by Bill Roddy

    In the summer of 1941, I went to work for the San Francisco Examiner as a copy boy. I was nineteen years old.
    In those days there were four newspapers in San Francisco; the Examiner and Chronicle were the morning papers and the News and Call-Bulletin, the afternoon papers.
    The Examiner was in the Hearst Building at Third and Market; a site occupied by the newspaper for many years. It was gutted on April 18, 1906. 

Hearst Building center. Call Building on right.

The ruins were demolished and a new Hearst Building constructed with twelve stories. The Call Building used the same shell in reconstruction. 

 

This is Third and Market as I remember it. The Examiner is on the left and the Call Building on the right. Before they ruined it by "modernizing it."
    At the far left corner is the United Cigar store where I used to buy cigars for Bill Wren, the managing editor.
 

Bill Wren

    The Hearst Building had offices for the executives of the Examiner and other Hearst publishing ventures and a few tenants. But the copy boys never used that entrance. We went down an alley behind the building.
    The first thing you noticed in the alley was the smell of  newspaper stock and ink and the roar of the presses. The alley was always jammed with trucks picking up stacks of newspapers to be delivered around San Francisco. The men who loaded the trucks were rough looking individuals.
    We used an elevator with a rickety iron gate operated by an elderly man who took us up to the City Room.
    The City Room was the nerve center of the paper. The reporters sat in rows of desks with typewriters. In the center of the room there was a large circle for the copy editors. The copy boys sat at a long bench against a wall where everyone could see us.
    Next to us was an alcove where an old white haired man worked.  We called him Pop. He sat at a telegraph key that activated a Morse sounder.  When a message came in it made a clicking noise.  He was the only one who understood what the clicking meant, but we all knew where they came from; Mr. William Randolph Hearst, the publisher.
    That's how Mr. Hearst preferred to send his orders, no matter where he might have been; San Simeon, or Wyntoon. I guess he had a telegraph operator wherever he lived. We took the messages to Bill Wren, who was managing editor.
    Mr. Wren was not very tall and was bald, but he was an imposing figure and the copy boys were in awe of him. Most of us wanted to be reporters some day, and he was the man who would make the decision.
    The first time I got a call to go to Mr. Wren's office I wondered what I had done, but all he said to me was, "Get me some cigars." I asked him, "What kind, Mr. Wren?"  He looked at me and said in a gruff voice, "Antonio Cleopatra." If you were a new copy boy, you could ask him once.
    He'd flip a quarter towards you and you went down to the cigar store on the first floor. From then on I remembered the name of his cigars and I still do at 87 years.  (2009)

THE BENCH