The man who was taking him to lunch pointed at a chair next to the only desk at the front of the room. “Sit here for a minute; I’ll be right back.”
One thing struck Peter right away — some of the people working in this room were his age or a little older. Odd, he thought.
All of a sudden, red lights started flashing and the machines started ringing. A boy not much older than Peter went to one of the blue machines and tore off some paper. He then thrust it into Peter’s face and said, “Quick, take this to Hourlies.” Then he went off into the other room.
Peter, keying off the urgency of the boy’s voice, ran out into the hall but immediately stopped because he had no idea where he was going. Then his brain kicked in. “This is NBC Monitor News on the Hour. I’m Chet Huntley reporting” played back in his head. Hourlies? He took a shot and went back the way they came. He went through the glass door to the studio where he saw Chet Huntley. A bald-headed man was sitting at the desk reading a script, following along as Chet was broadcasting. Peter handed him the piece of paper. The man scanned it quickly and said, “Great! Bring me the ‘first lead.’”
Peter went back out into the hall, retraced his steps once again to 523, and found the blue machine that he thought he saw the kid tear the paper from. There before him, typing out at thirty-five characters per minute was: “1-s-t-L-D.” First lead.
Peter started to read:
UPI — Mexico City, Mexico. A Boeing 737 with 87 aboard crashed on takeoff from Mexico City Airport. All on board are presumed dead. The Aero Mexico airliner struggled…
“What are you doing?” asked the man who was taking him to lunch.
“I’m waiting for the first lead?”
Just then, the desk assistant who handed him the paper realized that Peter wasn’t who he thought he was and that Peter didn’t work there. Panic registered. “Where did you bring that paper?”
Peter answered to the man instead, “Glass doors, down the hall, bald-headed guy.”
The man barked, “Sit!”
So Peter sat, terrified that he did something awful. The commotion in the room started to wane in about five minutes. The last time Peter was this close to coming to tears was when he was eleven and his father got pissed off at him for blowing up the old Dumont TV. He was sure they were going to call his parents. Forget about whatever he just did wrong, he was also cutting class, so there was no way he wasn’t going to get in big trouble for this. His life passed before his eyes twice, because he as only 14! Then the man came back and sat down at the desk next to Peter.
“First off, I’m docking him a day’s pay,” he said, pointing to the kid who started all this.
“And I am paying you. Would you like to work here?”
“Me? I’m…”
“Look, you showed a good sense for news and you showed me you’re a pretty smart kid. Do you want to work here?”
“Sure. If it’s okay.”
“It’s okay; what’s your name, kid?”
“Peter, Peter Remo, sir.”
“Good. Welcome to the NBC News, Peter. I’m Kasiko Halman.”
“Hold it! Wait, Peter…” The Washington Monument appeared gray under a cloud’s shadow, while the reflecting pool and the mall were in brilliant sunlight, but that wasn’t the reason for Bill’s squint, “So far this is a nice story and all, …WWII, Hungarians, Science Fair and what have you, but honestly, you expect me to believe that NBC hired you at fourteen!” Hiccock said to his old friend from the Bronx (who he hadn’t seen in twenty-five years) as they sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “I couldn’t get a paper route with the New York Post until I was sixteen and had working papers.”
“Yeah well, kid, my folks didn’t believe me either. But you were only four then, and the world was a different place back in ’68. Nepotism was alive and well in those days. The entire cadre of desk assistants — in print they’d call ‘em copy boys — was a dumping ground for the kids of RCA and NBC Senior Executive VPs. From summer jobs to after school work, it was like day care or day camp.”
“Your pop was a truck driver. You weren’t ‘anybody’s’ kid.”
“And I got let go three times for not belonging to anybody. But I got hired back four times.”
“How?”
“I was good and I had a little secret I shared with the news managers.”
“Job security?”
“In our room was one of the first Xerox machines, a 3600. It was massive and had stuff we take for granted today: document feeder, 20-copy sorter, up to 999 copies. Had a Nixie tube readout.”
“Ahhh, Nixie tubes… please stick to the story.” Bill checked his watch.
“Anyway, do you know why it took so long to invent copy machines? Because they had to invent copier repairmen first. ‘Cause you couldn’t run one of those suckers for more than a few hours before they broke down. I only worked Saturday and Sunday nights cause of school, but I made seventy-five dollars for the weekend. I was paid through newsroom dinner vouchers. Every week I was somebody’s dinner.”
“Wow. Seventy-five a week back in ‘68. That must-a been good!”
“My dad broke his ass on the stone truck for one-seventy-five a week! So anyway, one Sunday night the news manager has a report to get out and the Xerox is down. He’s about to retype the whole fifteen pages on Rexograph masters when I say, ‘I think I can fix it.’
“‘You think you can fix the Xerox machine?’ he says.
“‘I might have to shut the lights in the newsroom for a while.’
“So then he says, ‘Peter, I’ll give everybody flashlights to work with if you can fix it.’
“I started by defeating all the cabinet door sensors with paper clips. The problem was the tray that you pulled out to free jammed paper came all the way off the runners and the ball bearings went everywhere. So I shimmed up the tray using shaved down pencils. I got that sucker right in line but had to run the machine wide open cause of all these sticks and tape and paper clips hanging out of it.”
“I bet NBC news was never the same after this,” Hiccock said.
“Billy, you had to see it. At one point this big arcing light was swooping across the entire newsroom with each page being copied. I had to shut the lights because it was an electro-photostatic process. The inside of the machine was like a dark room, so when it was open the room had to be dark, but I had it running and humming. At the last minute, the news manager came in and asked for the last page of the report back. I remember I used to have to print it on NBC stationary that had hundreds of little interlocking NBC logos on it. He gave me back the last page and I collated it into the thirty copies of the fifteen-page report. Then I went about my job distributing it to the inner-office list. I did that every Sunday as the last thing I did before I went home. This way the VPs had it on Monday first thing when they got in.”
“So that’s how you stayed employed?”
“No. It’s how I got fired. Actually, on that last page? He rewrote the end to say, ‘This entire report wouldn’t be possible without the ingenuity and determination of desk assistant Peter Remo.’”
“Nice touch.” Bill said.
“Actually, not really. When the head weenie in personnel read that about me, he checked his list and found that I was nobody’s kid and fired me the next day. A week later, I was hired back.”
“Great story Peter, but what the hell’s that got to do with why you called me?”
“What happens then is Professor Brodenchy sets up his committee and gets Kasiko to be the Sergeant of Arms. Around the holidays a year or so after I started working there, Kasiko invites me to his home for a little Christmas Dinner…”