Andrew Shaw - Campus Tramp

Linda looked at him. He was, she decided, a very complex person. She remembered the self-satisfied young man who threw down shots of whiskey with beer chasers at the tavern, the smooth and witty young man who handed her her books after she ran into him and talked her off her feet. This was a new side to Don Gibbs, this tired young man who worked without a break and seemed on the point of collapse.

She coughed nervously, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She coughed a second time and he looked up.

“I’m here,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Linda Shepard from Cleveland,” he said. “For a while I didn’t think you were going to come.”

“I did.”

“So I see.” He stood up and walked around the desk until he was standing just a few feet from her. Then he put his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her eyes. His mouth was serious but his eyes were smiling.

“Well,” he said, “what can you do besides look pretty?”

She was flustered.

“This afternoon you said you could spell. Can you still spell?”

She nodded.

He turned around and picked up a batch of sheets of paper over two feet long and four or five inches wide. He handed them to her without comment and she looked at them.

“These are galleys,” he said. “Galley proofs.”

She nodded, her eyes on the top galley. The print on the paper was set up like newsprint in a single column two inches wide.

“Here’s how it goes,” he explained. “When a reporter types up a story it goes in my IN box. I check it, rewrite it when it stinks, correct the grammar and punctuation and toss it in the OUT box. Then it goes down to the printers.

“The linotype operator gets it next,” he went on. “He punches keys and presses levers and it winds up on a batch of little pieces of lead called slugs. He puts the slugs in a tray, and when he’s got about sixteen inches of copy set he runs off a galley print, an impression of the type that he’s got set. The guy downtown gives me two sets of galleys. I use one when I make up the papers and I proofread the other and send it back to him.”

“I see.”

He smiled. “Do you? That’s impressive. It took me months to understand what the hell they do down there. Great business, newspapering.”

He paused and sucked on the cigarette. He drew the smoke into his lungs and let the butt drop to the floor, squashing it absently with one foot. Then he looked at her again.

“What I want you to do,” he said, “is proofread the copy. I’d do it myself except I’ve read all this copy a good ten times already and I wouldn’t be able to spot any typographical errors. Besides, at this hour my eyes don’t work any more and typos would go right by me anyway. Read the stuff slowly and carefully and make the corrections with a copy pencil. The outer office is lousy with copy pencils.”

“How do I make the corrections?”

He groaned. “I forgot — you don’t know proofreader’s marks. There’s a sheet outside on the bulletin board, plus a style sheet to show you what gets capitalized and what doesn’t. Better check them.”

“All right,” she said. “How long will it take me?”

He scratched his head. “Hard to say, but it shouldn’t take more than an hour tops, even if this is your first time at it. There’s about six or seven galleys there — you should be done by 1:30 or so.”

“When will you be done?”

He looked at her. “I won’t.”

“Huh?”

“I never sleep Thursday nights. It’s part of the job. As soon as I get the whole issue made up with the dummies down to the news and all the copy finished I can knock off, but by then it’s usually time to race down to Fairborn and pick up the engravings. And by then the first page proofs are ready at the printer’s and I have to read them. With one thing or another the rest of the morning gets shot to hell and the afternoon with it, and then I take the papers and haul them over to the caf so the idiots will have something to read with their dinner. I’ll get to sleep about seven or eight tomorrow evening.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Precisely. Great business, newspapering.”

“But—”

“Every editor does it,” he said. “I was managing editor under Phil Stag last year and he went through the same kind of hell. You can live through it.”

“Can’t anybody else do the work?”

“Not really. I’ve got a managing editor and a bunch of people who write bad news copy, but there’s nobody who knows enough about the technical side of it or who has enough time to spare to make much difference. I wouldn’t trust anybody else on make-up or head-writing, and I can’t get around the job of being down at the print-shop Friday. So there’s not much chance of sleeping for a while.”

He straightened up. “Look,” he said, “get to work on proofing those galleys. Give a yell if you need me, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t because I’ll be going quietly nuts in here as it is. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Come back with them when you’re done. And don’t mind me if I scream or throw ashtrays against the wall or anything like that. Okay?’”

She nodded and turned away, walking out of the office. She found the style sheet and the sheet with proofreader’s marks on the bulletin board and took them with the galleys to one of the wooden tables. She studied both sheets of paper for several minutes until she managed to figure out what in the world they were about. Then she got down to the laborious business of proofreading the galleys.

It was a quarter after one when she walked back into Don’s office, holding the batch of corrected galleys in front of her like a pagan making an offering to a god. He took them from her, glanced at them and tossed them into the OUT box.

“That was fast,” he told her. “Think you did a good job?”

“If there are any mistakes there you can shoot me.”

He laughed, but the laughter was strained and she knew how tired he was. “There’ll be mistakes,” he said. “I’ll catch some of them on page proof and the others’ll wind up in the paper. They always do.”

“Always?”

He nodded. “We get them all the time. Nothing worth sending into the New Yorker , but we get some honeys. The best one that I can remember was when we were running this story about a wooded region that was partly private and partly open to the public. We had something about the public area, only we dropped one letter out of public and—”

She felt herself blushing.

“Well,” he said, “thanks a hell of a lot for coming in and helping me out. You’ve saved me a good bit of work and I appreciate it. Any time you feel like dropping in, the office is always open and I can always find something for you to do.”

“Do you want me to go now?”

“Don’t you want to get to sleep? It’s late.”

“I’m not tired.”

“But you’ve got classes tomorrow—”

“I can cut them. I’d like to stay around.”

“Well—”

She grinned. “You just said that the office was always open and there would always be something for me to do.”

“What could you do now?”

“Anything. The office is messy — I could clean it up for you.”

“The janitor does that in the morning.”

“You could find something for me to do. Couldn’t you?”

“I suppose so.” He butted the cigarette he was holding in the ashtray and looked at her again. “Are you sure you don’t want to get to sleep?”

“Positive.”

“Cutting classes is a bad habit to get into.”

“Don’t you cut classes?”

“I’ve cut most of my classes since the second semester of my freshman year,” he admitted. “I go to about one class out of every five.”