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He was recaptured a week or so later. He was thin, hungry, tired, confused.
He knew nothing about ATM machines, debit cards, cars that start with push-it buttons rather than keys. The "Internet" was a concept to him. Cell phones? No understanding.
He actually sounded relieved when reporters got him to comment en route to being led into court in handcuffs.
The world had passed him by.
I know the feeling.
Some of you have seen the results.
Look at the "column sig" that contains my photo. See the line between the title and my name?
One day last week, some columns appeared with just the name of the writer, and two lines beneath that name. Most of you never noticed, but that was a goof. My goof.
Did any of you notice that, on another day, there was more space between each paragraph of type on this page than there should be?
Me again.
What you didn't notice at all, because other people who work here caught them, were:
* A cartoon "squeezed" vertically, but not horizontally, so that its characters looked like we do when we stand in front of those "funny mirrors" at the amusement park.
* A column by Charley Reese, a syndicated columnist who lives in Florida, that featured the photograph of Nick Hoffman, our managing editor, who lives in DuBois.
* The inspirational First Amendment-oriented quotation that appears at the top right of this page, appearing, and appearing, and appearing, for several days in a row, the same quotation.
* A letter to the editor that was published with the "Here's what I think" main headline we use for letters, but without the two-line sub-headline that previews its specific contents.
Yep. Me. All me.
A month and more after the rest of the news staff began to wrestle with putting out the newspaper in Adobe InDesign rather than QuarkXpress (page-producing programs), I started to learn it.
It is SO frustrating.
I have been in this business for 45 years now. I wrote my first headline back in 1963, for the Erie Daily Times. I wrote it on a slip of paper, about 5 inches deep by 7 inches wide. I wrote it in pencil, then stuck it on a long upturned sharpened nail-like "spike" (Wouldn't the OSHA people have a conniption to see one of those in an office today?). Someone else picked it up, then retyped it on a Linotype, which printed reverse-type letters in the proper size and style - in lead. Those were fitted into a flat form, then rolled against cardboard, which was then bent into a cylinder and stuck inside a mold. More lead was poured in, and out came a half-round printing plate.
These days, headlines are written right inside story frames, which look a lot like Microsoft Word document templates. The frames go from one computer to another, eventually ending up on a thin aluminum plate.
So much has changed.
But in another sense, nothing has changed. A line of type in quarter-inch type (17 point), in Bodoni typeface that covers one column will accept
This much type
In the "old days" we would "count" the characters. The letters "f, i, j, l, t" counted as half-characters. Capitals were 1.5 characters, as were lower case "m" and "w." Upper-case "M" and "W" were two characters - in most typefaces. We had (and still have) ultra-narrow faces (like this), and ultra-wide faces, but that "counting" was a rule of thumb that would allow someone writing with a No. 2 soft lead pencil on a piece of cut-down newsprint to come pretty close to which letters would fit on a stick of lead type.
So I have been writing headlines for 45 years. We still fit newspaper pages into columns.
I really KNOW how to write headlines. I can do it almost without thinking.
Yet, when I opened up an InDesign page, I drew a box for the headline. The box promptly disappeared, because the drawing tool used for this type of box in InDesign is different from the one used in Quark, and I had confused the two.
The "grabber" tool that grabs stuff and slides it onto the page is different, too. In Quark, there were two, with clearly defined functions. In InDesign, there are three. No, wait. If you use the "T" tool, it does one thing. If you hold down the "Command/Apple" key, it does something else.
So I would draw a box, drag a cartoon inside the box, then look at the result. Hmm ... a bit off center. Let's just drag it to the left and -- WHY DID IT FLIP UPSIDE DOWN?
Happily, there is "Command-Z," a.k.a. "undo." InDesign allows unlimited "undo" commands. Good, because on more than one occasion, I whapped "Command-Z" all the way back to the beginning and started over.
But what had taken me perhaps 20 minutes six years ago, when I moved from the newsroom to the publisher's office and, though I continued to write and edit, I stopped laying out pages ... that took me 2.5 hours one day last week! And Nick STILL had to "tweak" it after looking at a reduced-size page proof, to get things to line up more or less correctly. To his credit, he didn't deride me. He is, after all, just a few weeks ahead of me in this InDesign regard.
We are all stumbling around. Last Saturday, I worked with Joy Norwood, our Sunday editor and probably the best page-producing person we have, and Chris Wechtenheiser, a sports staffer who usually flows right through computer stuff.
We were all asking each other stuff, kinda like a Larry, Curly, Mo ring-around-the-rosy.
Somehow, Sunday's edition got out.
Somehow, those editorial pages got out.
This page, too, is produced by yours truly.
I think that, by now, I've got it!
Unlike that poor convict, I can adapt to the modern world.
I do know what I'm doing ... doing ... ding ... dong...
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Denny Bonavita is the editor and publisher of McLean Publishing Co. in west-central Pennsylvania, including the Courier-Express in DuBois. E-mail: denny2319@windstream.net
