Now, since I’ve split up with my wife, I go to an old Sacto institution on two or three Friday nights a month. I’d forgotten how pleasant a nice bar can be. It’s such a rough place I took my pregnant daughter and grandson there for lunch in July. They both loved it. And vice-versa. The bartender was shoving pictures of his 2 yr old in our faces. Physically, the place is an ancient dump just like Hanno’s was. A bar’s character is in the people.

I’m not a journalist by a longshot. I’m a designer, I’ve worked for a few archtecture firms and have fond memories of parties and get togethers such as you all have mentioned here. Brings back old memories. I’m still in the profession but it doesn’t seem like people are having as much fun as we used to. What’s up with that? Just me getting old?

perfect place to unwind after a long day with the CP-16 and the glue splicer.

The police were called when they sent a couple of beer kegs down, which made the basket but also a hell of a lot of noise.

Years later in Fort Wayne, Alan and I were drafted to host a job candidate for a Friday-night party. This was when budget cuts meant we tried to make candidates stay over a Saturday night, to save on airfare. It was a potluck dinner/barbecue. The guest of honor was applying for the features editor job, and everyone who came would have been on her staff. We all sat around drinking and drinking and drinking, while she barely said a word. Alan burned the chicken. One of the interns occasionally brought the conversation to a screeching halt with such bon mots as, “I just love the new Steve Miller album. Don’t you?”

She, too, was never seen again. Can’t blame her, really.

My favorite is the one where we had a big birthday party for one of the writers, at the auto editor’s house. He was renting in a retirement community here, you have to be 55 to get in, and no kids allowed, so the retired fire engine that brought the guest of honor raised a few neighborhood eyebrows.

Later, after the drinking got serious, the publisher’s son was teaching my wife how to play ‘quarters,’ with glasses of beer. About that time he looked up to see one of the cops who’d been called when we got too raucous. “Big blue uniform, big silver star,” is still a mantra for us old-timers, though there are only one or two who were there still actually on the payroll.

And the new features editor, who had not yet officially started her job, quit the next Monday, after attending the party. We saw her sitting in her car across from the office, apparently wrestling with the notion of whether or not she wanted to work with people like us. We heard later that she’d joined the military instead. We were that kind of crowd, where boot camp was more attractive.

We don’t have parties like that anymore, pity.

I worked for several years during and right after college at the Michigan State bookstore in the buyer’s office. We did most of our ordering on a punch style teletype and knowing how to do it was considered a highly paid specialty.

Unlike the now antique machine that I was responsible for: a 5×8 card for all current inventory titles and other titles required by professors, ranked on a series of 4 shelves. The bottom of the cards had a punched in author title code. I could search by the codes, and every card that matched the code was popped up by little wires. Then the right one went out to the floor for an inventory check and back to the buyer’s office. (I was also the person who decided which textbooks we would buy back at 50%.)

Hilarious. Nostalgic. Apropos of very little in this thread.

No no no!!! -

for THAT you have to shoe-horn in a semi-related quote from Bartletts…maybe a pithy saying from Van Gogh about having one ear, or some such

But what I really loved was watching Dad edit news stories. On a reel to reel player. For each edit he had to take the reels off, make the cut, and put the ends in a splicer with some clear tape over the top. For a one-armed man, he was poetry in motion. OMG, have I turned into Tim Goeglein?