Ouch. Just call me fat next time. Or old. But BORING. She knows how to hurt a guy.

Write something personal, she says. OK I’ve got this rash – NO STUART. Not THAT kind of personal.

Tell me a story. Isn’t that what 60 Minutes guru Don Hewitt always says?

So here’s a story.

I got my first paid job in local TV news at WAPT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi in 1983. It was a UHF station and an ABC affiliate and I got paid five bucks an hour, but it was in a state capitol and a unique part of the country so the work was always interesting. I had crammed four years of college into six while minoring in beer but finally got a degree that didn’t come out of the back of Rolling Stone magazine. I went to the unknown SEC school, the one that makes the top half of the SEC possible in football every year. We Commodores just kind of float the conference up a peg and give Kentucky one in the win column.

So I’m working at this little TV station and every now and again we reporters were called upon to anchor the morning news cut-ins. A cut-in is TV jargon for those little news reports around the top of the hour – five minutes maybe. Well the station didn’t pay anyone to roll videotape at six in the morning so the newscast was basically this kid fresh out of college reading Associated Press wire copy for five minutes with a little box thingy over his shoulder that proclaimed THE NEWS.

Now in those days, kids, shortly after the invention of the wheel, the wire actually continuously printed on a roll of something called paper – it didn’t just magically refresh on your computer screen because there were no computers in our newsroom, just typewriters, and in some cases manual typewriters with really big fonts with which we thwacked our way through a newscast on five ply carbon copy sometimes called script sets which flunkys like me would rip apart tossing away the carbon blackening our fingertips before carrying around smudged, color-coded copies of the script to the anchors, directors, producers and TelePrompter operators. A newsroom was a loud place. Police and fire radios – scanners – chattering away. Typewriters thwacking. Wire machines cranking out copy. Bells for news bulletins. People shouting. Mostly me shouting. Lots of things were different then. You could smoke in the newsroom. You could drink in the newsroom.

Only at five or six in the morning there were no anchors or reporters or editors or producers. Just you. So you’d arrive shortly before dawn and walk into a darkened newsroom to find a pile of wire copy heaped on the floor. Except on the days when the master control operator was too hungover to get up before dawn and open the building in which case you’d make a frantic phone call and try to get someone to sign the station on the air. Or the days when no one bothered to stock the roll of continuous paper on the wire machine in which case you made a frantic phone call to the AP to get them to resend the am news summaries so you would have something to read. This ain’t the journalism part folks. This is the news reader part of the business.

Because it was just me and the master control operator at ungodly o’clock in the morning, there wasn’t even a camera operator in the studio, no one to point the camera at you. They’d just lock the camera down and you’d put your earpiece in and the control operator would tell you to scooch your anchor chair right or left behind the big fake desk so your head didn’t disappear behind the box thingy that said THE NEWS. One anchorwoman who had white blonde hair once had a rather large moth land on her hair during a newscast. She had to shoo it away herself. No one else in the studio to fight off the moths and the bats. The station sat out by itself away from town in a prefab building in the shadow of the broadcast tower where our mighty signal reached several dozen viewers at that hour of the day. The engineers would occasionally shoot deer in the field behind the station.

So I’d sit at the desk and shuffle through the bits of wire copy and wait for the cue that we were live on TV. That cue came in the form of the director’s voice and he always said the same thing. TAKE TAPE SIX. There was no other tape. There was no tape operator. He rolled the tape so come to think of it I’m not sure he was talking to when he gave this command. Then immediately thereafter he would bark CUE THE FOOL. My eyes would cut to the TV that carried our live signal – what was being broadcast to the aforementioned several dozen viewers. I only had to take one glance at the TV screeen to see the fool to whom he had referred. I had my cue.