Holy Week in the composing room

It’s Holy Week, and on this particular night, about 30 years ago, I am filling in as makeup editor in my newspaper’s composing room.

The job has nothing to do with lipstick and rouge, though it does involve working with a few people who I sometimes think — in my less charitable moments — deserve the kind of facial makeover that Estee Lauder never envisioned.

Most of the people in the composing room are nice to me; they dutifully cut and paste up the type after it comes out of the film processor that has replaced the Linotype machines. But a couple of them are incompetent and incomparably rude. One of them can’t be trusted to cut type correctly — his nickname is “Chainsaw” — and when he puts type on a page it’s often crooked. The only way he could consistently put it on straight would be if his shift coincided with a major earthquake.

And there’s the production manager, whose duties consist of sitting in a little office, reading a newspaper and chewing gum, then coming out to the newsroom to chat with the managing editor, then going back to his office — and more gum! — then, as deadline approaches, coming out to the composing room and harassing already harried editors.

The makeup editor job is basically troubleshooting: cutting stories that are too long; finding ways to fill space because a story is too short; looking for stories and pictures that are missing. And when I’m not doing all this, I’m trying to anticipate problems as the clock keeps ticking.

This being Holy Week, the paper has been running a daily series that retells the Easter story.

A small picture goes with it — an artist’s rendering of the face of Jesus Christ.

And it’s missing.

I know that every morning someone from the newspaper’s library comes into the composing room, collects the pictures from that morning’s pages and brings them to the library to be filed.

So I hustle across the building to the library.

Over the years the library has improved. It used to be that if you went in there looking for, say, a picture of Julie Andrews, you had to look in a file cabinet and find a small folder with her name. This would direct you to a large manila folder in another file cabinet, a folder marked with a number, such as 4537.

Upon opening the drawer in the bigger file cabinet and finding Folder 4537, you would be likely to find a few pictures of Julie Andrews — but only after sifting through pictures of the Empire State Building, a circus elephant, a guy in a hard hat pointing at something, a kindergarten class from a local school, the same guy in the same hard hat pointing at something else, and about a dozen other unrelated images.

You know that theory that says that if you take 20 monkeys and sit them at typewriters, one of them will eventually type “King Lear”? I am reasonably sure that one of the 19 other monkeys invented this filing system.

Luckily for me, the filing system has been revamped. Unluckily for me, I can no longer dive in and find something myself. Instead, I’m now required to ask a clerk to find it for me.

Tonight the clerk is a guy named Bob. He’s an older gent and one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet.

And he has a hearing problem.

Bob used to be assigned to a night shift in the wire room, where he didn’t have to deal with people much; he spent his shift collating stories from the wire service machines. But those machines have been replaced by a computer system, and he has been reassigned to the library.

Whenever you talk to Bob, he looks at your lips, even though he wears a hearing aid. Having dealt with him a lot, I know enough to enunciate when I tell him that I’m looking for a picture of “Jesus Christ.”

But I can tell that he’s not understanding me, and I am sympathetic; “Jesus Christ” can’t be an easy name to lip-read. So I try again, a little louder, as if that would help much.

“I’m looking for a picture of JESUS CHRIST!”

He’s still not getting it.

“JESUS CHRIST!”

By now I’m worried that he thinks I’m yelling at him. But he finally understands me, and he walks to one of the file cabinets, opens a drawer and pulls out a small cardboard folder.

On the folder is typed “Jesus Christ.” In the folder is my Holy Grail of the moment, the drawing of the Savior Himself, complete with crown of thorns.

But there’s no time for champagne — I have to rush back to the composing room with my find and await the next crisis.

I’m sure the wait won’t be long.