Living In The Office
From James Donahue’s Journal
It was after Jennifer moved from the Sandusky Christian School into Caro High School that my life took a strange turn. Because I was working nights, covering city council and school board meetings, and having to get my stories filed before going home, I started sleeping nights at the office instead of driving the long trip to the Deckerville Road house and back again. I put an alarm clock next to the bed in the back room, bought an extra tooth brush and comb, and slowly moved a stereo system and other conveniences.
At first it was hard getting used to all of the night noises in downtown Sandusky. But after a while I got used to staying over. Then when one of the regular copy editors had a heart attack and was laid up for several months, the editors at Port Huron brought me in to fill the slot until he could get back on the job. That involved a long 50-mile drive from Sandusky to Port Huron and then back again every day. I found that living in the office saved me from going the extra 40 miles to and from Cass City, so I literally moved into the office.
I look back on that as a very hard and lonely period in my life. I hated the drive. I hated copy editing. I hated the loneliness of coming back to an office where I could no longer cover the beat I had worked for so long and now had to ignore. I could not understand why I was tagged for the job because it created an extreme hardship. Since I had to be in the office by six or seven in the morning, I made the drive while there were not many cars on the road. Also I began experimenting with alternative routes, looking for shortcuts and faster ways to get from point A to point B. Because it was so early, and I literally owned the road during those hours, I often broke the speed limit. One morning as I was rounding a curve on one of the shortcut routes I had discovered, I passed a police cruiser. He quickly turned on his lights and pulled me over. I came to work having to deal with a speeding ticket. I was not a happy fellow that year.
I remember the hours I spent sitting on that copy desk, relearning how to communicate with that complex DOS computer system while trying to edit copy, fit it into prescribed newspaper space, and write assigned one, two or more-column headlines. It was demanding work requiring speed and accuracy. There were four or five of us all doing the same thing all day long. I was reminded every day why I never wanted to take an editor’s job on a newspaper.
The only highlight of those days was the time I got to spend with Jim Ketchum and some of the other staffers when we took our lunch breaks. It was customary to seek out the various restaurants in the city and we eventually hit them all. At least the ones that offered good food at reasonable prices. Jim and Alice Ketchum had me over for dinner at their place a couple of times during that ordeal, which was nice of them. The problem I still had with eating at their house was that Alice still was a very bad cook. At the time she was suffering from breast cancer so life was not going well for the Ketchums just then either. I later learned that Alice since died and Jim married again.
From James Donahue’s Journal
It was after Jennifer moved from the Sandusky Christian School into Caro High School that my life took a strange turn. Because I was working nights, covering city council and school board meetings, and having to get my stories filed before going home, I started sleeping nights at the office instead of driving the long trip to the Deckerville Road house and back again. I put an alarm clock next to the bed in the back room, bought an extra tooth brush and comb, and slowly moved a stereo system and other conveniences.
At first it was hard getting used to all of the night noises in downtown Sandusky. But after a while I got used to staying over. Then when one of the regular copy editors had a heart attack and was laid up for several months, the editors at Port Huron brought me in to fill the slot until he could get back on the job. That involved a long 50-mile drive from Sandusky to Port Huron and then back again every day. I found that living in the office saved me from going the extra 40 miles to and from Cass City, so I literally moved into the office.
I look back on that as a very hard and lonely period in my life. I hated the drive. I hated copy editing. I hated the loneliness of coming back to an office where I could no longer cover the beat I had worked for so long and now had to ignore. I could not understand why I was tagged for the job because it created an extreme hardship. Since I had to be in the office by six or seven in the morning, I made the drive while there were not many cars on the road. Also I began experimenting with alternative routes, looking for shortcuts and faster ways to get from point A to point B. Because it was so early, and I literally owned the road during those hours, I often broke the speed limit. One morning as I was rounding a curve on one of the shortcut routes I had discovered, I passed a police cruiser. He quickly turned on his lights and pulled me over. I came to work having to deal with a speeding ticket. I was not a happy fellow that year.
I remember the hours I spent sitting on that copy desk, relearning how to communicate with that complex DOS computer system while trying to edit copy, fit it into prescribed newspaper space, and write assigned one, two or more-column headlines. It was demanding work requiring speed and accuracy. There were four or five of us all doing the same thing all day long. I was reminded every day why I never wanted to take an editor’s job on a newspaper.
The only highlight of those days was the time I got to spend with Jim Ketchum and some of the other staffers when we took our lunch breaks. It was customary to seek out the various restaurants in the city and we eventually hit them all. At least the ones that offered good food at reasonable prices. Jim and Alice Ketchum had me over for dinner at their place a couple of times during that ordeal, which was nice of them. The problem I still had with eating at their house was that Alice still was a very bad cook. At the time she was suffering from breast cancer so life was not going well for the Ketchums just then either. I later learned that Alice since died and Jim married again.