It was unusual for me to purchase a “rare book” through a used book store, a first edition at that, but it was one that I had been seeking for years and could never find, so I ordered it from some California book dealer who had what may have been the only remaining copy. It was a book I'd read in high school that confirmed my desire to be a journalist. At the time, journalism degrees were not all that common. Television news was relatively new; it was just somebody behind a desk holding up black and white pictures, and a local map to show the weather. No “breaking news” or helicopter high-speed police chases on live broadcasts. Competing daily newspapers kept us informed, and my first job on a big daily, while unimportant in the larger scheme of things, was the world's greatest experience for a college kid who wanted to be a journalist.

But I digress from the book, a story about a cub reporter on a small town newspaper on Puget Sound written in 1937 by Howard M. Brier, a journalist and professor at the University of Washington. In the following passage, he describes the scene so many of us who worked at newspapers in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and early 1960s experienced, before automatic systems of publishing took over and the computers did away with much of the city room clamor and glamour:

“It was 1:45 in the morning. In another 15 minutes, the forms would be locked and the press would roll with the early mail edition. [T]he first hesitating rumble [came] from the press room…. Usually the buzzer back of the city desk tapped out one or two fire alarms in the course of an evening, but tonight the firemen had been undisturbed at their card games. [The grumpy old city editor reminisced about his days on the beat. He said,] 'It made a newspaper man out of you. Once you go through a major disaster – some smash news break – the germ gets under your skin. It's like a disease – an incurable disease…. Once you are caught in the spell, you see your work in a new light. It no longer seems like a job; it becomes a duty. Men give up their lives for duty.'”