On assignment - weird places you have filed from

Weirdest for me: Rawlings Baseball Grill at the Ballpark in Arlington.

The weird part was the Rangers were on the road. I was covering a high school baseball playoff game in Arlington that day and got thirsty afterward, and the place was open.

Not a damn thing that beats pounding out a gamer where you can enjoy a cold one or three.

 

My first job out of college in 1989 was covering preps at a suburban Philadelphia daily paper.

That fall, I was covering a football game on a Saturday night that was delayed for quite some time by a thunderstorm.

The stadium was about a 25-minute drive from our office, and I had planned to go back to write. But with the long delays, I knew I'd never make it.

So when the game finally ended around 10:45 or so, I had maybe 20 minutes until deadline. I wrote a 15-inch gamer on my TRS-80 in the car.

But here's the best part: I had to send it from a phone booth -- using those brutal acoustic couplers -- while standing in the rain outside a Roy Rogers restaurant on Lancaster Ave.

I made deadline, then went inside to have a Double-R-Bar burger with a holster of fries. Anyone who ever ate at Roy's knows what I'm talking about.

 

Damn, it's been years, but they had bacon cheeseburgers from heaven ...

 

I understand you get the crack pipe if you're Glades Inn Silver Rewards, but you have to be Gold for them to provide the crack. Platinum, they supply a hooker as well.

 

True story: A guy who used to be on our desk covered preps for a large paper before coming to us, in the mid-1980s. He was covering a playoff football game in the boonies when he came across a problem familiar to anyone who has covered high schools: the promise of a phone in the press box or someone to get him in the coach's office to file never materialized. Long story short, he wrote his story, then made a beeline back to the litle podunk town business district to stop at a convenience store and ask to use their phone to send (he was using a trash-80 and couplers).

On the way to town, he was pulled over for speeding. Also had an expired license. And an expired registration. He was taken to the hoosegow, where he was told he'd have to spend the night and see the judge the next morning. He was given one phone call.

He used the phone call to send his story. Then he threw himself on the mercy of Sherrif Buford T. Justice to get one more call to check it in.

If there's a prep writer's Hall of Fame, and desk guys voted on it, he would have been a unanimous pick.

 

Phone booth in the parking lot of a strip mall across from the stadium at Williamsport (Pa.) High School in 1982. Holding a 20-pound Portabubble with one hand, with the phone plugged in. Balancing Portabubble with one hand, dialing with other. In a driving snowstorm.

Williamsport High School had phones. They did not dial off campus. Honestly.

And we liked it that way.

 

From the office/owner's apartment of the only motel in a town in Central Texas. The town, population of about 2,000, had a little square with knick-knack stores and restaurants because it was one of the only stops between the federal detention center 80 miles to the west and Austin, 100 miles to the east.

I'd covered a district game that night where the home team lost in overtime on a blocked extra point. The town had a weekly paper, and I'd talked to their editor about using the wireless signal to file. I parked outside of the paper (in the town square) before the game to check it out and voila, beautiful wireless signal.

Went to the game, about five miles out of town, wrote the story in the parking lot when they kicked me out of the stadium, then drove back to the paper. Turned on the laptop there - zip. No wireless signal. I tried turning the modem on and off, but the people at paper apparently unplugged the router when they left for the evening. Awesome.

The two gas stations in town were closed, so I figured I'd see if the only motel had wireless. I wandered into the office, because even though no one was there, it was lit and obviously open. I couldn't get a wireless signal, and right when I was about to give up and call in to dictate, the owner came out through a side door. I explained that I was just at the game and needed an internet signal to send my story. She told me her son just played in that game, and wasn't it awful, and of course I could file from there.

She brought me into a three-bedroom living area built into the motel office and let me use the family's personal ethernet line to file the story. The kid, one of the linemen who allowed the blocked extra point, sat in the corner glowering at me the entire time, and I don't think her husband ever looked up from SportsCenter. Got my story sent and made my 100 mile drive back to my paper.

It was really stressful at the time, but a fun memory.