Tuesday, April 15, 2014
The wonderful -30- on Doris’ obituary put me right back in the newsroom of the old PJ building on Washington Street. Doris was there along with Jennie Vimmerstedt, Frank Hyde, Maggie Bentley and Margaret Bentley, Pat Parker, the Dempseys, Jeanette Hansen, Jean Moore and on and one.
Doris is the one who took me under her wing when I was hired in 1972 to roll sports ticker tape in the early morning and then to help with odd jobs around the newsroom the rest of the day.
-30- is one of the first things she taught me when I started helping with rewrites of club news, obits and announcements destined for publication. For those who don't know, -30- is a typesetting notation of where the copy ends.
Doris was generous and fun and certainly very good to me over the years. Day to day, she handled the large roster of paid correspondents, turning their submissions into useable copy and keeping the books so they could be paid at the end of each month.
In those pre-computer days, only The Post-Journal collected and tallied the votes on election night. It was years before the Board of Elections would do that. I can remember politicians -- Joe Gerace, for one -- coming to the second-floor newsroom in the very late hours of election night to find out who had won.
Doris was the one who undertook the monumental task of hiring people to go to each of the county’s then-250 polling places at 9 p.m. when the polls closed. They’d collect the vote totals from the AVM machines and report them by telephone to the PJ newsroom - where Doris had also organized an army of PJ employees to take the calls as they started rolling in.
She started working on elections in September, I think, and by Election Day had a well-schooled army ready to fan out across the county. Doris never failed to deliver.
In those days, the PJ was place of long term employment for a lot the folks, and so there was a camaraderie that built upon years of acquaintance and friendship. How lucky I was to land in the middle of it and to be so warmly embraced by all those quirky and wonderful newspaper people, including Doris.
She and Red were generous in sharing their camp in Hidden Valley for picnics with the PJ gang and games of charades around the campfire afterward. The most famous evening perhaps was the night Jennie Vimmerstedt assigned Jean Moore the movie Birth of a Nation to act out. I can still hear our laughter over that.
What wonderful days those were and what a large part Doris played in encouraging my growing interest in newspapers and journalism. I can’t imagine what might have become of me had I not encountered Doris Anderson in the PJ newsroom those many long years ago.
-Cristie Herbst
Retired Post-Journal editor
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