AP Memories

Bill Baskervill retired in 2004 after a 36-year career as a reporter and editor with The Associated Press in Virginia. The award, given annually for outstanding contributions to Virginia journalism, will be presented to Baskervill on June 16 at SPJ’s Virginia Pro Chapter banquet in Richmond.

-- Times-Dispatch

I haven't seen Baskerville since the early '80s when I left the AP. Desperate to leave the production pit of the Richmond News Leader where nothing good was happening for me, I had taken a job as the secretary at The Associated Press, which was in the basement of the Media General building, so I didn't go far. In fact, I literally sunk lower into the ground. I was making $170 a week at the RNL. The AP offered me $175. RNL counteroffered with $180, but despite all the big money negotiations, it was time to go.

Bill was there before me, the whole time I was there, and apparently from this news story, for a very long time afterward. Most of the time the guys and occasionally a woman in this small basement office rewrote stories from the Times-Dispatch and News Leader and put them on the wire for other newspapers in the state and for radio.

It didn't seem like a very hard job to me, and it paid very well. I think it was $600 a week to start! A fortune! It was a union shop. The challenge was periodically they had to actually leave the office and develop an "enterprise story," a long feature. I couldn't apply for any openings because you had to have two years experience writing for a radio station or newspaper, so I left after three years to edit a short-lived cable television magazine. My boss at the AP, Bureau Chief Bob Gallimore, was probably the nicest boss I ever had, a very kind man, and I can still see him in the glass cubicle next to me, combing his comb-over. When the reporters and editors made fun of him behind his back, they imitated him combing his hair. (He was management, so even though he was such a nice guy, he was the bad guy.)

We had a nice system going with the in and out trays. Mr. Gallimore typed his letters on scratch paper and I retyped them on stationery. There weren't copy machines then. I made copies with carbon paper.

Each year the AP had two conferences to hand out awards, one for newspapers and one for broadcast outlets, so I got to travel around the state and stay in some nice hotels. At one conference in Newport News, I let the waiter keep refilling my wine glass. I was fine all the way back to my room. But then I could not take off my shoes or dress, or even move. If I did, my head would shatter into a million shards. All night I was on top of the bed spread, still in my shoes and evening dress, not moving. That pretty much ended my association with alcohol.

A row of teletype machines chugged along all day, spitting out streams of news on brownish paper. The men were always in there, replacing the paper rolls and cursing. Big news happened while I was there, news that made bells ring on the teletypes. President Ronald Reagan was shot. Richard Obsenshain, running for the Senate, died in a small plane crash at the Chesterfield County Airport. John Warner, who was married to Elizabeth Taylor at the time, was selected to run in his place.

Photographs were coming in on this big printer contraption, photographs that would never appear anywhere because they were distasteful, but still they were transmitted on the wire. I am still haunted by one of a child in a pickup truck in the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens in 1980. Fifty-seven people were killed, including this child in the back of the truck who looked untouched. Apparently during a volcanic eruption, the oxygen must get sucked out of the air, suffocating everyone in the area. The child's eyes were open, looking blankly upward in the aerial photo.

The other haunting photo was taken by a local photographer of a woman killed in a shoot-out or a domestic dispute or something down in Petersburg. Ambulance crews had tried to save her, which meant cutting off her clothes, but she died, and they left her there on the ground for a moment, enough time for the photographer to take his photo. Men are men, not above enjoying a photo of a topless woman, even a dead one. I was disgusted that day. And that photo is burned into my head, too. Her eyes were also open.

But this is supposed to be about Bill, so here's my Bill story. The way he taught his wife to drive a stick shift, he said, was they went down to an empty department store lot one Sunday in two cars. He drove the stick and she drove the other one, but then he took the other one home and left her in the parking lot with the stick. Good luck. Find your way home.

That's it. I have another story about pens, and how union workers wouldn't bring their own pens to work. They wanted to be issued a company pen, and they often misplaced it, so I would have to reissue pens often which started to get on my nerves, and I never understood this (it's a pen! and you make very good money! can't you use your own pen?), but being provided that damn company pen was important and I ended up crying in the bathroom because I was management and keeper of the pens, and don't you get smart with us, missy, but who wants to hear that story.