My friend Sarellen McAndrew, who worked with me at the Sunday Dispatch for more than 15 years as a top notch graphic designer, taught me a simple little poem that her mother taught her. I think about it every Labor Day. It goes like this:

Be a laborer

great or small;

do it well

or not at all

I always thought those words perfect until I spent an afternoon with my old buddy Jim “Spot” O’Donnell on the deck of his boathouse at Harvey’s Lake a couple of weeks ago. Spot was head pressman at the Dispatch for the 23 years I worked here as a full-timer (1967 to 1990) and for several years before and after. All he talked about that day on his deck was work. It’s his favorite subject. Today, as I contemplate Sarellen’s mother’s poem, I keep thinking the only thing that could make it better would be something Spot might be inclined to add:

But work is not

about getting done;

work is about

having fun

At 87, Spot still looks like he could run a printing press … or knock your block off, for that matter, but he was never that sort of guy. More importantly, he still gets a gleam in his eye when he talks about the fun he had running printing presses for some 50 years.

“No matter what catastrophe we came up against on the job,” he said, as a thunder storm rolled in over the lake, “I’d look around and say to the guys: ‘We’ve got to find the humor in this. Otherwise it’s gonna feel like work’.”

He then told a story that goes back to the early days of the Dispatch, when the operation was in the basement of the Dime Bank building on Main Street and the massive letter press sounded like a 747 taking off and seemed like it might shake the whole building down. Spot affectionately called that press the “Old Hurdy Gurdy.”

One Saturday night – actually in the early hours of a Sunday morning – unbeknownst to anyone working, including the press crew, a roller flew off the press and settled down in the mechanism somewhere not only causing the press to shut down but also creating so much heat that parts of the machine actually melted together.

“There we were,” Spot said, continuing with his story. “The press was down, the paper had to get out, we could look down between the cylinders and see the mess we had on our hands, and a couple of dozen guys were standing around looking at me and saying ‘What’er we gonna do now, Spot?’

“I looked down into the press for a minute trying to size things up,” Spot went on. “Then I looked each of the guys right in the eye and I said, ‘Well, the first thing we’re gonna do is send out for coffee.’

“Once the tension was broken,” he went on, “I started barking orders and we were up and running in an hour. I didn’t know it then, but those words became my mantra. Every time anything went wrong someone would say, “What do we do, Spot? Send for coffee?’”

I reminded Spot of the time he taught a young man from Boston how to go about his job.

Before there was computerized typesetting there was phototypesetting and one Friday our phototypesetter broke down – a real nightmare for a Sunday newspaper.

We put a call into the company and they immediately dispatched (no pun intended) a technician from Boston. I remember owner and publisher “Pidge” Watson lamenting that the “meter started running the minute the guy got into his car” meaning this was going to be one expensive service call. But we had no choice.

The young guy assessed the situation and said he needed a part – a tiny, little thing – that he would have to order. It would be in the following week.

That’s when Spot stepped in. “That’s not good enough,” he told the young fella. “There is no ‘next week’. This newspaper has to go to press tomorrow night. And you have to make their problem your problem.”

Spot then said “let me see that broken part” and when the young guy showed it to him, Spot said “C’mere a minute.”

Spot took a paper clip and fashioned it into something that looked just like the part. “There,” he said. “This won’t last forever but it should get them through a day or two.”

The young guy installed Spot’s twisted paper clip and the unit ran like a charm.

“Now, doesn’t that make you feel better?” Spot asked him. “You were too quick to give up. Where’s the fun in that?”

“He was a little timid, wasn’t he?” Spot said, recalling the young technician. “He didn’t know how to appreciate a challenge.”

Spot never had that problem.

About the Author

Ed Ackerman is the editor of the Pittston Sunday Dispatch. He can be reached at 602-0175.

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