Newsroom Memories: Telephone Fun

For most of my newspaper career I was in departments where the phone didn’t ring unless it was someone’s spouse or kid or whatever, or unless the switchboard operator didn’t know how to route the call and took a wild — and usually wrong — guess.

The features department was different.

One day I took a call from an angry woman who sounded as if she could have been a grandmother. She was complaining about a picture on the cover of that day’s section.

The main story — with picture — was about back-to-school fashions.

"No, that’s not it!” she said. “That’s OK! I mean the other picture, lower on the page!”

There wasn’t much to see there, aside from a two-by-three-inch picture accompanying a brief about an upcoming play.

“That’s the one! How dare you run that in the paper where children can see it!”

The picture showed two men and a woman in 1920s-style clothing. One man sat in the foreground as the other man approached him from behind, holding out a rope with the apparent intention of strangling him. The woman, dressed like a flapper, looked on with exaggerated horror. Matter of fact, everything in the picture was silly and exaggerated. We’re not talking Quentin Tarantino here.

I told the caller that I doubted that kids (assuming they ever looked at the paper) would see that tiny photo and immediately begin garroting each other.

“DO YOU HAVE CHILDREN?”

I would have liked to have said I had twelve little buggers at home, or a degree in child psychology, but lying is wrong and besides the bosses might find out if I fibbed. So I said no, and she said I had proved her point. (“Don’t take any logic classes any time soon,” I didn’t say as I went into default mode for such callers: Let them vent and run out of steam, then politely say “Thank you for calling” and hang up.)

Then there was a call I didn’t take.

In the wee small hours a security guard would often staff the switchboard. One night it was a middle-aged guy who always seemed a little screwy. He once told me he had been a dean at the local community college. Uh huh.

Late one night while I was in the men’s room one of the sports guys came in to tell me that the guard was looking for me and that I had a phone call. Some woman calling me.

A woman calling me at 1:30 a.m.? A woman calling me at all?

I found the guard. “That’s right!” he said. “She was asking for you! Asking for Mark Murphy! But she hung up before I could find you!”

Off and on over the next day or two I racked my brain trying to figure out who the woman was.

At one point I thought of one possibility, a talkative former part-timer who used to call in stories to us in the days before laptops. I got along with her, but she could be an awful pest on deadline.

I called her anyway. I almost didn’t recognize her voice because she was sober.

No, she said, she hadn’t called me.

Maybe a day or two later a friend and former colleague named Lou called me at home. He said he’d tried to call me earlier in the week at the paper.

Yep, dear reader, that “woman” was Lou. (Oh well. He was a soft-spoken guy.)

Eventually that security guard wasn’t around anymore. Maybe he got another job in academia. Or maybe not, but that could explain a lot of things.