by John Langone
Long before DOS and Windows and CD-ROM lit up our screens, before Intel and Pentium and RAM mysteriously got inside, before F1, F7 and Print Screen, and Page Up and Page Down, before E-mail and the Internet, there was the chattering, clattering, word-spattering workhorse of the press known as the teletypewriter.
"The what?" a question which, when put by a newly minted reporter, indicates you are about to be dug from a journalistic stratum somewhere beneath the Mesozoic. "That was like a Morse Code thing, right?"
Scientific illiteracy like that is expected from someone having trouble covering awning fires, but not from the person I spoke with recently at Western Union, the company that supplied and maintained the teletypes I used years ago at UPI. (They were actually manufactured by a subsidiary of Western Electric, which was a subsidiary of AT&T.)
"The what?" she asked, as puzzled as if I had inquired about pony express and carrier pigeon rates, which, come to think of it, were probably in the same communications category in her mind. "You mean telefax?"
"No, no," I said, "this is a thing that looks like a huge typewriter only you had to punch holes in a paper tape and feed it through the transmitter and that's what made the teletype on the other end go, duddaduh, duddaduh, dattaduh, dattaduh, and the news story would come up on a big roll of paper and spill all over the floor?"
"Oh, the ticker tape," she said, "like they dump on parades. That's pretty messy. Fax is better."
"It is now," I said.
For a generation of journalists accustomed to computer keyboard commands that enable the writer to swiftly and expertly compose, edit, delete, move words and paragraphs, and recreate an entire story with childish hand and finger passes that would mesmerize a Houdini, the teletype (not to mention the manual typewriter) is something that belongs in Johannes Gutenberg's shop, along with movable type and the other things they never heard of either, the linotype and the teletypesetter.
But oh, God, if they only knew. If they only knew what we could do with it, and what it did for us!
I first laid tentative hands on a teletype keyboard, determinedly facing the looming black metal printer with its upright tray and clip to hold copy, some forty years ago at UPI in Boston, and later, when it became an actual extension of myself while I worked the one-man wire bureaus in Providence, Concord, New Hampshire, and Portland, Maine. In UPI's big city bureaus, we had "operators" who did most of the punching, as the process of writing and transmitting a story and messages was called. But in the up-country bureaus, it was just you who reported, wrote, edited and sent stories with the flick of a switch to newspapers and radio stations all over the country and, through relays, throughout the world.
There was, however, one glaring difference between what we did and what those on the computerized Internet lashup achieve today: we did it all blind. We could not see the story we were writing because when we punched the typewriter-like keys the words didn't come up on paper but were encoded in tiny holes in an inch-wide strip of rolled paper that was fed into a transmitter and sent to the receiving teletypewriter at the other end, which in turn decoded the story and printed it out on letter-size rolls of manila copy paper. It was, as I tried to explain it all once to my computer-hacker son, like what happens when a player-piano roll activates the keys and the music goes down and around and comes out here. ("What's a player-piano, dad?")
Moreover, there was no way to rework tape-encoded copy, although we could delete a word or two by whacking with an open palm a gadget like the timer chess players hit, which backed up the tape and obliterated the holes so you could insert a new phrase or a word, a process that made the teletype receiver pause in midstream and let everyone know on that end that a bush-leaguer was filing at a keyboard somewhere. You weren't allowed many pauses because on the wire was money, and editors and broadcasters didn't appreciate waiting too long for a breaking rip and read to clear. If you were called on it, and you complained that you only had two hands, you could expect a terse message (the forerunner of E-mail) from New York or Boston that you should be fired, you crippled son-of-a-bitch.
So, what we punched was what they got, and that, most times, was first-draft, instant composition with all the danger of typos, twisted syntax, and misquotes and factual errors. We'd rush bleary-eyed into the bureau at 4:30 a.m. for the 5 o'clock split (the time on the wire that bureaus split off from division headquarters to write and send news to local clients), frantically tear apart the morning papers, stick pertinent stories up on the clipboard in front of the teletype keyboard, and rewrite (or not, depending on when one sat down at the keyboard), madly. In those days, many of us didn't have time to take UPI's motto--"A UPI man is always at the scene"--literally. Being at the scene for my generation of wire-punchers was waiting outside the drugstore in freezing cold and rain for the early editions to hit the streets so we could copy shamelessly from them.
