I’ve been told that event was on a snowy day in a little house on a North Carolina mountainside. A midwife helped bring me into the world.

Pardon an old man’s tale, but this September marks a milestone for me. It was in September 50 years ago that I got my first job in journalism. The exact day I started working in the sports department of my hometown newspaper, I can’t remember.

But I remember my first assignment. I was typing a list of football scores as they were reported to the sports department during the evening. I also was to help answer the telephones. Most callers either wanted to know a game score or were reporting the results of games. The job seemed easy enough. Being able to use a typewriter was a requirement for getting the job. (Typewriters never offered the challenges that computers do now.)

I begged for that job; to me it was more than being a mere flunky in the sports department. It was my dream come true — a dream that I had since I became an avid sports fan in elementary school.

Besides, I had gotten married the previous month, and I really needed a job.

I was able to flaunt my experience when I applied for the job. I had been sports editor of my high school paper. Now, I was a college student and needed a job in the evenings while I went to school during the day. Never mind when I found time to study.

Listing the scores of games was important because scores needed to be available when people called and wanted to know which team won the game. It was a public service provided by newspapers. TV didn’t provide scoreboards like they do now, and the Internet didn’t exist in those ancient days. The local newspaper was the source for most news — even scores of ball games. Alas, the good old days of journalism.

(When the college and professional teams played, the phones rang constantly with inquiries about the scores. I always suspected that many of those calls were from bookies filling in their betting sheets.)
This rookie’s job of typing the scoreboard had to be done a special way. It had to be typed in triplicate. That was easy enough simply by using carbon paper for the extra copies.

I assembled my paper, along with the carbon sheets, and typed off and on for a couple of hours as scores became available.

One copy of the scoreboard went to the typesetter in what was called the composing room (printing department).

Another copy went to the copy boy who provided the scores for the wire services (AP and UPI).

The third copy, of course, was kept close by the sports desk and used to answer requests from phone callers.

I figured I did a pretty neat job typing the scores. It didn’t have to be done rapidly until late in the evening when the final scores came in and the newspaper was soon to be printed.

The sports editor, who seemed to work frantically most of the time, finally called for me to turn in my first batch of scores.

I rolled them out of that old Royal, slipped out the carbon paper and handed him my first piece of work in journalism — the high school scoreboard.

The editor looked at the three sheets of paper back and front. “This won’t work (or something similar),” he said. “You don’t have three copies.”

“Sure I did,” I thought.

“You had the carbon paper in on the wrong side, and the copies are on the back of the paper,” the editor said.

I was stunned. Speechless. I got more paper and carbon (right side up) and began feverishly retyping the scores.

Despite the many stories I’ve written, the hundreds of stories that I’ve edited and the many newspaper pages I’ve designed (“laid out” was the newspaper slang), my first night working in a newsroom nearly 12,000 workdays ago was one of my most important experiences.

Lesson learned: Don’t allow overconfidence to lead to mistakes. Small jobs deserve our best attention just as much as the biggest story of your career.

You bet I got the carbon paper right side up the next night on the job. Weeks later, I was allowed to write stories — some little ones. Now, I don’t know how to quit writing. Never mind that a couple of years later I moved from sports to news writing. That elementary school ambition has never gone away.

Contact Bob Burchette at bburchette@triad.rr.com