I’d basically been a full-time part-timer at the LIFE Magazine News Desk at 1271 Sixth Avenue for about four years until I was laid off with a host of other folks in 1993. But through the auspices of a colleague always on the hunt for resilient young talent upstairs at TIME Magazine, I was plucked back out of the discard pile and given a series of short-term administrative and editorial assistant gigs until I finally landed a full-time position at the TIME Magazine News Desk … a more robust and round-the-clock operation than LIFE’s.
After a week or so of learning the ropes, I was assigned the dreaded Friday night vampire shift – I would man the News Desk basically on my own from 8pm Friday evening until 8am Saturday morning, while the magazine was essentially being “put to bed” in advance of hitting the newsstands the following Monday morning. If news happened to break during that shift, the organization was largely relying on me – gulp – to alert the proper reporters, correspondents, writers, and editors. That was the gig. When news broke, we fixed it.
On my very first Friday night shift, I arrived a bit early to get acclimated and go over some of the finer points of my duties with my colleagues who’d been there all day. But eventually, they all took off, one by one, leaving me by myself in a large office filled with several computers and a television playing CNN (usually with the sound off). I believe some folks even took off earlier, it being a warm, early-summer night in New York City. I sat down and started wondering how I was going to fill up the next twelve hours.
As if on cue, my phone suddenly rang, and it was my excellent colleague, Katie McNevin half-laughing incredulously down the phone: “Have you heard anything about O.J. Simpson killing his wife?”
I looked up at the screen which was showing a phalanx of Los Angeles police cars involved in a strangely slow-moving pursuit of a white SUV.
It was about to become a very long night.
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