Counting Votes and Baking Bread

“All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.” – Pat Paulsen for President, 1968

By DAVE BERRY

I love the smell of ink and newsprint on Election Night.

It has a special appeal after midnight – especially on those nights in the newsroom when we count the votes. It’s a calming, reassuring reminder that you can almost relax. The familiar scent tells you your work is near an end, the numbers are tallied, the victories declared and it’s time for another edition to go to readers.

Out back at the dock, delivery vehicles are aligned in the dark, drivers slumped in their seats or perched on tailgates, talking in hushed tones, waiting for the first bundles.

In the pressroom, we from upstairs stand aside, letting the production crew do its job of clamping on final plates, making last-minute adjustments to ink settings and checking tensions on long webs of paper from massive rolls that will flow up, over and through a dozen press units.

You don’t lean, having learned that lesson long ago. Words and pictures on a computer screen are clean and perfect. Downstairs, in the pressroom, they jump onto the page through a process involving water, rubber blankets and four colors of oil-based ink … cyan, yellow, magenta and black. The transfer of ink to clothing is an easy process – not mysterious at all.

You check your watch and an alarm sounds, warning all to stand clear. Immediately the Harris offset press – four decades old but refurbished, modernized and computerized – begins to roll. With a motorized hum, long webs of paper flow from reel stands on the ends through the press units. Slowly, gingerly, the webs slide through the press, with each unit adding a color to the page.

At the folder, the sound becomes more mechanical, “chunka, chunka, chunka,”… as each finished paper is cut, folded a final time and aligned on a conveyor. The first over-inked copies are unceremoniously gathered and dumped into a recycling bin. The pressman running the console scoops up another half dozen for the editors and passes them back. Errors should have been caught before now, but you give it another look… and a thumbs up to the press foreman.

Once the pages are clean, in register, ready to go to customers, the foreman cranks up the speed and the “chunka, chunka” become a steady roar. Soon, the press is doing its nightly job of disgorging multiple thousands of newspapers onto the conveyor, which takes them up and over the wall to other machines that insert advertising circulars and strap them into bundles for the haulers.

With a final good copy scooped from the conveyor, I return to the newsroom, where the election crew is shutting down. With this election night, I tell them, my career has spanned at least 100 of these long nights of counting votes. I’ve missed very few.

A HUNDRED ELECTION NIGHTS

My first election as a journalist was in 1968, the year I met Hubert Humphrey and conducted him on a tour of the Kansas State University campus. I remember his jowly smile and the strength of his meaty handshake. That year, I also got to meet Pat Paulsen, the comedian who made his mark on the “Smothers Brothers” TV show and entertained us all with his tongue-in-cheek campaign.

I covered Ron Paul’s election night party in Lake Jackson the night he won election to Congress after being defeated earlier. Two presidential candidates – Bob Dole and Arlen Specter – are from my hometown in Kansas. My job as a journalist in Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Texas has allowed me to meet a dozen candidates for the nation’s highest office… but that will have to be a topic for another column.

Most election nights are less than memorable – primaries, city/school elections, bond votes, special elections and runoffs. Before computers, it was a tedious night of number-crunching. In Brazosport on the Texas coast, we logged the count on chalkboards in the newsroom. Before state and county websites, we operated with banks of telephone callers chasing down county election officials throughout the night.

Hanging chads in Florida kept us guessing all night about what the main headline should be. Some local elections held more drama than the national votes, and all came with their own special issues. We’ve had election night fires and murders, upsets and blowouts, miscounts and election judges who stopped for dinner before delivering their ballot box. We’ve had computer crashes and computer operators who choked on the numbers.

But this month’s general election had gone surprisingly well. I walked away from the familiar smell of ink and newsprint, out into the rain, down the alley, listening to the purr of the presses. But the drizzle masked the one election night experience I had hoped to find. For 20 years, one luxury of leaving the office in the early morning was the rich scent of baking bread that drifted in from the nearby Flowers Bakery.

Not to be denied, I drove west, through the blinking red light on Bonner, west on Erwin past the bakery. Rolling down the window, I sniffed the air and got my fill. Only then could I call election night a success.

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(Dave Berry retired as editor of the Tyler Morning Telegraph at the end of 2014. This column ran Nov. 19, 2015, following his last election night as an editor. Photo taken by my daughter on my last day on the job before starting retirement.)