looking back

Back in 1992, when United Press International looked like it was about to close its doors, Paul Hendrickson did a lengthy piece about us for The Washington Post. He interviewed me for the piece and my part went like this:

Rosso's talking. Rosso's big and beefy and bearded. He came to work today in tennis shoes and a black nylon jacket. His full name is Dave Rosso but all anyone ever seems to call him is "Rosso." Maybe his wife calls him that. He's the Washington news editor. Nice guy.
"I can read the tea leaves," he says, "but I want to stay, I want to keep the dream alive."
He's been a Unipresser for 22 years. Started out on the switchboard. Took him 17 years to get off weekends. Was in at 6 this morning. That bad day in 1970 when Merriman Smith shot himself, Rosso was just a greenhorn manning the phones. He worked double shifts. He wrote across the top of the overtime slip, "Death in the family."
"I love the process," he says. "I really do." I can't describe it beyond that. I take the stuff home to my wife. I show her what the guy reported and what I did to fix it, and both of us working like crazy, and she'll say, 'Mmmm, I kind of like that one better.' Wrong!"
Once he had Unipressers all over town phoning in stuff. Now there are two on the Hill, one at State, one at the Supreme Court, three at the White House. One guy covers Treasury, Commerce, Labor all by himself. Lonely guy.
Almost blithely: "Oh, we've been fed stories (by management) over the years: 'We need these cuts out of you now, but we will bring it back up.' It never comes back up, not all the way."
Then: "I don't know who we're feeding copy to. I don't have any idea. We're in the information business. And we're working in an information vacuum."
So you're doing your job every day --
"That's right," he cuts in. "With no (expletive) idea if anybody's reading it."
More of this. A broad-shouldered semi-profane man who's dressed like a trucker wipes a tear with his thumb. He grooves his thumb down the ridge of his nose. "Didn't know it would get to me," he says, caught between the tear and some more laughing. He goes into a story. "Over a year ago we lost a couple hundred all at once. Big pink slip orgy. I saw a message come across, 'There's going to be a big party in Dallas.' And these were names I'd dealt with over the message wire for years. I told my wife, 'We're flying to Dallas.' No way could we afford to fly to Dallas. So we flew to Dallas. There were about 50 people at this party. Names. Names. Names from the message wire. I was putting faces with names. It was like a reunion with people I'd never met."
Did you cry?
"Nope," Rosso says. "But it was a rough ride home the next day."