Chapter 27: The Sick Notices

27
The Sick Notices on the Board, 1974~1981

Pageboys and girls had been racing to and from the newsroom and linotype room, mounting and dismounting the stairs, until a fresh new method of plying the proofs was worked out. Time reduction process was needed. Some smart guys came up with a bizarre idea of tunneling up and down stairs rooms. The newsroom floor just around the proofreading desk was bored into the ceiling of the linotype room through which the proof-containing boxes were plying between the two rooms. It's just like they were drawing water from a well.

A hell-raising routine almost always began with a spine-shaking yell of the editor in chief. As the thundering whiffs were blowing from the editor in chief's desk, fanning out in all directions with the corresponding turf power. The political and economic desks were always hit the hardest and the proof desk was the meekest. The position of each desk said it all, of which the proof desk positioned itself at the entrance of the room by which it symbolized the bottom line of responsibility in the production of a newspaper. Whenever the plastic box containing the manuscripts lowered into the pit, they rang the bell, exclaiming "We are sending them down." And the linotype people did the same sending them up to the newsroom.

Even in the whirlpool of a day's rat race toward the deadline, Dano was an odd man out. He had not been "officially" employed. He was particularly recruited by the editor in chief. He was not a college graduate nor a English major. He was a freak from savagery who happened to step in the civilized society of the urban sophistication. Although he scrubbed himself up and changed from night-shift clothes, his coworker Mr. Yang in his thirties, during day-shifts, was heard to whisper, from time to time, to Tony somebody's ears, "That guy stinks."

"It's a karma," I was startled to realize one day during the job, and one day many years later, just out of the blue, that it was a karma at work. The image of myself was that I was, just like my father Don that had been, digging something from the "pit." My father had been digging coals, as a coal miner of the colony of the Imperial Japan, I myself was digging the typed news articles from the pit of the linotype room.

Anxiety used to be a persistent sword which had been dangling above the ceiling of the room in which the Dano-Tschai pair had lived. The pair had to pack and move to another rental place if and when the land lord had come to them and solemnly declared: "You have to be moving!" At that time the prices of the real estates in Seoul had been actually skyrocketing so the land lords had been domineering like tyrants. The pair had more often than not been startled to sit up with spontaneous shrieks of nightmares.

Anxiety was contagious just like colds. Three son children, including the one which had been born at the Black Rock Town in the year 1978, when moving to new places, had to be scared at the entrance of a new house until the land lord said "O.K." They were usually scared, casually looking askance, and getting feverish at times.

Particularly Kyo, the third and last son, developed an odd convulsion. His vulnerability got his parents in no particular time racing in all directions for any hospital in an exact category. Kyo once succumbed to kyonggi, or children's convulsion, which had astonished his parents to no end. The pediatric doctor they consulted recommended that the parents prepare emergency aspirin and abdominal irrigation syringe.

Tschai had not succumbed to any illness. Me Dano had not gotten sick during my term of office, either. Ironically, the sick leave notices of the desk reporters had been posted every other day, exaggeratingly speaking of course, on the bulletin board of the news room. Whenever the names of the hospitals and its room numbers, at which the reporters had been seeking asylum from the editor in chief's tyranny, remained affixed to the board, I took a visit to the hospitals and inquired after their health. I was reciprocated in later years by their thank-you calls when I was forced to quit the company in the year 1981. They had been a very appreciative lot, feeling grateful for what they had owed, such as it had been.