Sweet Thunder by Ivan Doig Read Free Book Online Page B

gentlemen of the press. What’s the name of the newspaper?”
    Seeing the three of us were stumped, she declared: “I thought so. Let’s think. What about”—I could practically hear her mind whirring as if she were trying out an idea on backward pupils—“the
Plain Truth
? That’s been in short supply in Butte newspapering.”
    Jared rubbed his jaw. “It’s nice, Rab, but I like something that sounds a little tougher, like maybe the
Sentinel?
”
    â€œThat’d do in a pinch,” Armbrister said with a grain of editor-to-publisher deference, “but we want something with some real kick to it.” He started reeling off feisty possibilities—the
Spark, Liberator,
the
Free Press.
Then, almost bashfully, he confessed: “I’ve always wanted to have a masthead in type big as what they use on Wanted posters that just goddamn outright says
Disturber of the Peace.
”
    â€œNo, no,” I exclaimed, the thought ascending so swiftly in me I was light-headed, “it must be something that carries the sound of promise, that resonates across the land, that dramatically bespeaks the coming clash with Anaconda.” The two men were set back on their heels, while Rab gleefully watched me balloon off into the upper atmosphere like old times. Passionately I invoked Shakespeare, the magically phrased passage in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
when Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, with rhythmic zest recounts the great hunt with Hercules and the dragon slayer Cadmus,
“When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear / With hounds of Sparta,”
concluding with the inimitable turn of phrase,
“I never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”
    Thus was the Butte
Thunder
born.

  4  
    â€œS O, M ORGAN, WELCOME TO THE DEN of lost souls,” Armbrister initiated me into the ranks as the newsroom full of novitiates turned to their tasks the first frantic day of publication, each hunched over a desk or a typewriter or talking into a telephone. I had much to learn, such as calling the vital opening sentence of any newspaper article a lede to differentiate it in print from the soft metal, and slugging each page of copy, as that term was, with topic and page number in the upper right corner, and noting that a less than urgent writing assignment was referred to as AOT, meaning “any old time.”
    Besides such lessons learned on the run, simply being around Armbrister was a fast education in journalism, I was finding. The long-faced editor was gruff, salty, uncompromising; from the first minute, the staff idolized him. In the green world of inspiration beneath his eyeshade, he was constantly thinking up angles of coverage and fresh features to dress up the paper; that bald head in the center of the newsroom reflected the adage that grass doesn’t grow on a busy street. He passed judgment on assignment suggestions with a swift “Amen” or just as decisive a “Nix” that sent a reporter off either to report or to rethink. Along with the bluer part of his vocabulary was the dreaded utterance that he needed such-and-such column inches pronto, or if a deadline really loomed, prontissimo. It quickly became ritual for the first staff member growled at a certain way to go around the room and warn the rest of us our editor was turning into Generalissimo Prontissimo. With the general air of purpose driven by Armbrister’s personality and, yes, deadlines, the newsroom seemed on the point of vibration. And at press time, when the almighty machine in the back room began spinning out newspapers by the thousands, that actually proved to be the case; the thrum could be felt in the whole building, as if the news on the page were a wave of sound reverberating into the waiting world.
Thunder
, indeed.
    But back there at the very start, any tremors were confined to those of us clustered around the editor’s desk, as Armbrister,