Dorothy was the promotion manager for a big company downtown. I was the editor of a suburban newspaper chain. One day a rad thought came to me. “I can do this.” So the next few months were spent on (a) planning to start my own newspaper somewhere and (b) talking my spouse into it.
Of course, that’s back when people killed trees, made paper, covered it with words and had 10-year-olds deliver a stack of it to your door. Papers were powerful, because everyone read them. They brought news, opinion and the latest Zeller’s sale into your home. They formed public opinion, created consensus and did that through the benevolent filter of newsmen or women, and their editors. Unlike this world of blogs, social media, Internet warfare and online echo chambers, newspapers coalesced society, rather than rending it. They were clumsy, expensive, labour-sucking behemoths, too.
But I wanted one.
The target was a small city that was home to a chain-owned daily with lots of history but barely a pulse. I talked a dozen co-workers into following me, rented a greasy former fish-&-chips store, bought a bunch of horrible purple desks from a Bank of Commerce surplus sale and built a composing room of plywood tables and leased equipment.
I was 26 and after selling every single possession we had, barely escaping divorce, I raised enough money to finance this venture for eight weeks. Yeah. Two months. If cash flow didn’t flow, I was toast. Because the paper would be free distribution, blanketing thirty thousand homes, every dollar had to come from advertising. So I became a salesguy as well as publisher. I cleaned the john, too. My skeptical, bemused, sporting, indulgent, adaptable wife quit her fancy career job and learned how to paste up pages to send to the printer plus typeset and operate the big vertical camera. We badly miscalculated on the first issue, and it took all night to get it out. This sacrifice helped forge a bond between us that has never been broken.
Well, we made it. In time the paper thrived, grew, moved into new premises. Then it expanded. There were eventually five publications, some weekly, some more frequent. I talked myself into buying a press, a giant, long rumbling thing that ate massive rolls of newsprint and cost a million dollars. At a time when nice houses were $60,000, this was a leap. The staff jumped to forty. The competition faded to nothingness.
Since I was now a master of the universe, at 27, I bought a new car. It was a 1976 maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass Brougham Supreme Coupe Something, about 18 feet long. Completely gross. I loved it.
The coup de grâce was the phone. No cell service then, of course, so I had a rotary phone installed in the thing that operated like a police radio and looked like, well, a rotary phone with buttons. Every call had to go through an operator and reception was dodgy. It also required a whippy aerial mounted on the top of the vehicle which bent and whistled obscenely in the wind. But a bonus was that it made my Cutlass look like an unmarked cop car so I could come up behind anyone, flash the lights twice and make them pull over. Loved that, too.
What happened?
Newspapering was a glam business in those days so a guy came along with a pile of money and bought our company. He took the building, the staff, the publications, the press, the receivables and the debt. We got a huge deposit cheque, paid something called ‘capital gains tax’ and retired. I was 29. It didn’t take.
What’s the point of this story?
There isn’t one. It’s just a slice of my life. Occasionally I hear from someone who worked for us and relished the cowboy capitalism we practiced. Sometimes Dorothy and I will remember moments. Like the night a slew of flyers had to be inserted into tens of thousands of papers as they flew off the press. Somebody arranged for a crew of high schoolers to do it, even though it turned out to be prom night. The kids showed up after midnight, in party clothes, with boom boxes. They danced, laughed and stuffed. Us too, as the trucks were loaded. Indelible.
Okay, you may return to r/wallstreetbets now. What a world.