Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [18]
It went on like that. When the staff first moved into the offices there was just one electric light in the middle of the room. The Desk wanted a low, green-shaded light over each desk. The meticulous Times maintenance men obliged with a network of wires and lights.
Suspended from all sections of the ceiling and hanging at ruled heights above the desks, the wires presented a maze too intriguing to anyone who’d spent half an hour in the Lamb and Lark, the pub across the street, before coming back to the office late at night for extra work. You’d start one hanging light swinging in great circles, then another and another and when enough of them were wound around each other, the whole complex structure would come down. Next day the maintenance men would be upstairs, surveying the tangled mess, the chunks of ceiling plaster, and the blown fuses. They would say sadly, “The blast of those bombs is enough to shake down almost anything.”
Which was all right and logical on nights when there was an air raid. But sometimes the lights came down after a raid-free night, and they said the same thing, and the staff finally decided they were simply nice, understanding guys who maybe had wanted to do the same thing in the staid Times all their lives but hadn’t dared.
At frequent intervals, we received a formal announcement that “General Somebody” was coming down to the office to look around. There could have been no more absurd place for a military inspection; but one time the staff was told “for sure” that Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, one of the army’s most inspecting generals, was to visit us. We were ordered to take down the ridiculous display on the walls and clean up the office. Some of the memos and pictures pasted on the walls were part of the office, though, and taking them down was out of the question, even for General Lee.
Ben Price walked over to Fleet Street. He visited half a dozen little bookstores, buying road maps, maps of the canal system in Afghanistan, terrain maps of the territory adjacent to Shanghai, and weather maps showing general pressure areas between Iceland and England. He came back and the staff went to work hanging the maps from hooks or with thumbtacks on the walls.
With straight faces the staff explained to the officer in charge that no one could kick about legitimate maps in any newspaper office. General Lee, of course, like the others, never arrived. Most of the maps came down, and the urgent memos, the cheesecake, and the outdated headlines were visible again in all their dusty yellow uselessness. The weather map of the North Atlantic stayed. Ben said we might need to know someday how the weather was there.
The Times people never really got used to The Stars and Stripes. They tried, and some of the compositors eventually became as one with the staff. But mostly the Times just wondered.
In the first few days strange things happened in the composing rooms with compositors who never had worked for any paper except the Times. There was, for example, the mysterious disappearance of a particularly choice bit of cheesecake that had been sent up to the engravers one night. Somehow the picture and engraving disappeared completely, and there always has been an argument as to whether some venerable Times worker secretly slipped the picture of the seminude Hollywoodite into his pocket to contemplate in some lonely place or whether the Times man was a reforming purist who thought that in the best interests of the soldiers of England’s ally the photo should be destroyed. If he simply wanted the picture for his own he was easily satisfied, because after that first week none ever disappeared again, and if he was a reformer he quickly gave us up for lost.
That first week at the Times was something English type compositors are going to talk about for a long time. On the sixth night, one linotype operator was carried off