As the stories were being sent--and the process had to be repeated every half hour or so for new leads and new stories--a copy would be chattering out on your own printer, and we'd refer to that later to send corrections in separate messages which often had as many words as the original story. The faint-hearted, or an early-rising reporter who had the luxury of deadline-free wire-time (not a luxury that UPI, with what the AP used to call our "Send it first, Send it fast, Send a correction" philosophy. granted any of us) might, occasionally, carefully type up the stories first on a typewriter and then copy them onto tape before throwing the switch. (UPI, in its fiscal wisdom, made that difficult anyway. Boston once refused to send me any copy paper when I ran the Rhode Island bureau, citing expense downholds. I solved the problem by hoarding handouts and using the backs of them.)
It took guts (or naivete) to write blind, but not being able to see what we were doing forced all of us who pursued this rather bizarre form of composition to develop a good memory, a keen sense of direction and transition, and nimble fingers. I think punching tape also taught us much about working fast under pressure, and, strangely, to appreciate accuracy simply because there were no delete and cut and paste keys to bail us out. We also knew we wouldn't be allowed to screw up too often. In a sense, it was like those old Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason TV shows where they did it live, sometimes with no script. It did bring out the best in a lot of us, along with the worst. Once in a while, if I planned to sleep a few minutes later in the morning, I'd go into the bureau the night before, watch a late local TV news broadcast, and punch up some of what I heard along with some feature material I had lying around. In the morning, I'd send the pre-punched tape out first and, while it was slowly chugging through, begin ripping first edition stories out of the papers, and punching the stories that would follow. I'd get caught every so often because in my haste to get some leeway on the tape the early morning breaking story about, say, a ship collision off Newport would follow the opener about a guest speaker at the Jaycees, which prompted unfair comments from my Boston editor and local outlets about my whereabouts and news sense.
Teletypes also made you resourceful in another way. They malfunctioned and broke down, and at 5 a.m. there was nobody to call, certainly no toll-free, life-tech support number. Tapes snarled or broke, and paper jammed, right in the middle of a story being sent to a new client we were trying to impress. So, we learned how to unravel tape (chopsticks from the local Chinese takeout were my favorite tool), a job worse than untangling knotted Christmas tree lights; how to unscrew and remove the machine's heavy housing, and to probe around the grimy insides with a pair of pliers, not looking for any 33MHz processor which wasn't even a dream then but simply to straighten out a twisted armature or a bent transmitter permutation bar, or maybe just clean up a rusted arresting or code cam. Some of us even learned how to read bits of tape, painfully memorizing enough patterns of holes to figure out the difference between a period and a comma, and to identify a "but," a "however," or an "indeed."
When we weren't repairing our own machines, we were answering trouble calls from panicked clients reporting a jam-up, or that they were out of paper or ribbons, or they were getting garbled copy, and what were we going to do about it, goddammit? All of it while the clock was running out on your split and the dozen stories you had to file.
They were cumbersome and unattractive, those teletypes, and temperamental and noisy. Not at all like the handsome computer I am writing this piece on, all sleek and powerful and silent except for an occasional electronic beep or semi-human voice to remind me of an error and guide me through my story that at least looks good in white letters on a clean, blue screen. But then I click on to the Reuters newswire, and the menu comes up wimpishly without a sound, and I scroll by the day's top stories easily, and just as soundlessly. And I think how much I miss that beat-up, boisterous, grungy old teletypewriter that was the perfect instrument for presenting so sternly those deviations from the norm that are so often the news. To this day, I cannot walk into a newsroom without longing to see and hear one again. It belonged there along with the sweet smell of copy paper and typewriter ribbons, and cigarette smoke. It had the meat and the motion. There was an alarm, no mistake about it, when it sounded its five bells to signal a BULLETIN, and an urgency in the rhythmic chunk-chunking of its keys as it spat out the story, tap-tapping it crisply against a clean roll of paper seemingly as endless as the other stories that it would churn out. It had authority, this machine, and the ability to get attention, and, yes, to thrill.
Nowadays, if you can find a teletype, it's more than likely being used in a third-world country, or is sitting somewhere in a museum of memories, its harsh voice silenced, probably alongside a replica of a Gutenberg press. Still, I can't help feeling about the teletype as I feel, and as someone said, about the news: she's daily trouble, storm and strife; she's love and hate and death and life; she ain't no lady, she's my wife, and I love her.
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Reprinted from The Silurian News, published by the Society of the Silurians, an organization of New York City newspapermen and women, November, 1995.