Newsroom Memories: Ramona and the Taxi Driver

Her name was Ramona, and she liked to tell about how, when she was a little girl, an uncle told her a bedtime story about a magical land.

The uncle’s name was L. Frank Baum, and the magical land was Oz.

Ramona also said she once appeared in a movie with Mary Pickford. I have never been able to confirm this, but who knows? Maybe she did.

Ramona was the newsroom’s religion reporter. This meant that on Sundays she and her tape recorder would go to one of the local churches, where she would sit in a pew and record the sermon. After the service Ramona would go to the newspaper, sit at a desk in a far corner of the newsroom and write her story on a manual typewriter. Someone would later retype it on an electric typewriter so it could be scanned into the computer system.

Ramona had been an actress, and she was still a trouper. If an editor told her we were tight on space and she needed to hold her story to two pages, she would nod or say “OK.”

Then she would widen her typewriter margins as far as they could go.

On Sundays I ran the copy desk, which was near the other end of the room. The copy desk was actually a number of desks that were combined in the shape of a horseshoe. I sat on the inside of the horseshoe (called “the slot”) while the editors I supervised sat on the outside (called “the rim”).

There was nothing really wrong with Ramona’s religion stories, but when quoting a minister she’d sometimes omit the second set of quotation marks, and I often couldn’t tell where the quote ended because Ramona wrote a lot like the people she wrote about. So I’d insert the missing marks where they seemed to make the most sense, figuring that God probably wasn’t going to call the paper the next day and bitch.

Ramona sometimes worked on a weekday, writing other stories. On one such day I was once again in the slot while two guys on the rim, Dan and Paul, were talking about the movie “Taxi Driver,” which had come out not that long ago. Our boss, George, sat to my right.

At one point Paul did an imitation of Travis Bickle, the psychotic title character played by Robert DeNiro, who in a famous scene looks in a mirror: “Hey … you talkin’ to me? You talkin' to me? Cuz if you’re not talkin’ to me, who are you talkin’ to?”

So of course Dan had to do his version of the speech. Dueling DeNiros.

During all this, Ramona, who I’m sure was oblivious to it, kept on working, far away from us.

Fun is fun, but stories were piling up and I had to get the operation back on track. So I did the speech in French: “Eh — vous parlez à moi? Vous parlez à moi? Parce que si vous ne parlez pas à moi, à qui parlez-vous?”

That broke them up and, more important, successfully signaled that it was time to get back to work.

Maybe a half-hour later Ramona got up from her desk and slowly made her way across the room.

At one point she shuffled past the copy desk, and our boss, George, who’d known her for many years, called out to her.

“Ramona! How the hell are ya?”

She turned and looked at him.

“You talkin’ to me?”