Read other papers and clip any local deaths.
Ugh! Being a cub reporter was sort of a gruesome job. But Tim did not seem to mind that part of it. Would he really like the work, she wondered. He had never been half so crazy about the Journal as she was.
“They’re running, Jo!” called Chub from the swinging door to the composing room, and Joan hurried after him.
That meant that the paper was being printed. Joan followed Chub “out back” into the composing room where the linotype machines were all silent now. This part of the Journal was just as important as the writing and business end, Joan knew, though Amy did not agree with her. Amy had visited “out back” only once, and then had brushed daintily by the printers in their ink-smeared aprons. Joan didn’t mind the dirty, dim old place, or the rough men. They might be inky and stained, but they were kind, always joking together just as the men in the front offices did. The “front” and “back” were like brothers of an oddly assorted family.
Joan knew all the men back here. The head pressman, the linotype men who often printed her name in little slim lines of lead for her when they weren’t busy. But she had to hold the lines up to the looking glass to read her name. It always made her feel like Alice in Through the Looking Glass.
All about on shelves under the long tables stood little tin trays of type, stacked—stuff ready set for a dearth of news. Joan had learned to read type, too. It was just as easy as anything when you got used to it.
They passed a gray-haired man sitting hunched on a tall stool, reading yards and yards of proof.
“Meet the Dummy!” Chub said, with a wave of his hand.
Joan looked at the man, whom she had seen only once before, with some interest. Chub’s remark was not so impolite as it seemed, for “dummy” is a word used for the plan of the newspaper before it is made up, and names apropos of their work delighted the Journal family. Just like Em, the cat.
He was a middle-aged man, and seemed rather dignified for a proofreader, with his gray hair and blue eyes.