Editor’s note: Pete Kendall is leaving the Times-Review after 26 years. His last day is Friday. He can be reached at kendallpete@yahoo.com.



The newspaper business has changed slightly since I entered the fray fulltime in 1970.

Many of the people I looked up to at the time are dead.

This is partly because of age, partly because of lifestyle and, yes, partly because of working conditions.

“Yeah, I remember the summer that Jim Bell came to work as sports editor,” Fort Worth Press alumnus Whit Canning said. “About the second day, he looked around and said, ‘Hey, this place isn’t air-conditioned.’ No, it wasn’t.

“But you could open the windows back in the sports department. You could look out and watch cops putting tickets on cars. If there was ever a wreck in the neighborhood, you knew about it first. You got to watch it.”

These days, journalists sit in reclining office chairs, soaking up air-conditioning while waiting for the police radio to spit out news tips to pursue while toting laptop computers and digital cameras.

At The Press, where I worked from 1972-75, the closest thing we had to an air-conditioner was the so-called squirrel cage, which collected dust and bird poop about seven months a year. Without warning, it would be activated around April 1, and any sportswriter in the vicinity would be covered by the resulting debris.

The squirrel cage succeeded primarily in moving the air around, but it never really lowered the temperature. So, by the middle of an afternoon in the middle of June, your shirt would be sticking to your back. I don’t recall anyone expiring from the heat, but a pressman did die in the society department one summer Saturday while taking his dinner break. It was several hours before anyone noticed.

Sportswriters and reporters at The Press were not paid extravagantly.

My friend Canning, who went to work there in ’68, tells of being offered $125 a week by Managing Editor Delbert Willis.

“Delbert told me to keep it quiet,” Canning said. “I told him, ‘Don’t worry.’ Before I got married, I roomed with an old Army buddy named Cotton. I graduated from TCU. Cotton dropped out of Birdville High School. He made more at Bell Helicopter than I did at The Press. He’d say, ‘I can see how an education is really helpful.’”

But there were benefits.

Every Christmas, the Cowboys would reward each sportswriter with a fifth of whiskey. I would gift-wrap and pass mine on to a relative, thereby shrinking the amount of money required for Christmas purcases.

Canning recalled, “In those days, politicians would give reporters whiskey at Christmas. My first year, I walked into the courthouse pressroom after lunch and found [reporters] John Moulder and Bill Hendricks surrounded by 16 bottles of booze.”

It’s fair to say we all worked at The Press for different reasons — some of us chasing fame like Dan Jenkins, some of us chasing the price of a car payment. We hung on because we liked it.

“I can remember thinking I had the perfect job,” Canning said. “It was fun. My wife never understood how I could be so cheerful at six in the morning. I just loved going to work.”

I remember hearing sports columnist Mike Shropshire say, “You know, if I could just make $300 a week, I’d be fixed for life.”

Shropshire is now a well-heeled author. Forty years ago, we were all scraping by.

“We used to say that if it were a little more big-time with a little more money, it would be the perfect job,” Canning said. “If it had been more big-time, though, we might not have liked it as much.”

I miss working at The Press. I especially miss the people.

Charlie Modesette, the grizzled sports desk man, was a curiosity. “Charlie is the only person I ever knew who cut scotch with Mountain Dew,” Canning said.

Charlie was unflappable in a crisis. At The Press, there was a crisis about every five minutes.

“I’ll never forget the time [Managing Editor] Jack Moseley was flipping through the first edition one Saturday and screeched, ‘Charlie, we don’t have the Kentucky Derby in the paper!’ Charlie had been looking through the section. He calmly responded, ‘Yeah, I noticed that, too.’”

Unlike The Press, which never seemed to change until it went belly-up, the Times-Review seemed constantly in transition.

“Back when I worked there, we had an office for the publisher, and then a big office for everyone else, and then a backshop for the linotype machines and press,” Jim Browder recalled of the early ’50s. “There was an office supply counter at the front. The entrance was at the corner, where the alley meets Anglin Street. We had a penny peanut machine. That was the snack bar.”

There were no computers, unless you counted the one in the nickel Coke machine.

“The temperature was turned down so low that the bottles came out frozen,” Browder said.

No one could have imagined QuarkXpress and pagination back then.

“Hot-type was the only way. It was kind of fun, though it was a little dangerous. Linotype operators would occasionally do what they called a squirt with hot metal. If somebody got hit, it probably wasn’t intentional.

“Back then, groups would come through the Times-Review on tours. The linotype operators would type out the name of the person on a hot-metal slug, grab it with their fingers out of the type tray and hand it to the person. And the person would immediately drop it because it was so hot.

“You had to be careful in the hot-type process. All the type went in big metal forms, the actual pages. The forms had to go on the old flat-bed press. If you dropped the form on the way to the press, you had to start all over again on the page.

“Lee Troy was our press foreman. He was so strong he would pick up the page form in his arms and move it to the press. He dropped the front page one day, and we missed deadline. But that didn’t happen very often.”

I miss things as I reflect on 26 years at the Times-Review. I mostly miss the people who’ve gone on — among them William Rawland, Paul Griffith, Rita Thomas, Beth Bradbury, Twig Odom, Troy, Duane Walker and Al Stricklin.

Diverse in personality, they had one thing in common, dedication to an ink-stained cause. They cared about the Times-Review.

I’d be flattered to be remembered in that light 26 years from today.

For now, I’ll just say goodbye.