My Sunday Feeling

This is not my first newspaper job. Many years ago, late during high school, I had a job as a copy boy at the Post-Standard newspaper in Syracuse, N.Y.

       A copy boy is the lowest rung on the career ladder at a large newspaper. Our nominal job was to pull stories off the teletype, roll them up and secure them with a rubber band, and place them on a bulletin board using a numbering system in the small room in which we worked.

My real job was to do anything that the editors wanted, including getting regular coffees for them at a small café across the street.

The stories could be written either in understandable English on regular paper that ran through a teletype machine on long rolls, or they would be sent in a sort of code that reminded you of Braille - a one-half inch strip of colored, thicker paper with small holes in it.

When an editor would call for a story to be published in the next morning’s newspaper, we would walk it out of our small, dimly-lit room down a long aisle through a vast outer room.

The aisle was probably was 75 feet long, and was brightly-lit. The many desks were occupied by busy reporters and editors, on the phone or writing away using typewriters – no PC’s back then.

After walking down the long aisle, we would open a swinging door at the end of the aisle and place the story on another bulletin board.

The world past this swinging door was not like the world we could see from the copy boy room. It smelled of machinery oil, was shrouded in semi-darkness, and was noisy.

It was the room where the printing presses ran, where each evening (I believe the deadline was 11 p.m. each night) the technology in the back room resulted in the newspaper that readers would see the next morning.

The creativity was in the large, well-lit room through which we traveled with the selected stories for the next morning’s newspaper.

Past the door, it was a world of thickly-muscled, beefy men represented by a labor union, men with opinions and attitudes that carried little tolerance for young people, and in particular copy boys.

You delivered the story just past the door, and left the room. You didn’t linger there, because you didn’t belong there; you weren’t even welcome there.  

It was among about a half-dozen jobs I had as I was growing up, and it ranked as probably the best.

Why? Because of the people with whom I worked. And I don’t say this because they were nice people, necessarily. Some were, for sure, but if you looked at the collective personality of the people with whom I worked at the newspaper, they were on the grumpy, irascible side. 

They were cynical, they were world-weary, but they were smart. The air around and above their heads seemed to crackle with electricity as you walked your story past them, down the long aisle in the large, brightly-lit room, where you witnessed the process of producing a daily newspaper.

It was here that I met some unforgettable characters, here that I listened one evening to a high military draft number being called for me, a guarantee that I wouldn’t be drafted to go to Vietnam, here where we joked and talked and sometimes out of boredom parodied the process of a late-night talk show, complete with a host and special guests.

One of us, his name was Bob, would play the role of Johnny Carson. He would welcome the guests to his show and interview us. Years later, Cosmo Kramer did the same thing with Jerry and George and Elaine and Newman on the TV show “Seinfeld,” after cadging an old set from “The Merv Griffin Show” from a dumpster.

I left the newspaper after about nine months, to take a better job promised by my cousin Chris. He described the new job as underwater photography in the Caribbean, working for the Disney Studios. I mean, can you imagine anything better when you’re 17 years old?

Chris was the “good idea” man among my friends. He was clever and he was imaginative. He was also a bit of a dreamer.

You couldn’t help but like him and sometimes admire him, but you learned to be careful about planning on his ideas. Sometimes, they didn’t materialize, and this was one of these. I left the job at the newspaper to take the summer photography job which never materialized, couldn’t return to the newspaper, and was left without a job altogether.

I found another job – the low pay common to all these jobs at least helped to ensure that jobs were available to me – but I missed the newspaper.

Another thing that has lasted for me from my experience at the newspaper is the way that the mood of the place, and with it my mood, changed on Sunday.

The large Sunday newspaper had been published that morning, and the preparation late on Sunday afternoon to get ready for Monday’s newspaper was unlike the other days I worked at the newspaper.

