Apart from those pages of dry listings, though, there are enough anecdotes to occupy at least one class of a history of journalism course. So I gathered that author Richard M. Harnett was an old-school reporter 36 years with United Press and its successor, UPI, ending his career as San Francisco bureau chief. One gets the feeling he yearns for a return to the days of typewriters and Teletypes. Phillips later invented the Phillips Code of abbreviations for telegraph operators. With the departure of paper from our newsrooms, I doubt it s much used anymore unless some romantics in our midst have figured out a way to program it to their save-get keys without bringing the system down.
Good stories abound.
The best ones are hilarious, having their roots, shockingly, in taverns. Then he tells a tale of the early 60s when Vegas opened its first topless show and UPI s L.A. bureau chief was growing impatient over delays in moving the story to New York. The story was called in quickly by New York. Insert Marilyn Monroe was an objectionable double entendre. Religion and all that shit.