If everything were the way it was in 1959, the copy boys from the old Chicago Daily News would be running a relay today between their city room and the macabre city room of the Chicago American.
Before 1962, the City News Bureau of Chicago-which trains young reporters while feeding a steady supply of police, fire and governmental news to radio and television stations and the newspapers-sent its dispatches along in pneumatic tube cartridges through a pneumatic tube system connecting the city`s media.
(For those who know only fax machines and computers, pneumatic tubes were used extensively by businesses in the old days. They operated on a principle similar to the one that operates a Daisy air rifle-pump up air to expel a BB. Or a cartridge stuffed with news copy paper.)
And the tubes from City News (it was then at 188 W. Randolph St.) all went through the Chicago tunnel.
It leaked even then, more than three decades ago. Whenever the river rose because of a violent rainstorm in which the sewers backed up into the river, the pneumatic tube system started to spring leaks. The leaks came from leaks in the ceiling of the tunnel at places where it crossed the river west and north of the Loop.
I was a copy boy at the Daily News in the summer of 1959, a particularly violent summer of thunderstorms that sent the river rising on a regular basis. As a copy boy, I checked the tube receiving apparatus every time a carrier thumped into the glass chamber in the middle of the city room.
When the river was up, the tubes were flooded.
You`d open the chamber and Chicago River water would gush out onto the floor of the city room. The News was then in its old building at 400 W. Madison St., on the wrong side of the river when it came to storm season.
The water on the floor was sopped up with newspapers. The more water, the more newspapers. A soggy mound of newspapers rose and rose. In those days, newspaper city rooms were garbage piles anyway, in which cigarette and cigar smoke clogged the air and dead stogies littered the floor. A reporter was once asked by a civilian where the ashtray was. ”You`re standing in it,” he replied.
The wet floors were noticed only when the ink on the City News copy began to run because of water infiltrating the tubes. Copy boys had three jobs: To answer to the cry of ”boy!” yelled by any reporter or editor; to bring up sufficient newspapers of each edition from the press room to supply editors and reporters and to sop up any water on the floor; and, finally, to dry out wet City News copy by lighting matches near it.
When the city editor could not read the spongy copy anymore, he put Plan B into effect.
Plan B involved sending relays of Daily News copy boys every half-hour or so across the river to the old Chicago American building on Madison Street and Wacker Drive. The American was the afternoon rival of the News but, as in the old school of dueling, fair was fair.
The American city room was quite a contrast to the News city room. Ours was bright, loud and grungy. Theirs was dark and quiet with fluorescent lamps lit over each desk, creating a twilight zone halfway between a funeral parlor and the starship Enterprise.
The alien kid from the News had to wait in an anteroom while his sneering counterpart at the American-sneering at the sissy News people who let a little water ruin the competition-went to some mysterious place in the back of the darkened city room to find ”the stuff for the News.”
Little did we know back then that we were sitting on a big story-the tunnel leaks.
Joseph Reilly, the president of City News Bureau, said his outfit stopped using the tubes in 1961. Today, it all comes through on computers. And the newsrooms are all smoke-free zones, and copy boys are boys and girls who are editorial assistants. And nobody is allowed to throw newspapers on the floor because, obviously, they never get wet anymore.
