Centennial-year recollections included long hours, low pay, drinks all around

“Three hangovers a year are legitimate absences,” insisted retired copy editor George Bousu in 1976, when kidded about not showing up for work once after a staff party.

Bousu	Curry
Davis	Martin
	McDonald

Not that we’re prone to stereotyping, but there might be some reality behind the image of the hard-boiled, hard-drinking, chain-smoking newsman — at least judging by the accounts of six old-timers rounded up in 1976 to reminisce for The Flint Journal’s Centennial.

“When I worked the police beat, I’d work 80 hours a week,” said Colin J. “Mac” McDonald, a former assistant city editor who put in 46 years at The Journal, starting in the days of Prohibition. McDonald also upbraided one of his old colleagues as “gutless” for not even looking at the bodies after a murder-suicide case.

He, too, acknowledged an interest in imbibing, lamenting that “every time a good booze joint would open, the police would close it down.”

Former editor Ralph B. Curry wrote in a memoir that reporters on a breaking story might work 50-60 hours at a stretch, fueled by desktop catnaps, wolfed-down sandwiches “and sometimes a stimulating chaser that we fondly called our sleep substitute.”

Roland “Bob” Martin, a retired managing editor, said the average work week for a reporter was 60-70 hours — and this in a field with notoriously low wages.

Curry said during the Great Depression, Journal pay was cut by about two-thirds, the balance being doled out in scrip redeemable for groceries and goods.

Asked if they ever received overtime pay, the panel of retirees answered as one with an incredulous “No.”

“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time,” added Keith Davis, a former assistant city editor.

Knowledge passed from one generation to the next. Bousu, starting as a cop reporter in 1942, learned the ropes from McDonald, who started in ’27. The times might have changed, but some lessons remain unchanged. Bousu said McDonald taught him that when it comes to reporting, “you cannot assume one damn thing.”

— adapted from Centennial reports
by Lou Giampetroni and Ralph B. Curry