Different Slants

Seeing the World from a New Angle

Chicago Sun-Times Fires Twenty Photographers…by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Gritty Katzman Chicago Stories,My Own Personal Hell,Rage! — Bob at 7:02 am on Friday, May 31, 2013

© 5/31/13 

I sold the god-damned thing

On a corner in Hyde Park

 For twenty years

Heat, snow, rain

Sleet, wind storms

Whatever else came my way

*** 

Cost a dime in 1965

 A good deal

 Compared to the

Nothing

It is now

***

If you live long enough

Everything goes to hell

*** 

For a guy like me who

Handled thousands of copies

Each week

Stuffed the Sunday comics into it

Supervised endless kids

Their young faces blurring

In my memory

*** 

For me to see a

Once respected publication

Dismembered

Passed along from

 Indifferent owner to indifferent owner

Is heart-breaking

*** 

The original home of

Roger Ebert and Ann Landers

(yeah, first read her column when I was a child)

*** 

Today

Ironically

As a vendor newspapers past

I am surrounded by hundreds of

Yellowing Sun-Times

From the 1940’s, ’50’s & ’60’s

Famous headlines

Long forgotten people

***

But the paper had class

It was something worth reading

*** 

Trucks speeding from the Downtown presses

Screeched up to my newsstand

Threw off heavy bundle after bundle

Black headlines screaming

The latest hot story

Grabbed the cash from me

 Then zoomed down to their

Next corner, stop

And once there were

Hundreds

*** 

Newspapers were so much like radio

Except

You could hold them

In your hands

You could scan the headlines

Read the sports page

See the great photos or tragic ones

Laugh at the comic strips

*** 

Or see what epic

Hollywood movie

Finally came to our Town

Our Midwestern

Flyover town

After New York and Los Angeles

Were done with it,

Like a hand-me-down

Celluloid rag doll

*** 

A reporter with a

Byline

In the Chicago Sun-Times

Was proud of it

Had a reason to be

*** 

Who

Still working there today

Some burly pressman

Sitting alone in a dim booth

Of a corner tavern

Morosely cradling a beer

With both hands

Ink-stained hands

Could look you in the eye

And say that today?

*** 

Our culture is bleeding.

 

4 Comments »

Comment by Don Larson

May 31, 2013 @ 10:33 am

Bob,

The changes we encounter today are just the beginning of a stronger disruption to come. The global forces at work are already being leveraged in new unmonitored directions.

Much of the rest of the world is not interested in the American model. They are free to experiment as they wish—on their own dime.

Some of the recent American markets are doing fine. Many of the old markets are doing their best to adapt and be prepare for their takeover possibly for a foreign company at a later date. America is for sale in this current phase one of a multi-phase transition.

Don

Comment by Herb Berman

May 31, 2013 @ 3:25 pm

I agree, Don. I also note that since the introduction of the desktop computer in the late ’70s – early ’80s we’ve been going through the most thorough and revolutionary period of technological change since the introduction of the steam engine and the power loom more than 200 years ago. Paper and ink are passé.

I still get the Trib in my driveway every morning. I don’t expect that service to continue much longer. A digital version of the Chicago Tribune is also pitched into my computer every morning. I can only imagine the huge reduction in production and delivery costs represented by digitization of the daily paper.

I also read books made from paper and ink. How long before my IPad, or some version of it, is my book store and library?

Maybe our “culture is bleeding.” Maybe it’s not. Change can hurt. It’s bad for some, good for others. The Industrial Revolution was a bloody catastrophe for many, a boon to others. We’re the lucky beneficiaries of 200 years of steady technological change. Of course, as Mary Shelly and others at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution have suggested, our inventions can turn against us and kill us. As they have.

Comment by Don Larson

May 31, 2013 @ 3:38 pm

Herb,

Thanks for those wise comments.

I my lifetime the steel industry suffered, the TV industry suffered, electronics, suffered, manufacturing suffered, etc. I myself got laid-off as a machinist in October 1981. I took my computer hobby and made it into a successful career.

The thing is, I was happy as a machinist and would have loved to worked until retirement in that job and still have computers as a hobby.

All people can do is keep learning and developing new skills to compete. The rest of the global community does the same.

Bob’s voice is important. He chronicles the demise of the status quo from the external forces at work. Many people pass by his store every day and don’t realize what he has accumulated is valuable, representative of printed material through at least some of their lives. Some day someone doing research will discover Bob’s efforts and recognize his true value.

Don

Comment by Herb Berman

May 31, 2013 @ 7:35 pm

Bob is a custodian of a dying way of life. His lifetime’s work is very valuable, and should be recognized as such by keepers of our culture——museums, libraries, universities. I hope they do before the record he has meticulously collected and maintained is lost or destroyed. Ironically, his collection should be digitized and made available to everyone, especially to scholars.

I’ve benefited from the digital revolution. When I gave up my law practice in 1983-84 to realize my ambition of being a full-time labor arbitrator, owing to my trusty Mac desktop, answering machine, and typing skills, I could work out of my home without a secretary, receptionist or bookkeeper. I saved at least $6000 a month. Of course, this meant one less bookkeeper, one less secretary/receptionist, with jobs, and my LaSalle Street landlord not making money off my labor. They lost. I won. That’s usually how technology plays out.

In my early years, I was Assistant General Counsel for the Brewery Workers Int’l Union in Cincinnati. Within five years, 1963-68, most small breweries shut down, unable to compete against Anheuser-Bush, Millers and Coors, or invest the money needed to upgrade outdated equipment. It was easy to automate the continuous-flow process of brewing, and workforces were reduced by 75-80%. And so it goes.

By the way, both as a beer hound and a lover of the underdog, I’m delighted at the rise of what used to be called “smokestack breweries” in the form of brewpubs brewing really good stuff, not the Budweiser and Miller swill that masquerades as beer.

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