It was lower-key, more relaxed, people at work were a bit nicer, and we often nipped out to a nearby sub shop, Jiffy King, to get a delicious submarine sandwich for supper, which we consumed in the small Copy Boy room.   

At the time, in the late 60’s, a rock group that was among our favorites was called “Jethro Tull.” The group was named after an agricultural pioneer in England in the Eighteenth Century.

We were vaguely aware of the allusion, but far more interested in the music: a driving sound with superb guitar work and drumming, complemented by the flute played by its leader Ian Anderson. At times melodic, at times manic, the flute would fill in the space between clever lyrics, often penned by Anderson.

One of their early songs was called “My Sunday Feeling,” about the hangover one may experience after having too much fun on Saturday night. Its significance resonated with us, because we occasionally partied too hard on Saturday evening, followed by the hangover.

 A sample verse:

My Sunday feeling is coming on over me.
My Sunday feeling is coming on over me,
Now that the night is over.
Got to clear my head so I can see.
Till I get to put together,
that old feeling won't let me be.

A typical Sunday, in those days, was often accompanied by work at the newspaper. Talking about it one day with a good friend who also worked at the newspaper, with whom I often partied the night before, he joked about the song and its relevance to us, referring particularly to our turn-down condition and a subdued mood at work.

Well, the phrase has stayed with me through the years, but it has come to mean to me something far different than the nausea and fatigue that it once represented. It now signifies a very special day in my life each week, one to which I look forward.

And I know my wife feels the same way. In fact, in a little poll to which she responded the other day, I noticed she said that Sunday was her favorite day of the week as well.

All Sundays are not the same for us. There is occasionally the obligation to which we’re committed, and sometimes something unexpected happens that changes our plans.

I use the word “plan” loosely, however, because the Sunday we like the most has a decided absence of plan and of normal weekday responsibilities, of which we have plenty.

Things like our own goals and desires, each other, kids, friends, family, dogs, work, appointments, meetings during the day and the evening, you know, the stuff to which Nineteenth Century poet William Wordsworth referred:    

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

But not on Sunday. A good Sunday, the way Sunday was intended, will begin for us in bed together, followed perhaps by Mass at 10 a.m. We’ve begun to favor the Saturday evening Mass the night before, however, to keep our Sunday mornings free.

I’ll rise early, work on a story, do some household chores, watch an old movie on TV that I recently TiVo’ed, walk on the treadmill as I read a book, shower, and head to Canton for a copy of the Sunday “New York Times” newspaper.

My wife and sometimes I will watch “CBS Sunday Morning,” a TV newsmagazine show that’s on each Sunday at 9 a.m., a leisurely, friendly show with affable Charles Osgood as host.

It’s news journalism at its best: informative, entertaining, sometimes inspiring. Yes, it includes footage and reporting of current events - weather disasters, war, corruption, generally bad behavior – but these are reported in a dutiful manner and you move on to the stuff that captures your imagination.

 Stories about how Eric Clapton’s song “Layla” came to be written, stories about the Iowa State Fair, a traditional, homey State Fair that features deep-fried Twinkies, and the show’s weekly ending that features nature absent of people, and often even of narration: nature is allowed to speak for itself, with animals at work or at play, the wind whistling through the trees, and sparkling water in a stream that pushes hard downhill as winter begins to turn to spring.

The rest of our Sunday is up to us. It often involves an absence of household cleaning chores (ugh!), but includes for me watching sports on TV, and marathon newspaper reading: the Free Press followed by the Times. My wife will busy herself with a hobby, and tolerate my TV habits.

We use that blessed Sunday to recharge ourselves. We’ve come to look forward to it, and to treasure it each week. Because, once you’ve experienced it, that “Sunday Feeling” is a reward for the previous week, and can help you through the week that follows.

During the previous week, we’ve got and spent, and laid waste our powers. Sunday is our day to cast off the world. It is a day to stop and to appreciate some of the good things that God has provided, including a truly beautiful day for which we are forever grateful.