LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The Courier Journal this week will leave its iconic building at 525 W. Broadway for new, more modern quarters on Main Street.
The old art deco building at 6th and Broadway always, to me, seemed like a building out of a grander time. The lobby of that building was a spectacle, with a huge globe hanging above all who walked in, and the words of Robert Worth Bingham in gold letters above the elevators for any about to enter the working floors of the enterprise:
"I have always regarded the newspapers owned by me as a public trust and have endeavored to conduct them as to render the greatest public service."
Even though my dad worked at the newspaper for a portion of my childhood, my first real exposure to the building was when I arrived there to work as a sports clerk in late 1990. I was awed by the surroundings, and the people who worked there.
There was a slot, running the entire height of the building, into which an envelope could be dropped and descend to a basement mailroom. There were pneumatic tubes, like we used to use at the bank (skip over this kids), running through the building. I could call the library with a request for some big-time writer, Rick Bozich maybe, or Pat Forde, and the library would send the materials back up through the tube, "On the Times side," they would say, because The Louisville Times (which ceased publication in 1987) died hard, or in some cases, didn't.
Yes, there was a library, even if a new publisher once reportedly aske "Why do we need all this?" God help us. Its photographic archives are now held within University of Louisville Libraries' Barry Bingham Jr. Courier-Journal photograph collection.
Upstairs, there was a cafeteria with a staffed grill. There were nights I would run up there for a burger during meal breaks. My kids were fascinated by it. We even had a birthday party for my youngest, Henry, up there one year. He's now editor-in-chief of The Northerner at Northern Kentucky University.
We taped webcasts and other shows in the TV studio. Besides that, there was a kitchen where the food staff would try recipes or make dishes to be photographed. Photo studios. Darkrooms. As an occasional editor of the "Scorecard" page — the one with all the scores — I'd get to venture back to oversee the pasting up of that page, and rarely did I walk back to that gravure section without thinking of the brutal mass shooting there years earlier.
That gave rise to heightened security. I'd always enter on the 5th Street side, through security, then pass the little snack shop operated by a blind man who helped sustain the newspaper's employees for many years.
I worked a long time at a couple of out-of-town newspapers for a chance to come back there and work. I got a desk in the back corner of the Sports department, which I seldom used, because covering U of L sports meant travel, travel, travel.
I rarely got to venture onto the third-floor editorial offices, wood-paneled and stately. Above my pay grade.
We got a paycheck every week in those pre-direct deposit days. I remember picking up the actual check every Wednesday from the desk of Jan Foshag, who ran the department's logistics, in a little brown envelope. I remember the credit union downstairs. If I needed a plane ticket or hotel room, I could tell her where I was going and when, and the arrangements would appear.
Later, when I was named columnist, I got an office along 6th Street, between Rick Bozich and sports editor Harry Bryan, with windows that overlooked the federal building. It was a lovely mess of a place. Newspapers stacked all over. But it never stopped humming.
I'm rambling now, but only to get to this: That building, both as a young man and as a not-so-young one, never ceased to be a wonder to me. A magic kind of place, almost a city unto itself.
Did you know when The Courier-Journal moved into that building in 1948, there was a parade down Broadway to commemorate it?
Later, when the traditional newspaper logo (not to mention that of the The Louisville Times) was removed, I was dismayed. Times do change, but the smart money leans into its history, not away from it. It's not a new banner that makes a newspaper modern.
But, by then, I, too, had given up on the enterprise, fled to television. Who was I to say anything?
This week, the building will close down, the newspaper will take its staff and move, and that will be that. Change is a constant. I hope they will find success there. It is a matter of critical importance to this city.
But there will be no parade.
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