PERRY: Discovering newspaper treasures and old stories as the Aurora Sentinel moves to a new home

Despite what many people think, newspaper types are flagrant optimists. Sorry if you had food in your mouth when you read that line.

No, really. TV shows and movies make journalists out to be dour, skeptical, smart-asses, slumping over messy desks, poking fun at everything good and light. Well, that part is true. But the lie is that we all believe nothing will get better.

I’m writing this in my brand-spanking-new office in our brand-spanking-new newsroom. My furnishings are three purloined folding chairs, a typewriter from 1938, an IKEA table that wasn’t put together right and a swank trash can I’m not allowed to put my leftover salmon in because it would leak all over the floor. In fact, I’m not allowed to bring in any more leftover salmon because heating it up in our swank new Seventh Avenue-like digs would stink out our fabulous wide-open space. Sigh.

But it’s going to get better. The optimism among my fellow brother and sister hacks became obvious while sifting through our past office. Inside desk drawers and file boxes handed down by generations of reporters and editors, I came across the very Exacto knife a composing room clerk once threatened to dismember me with. The composing rooms are all gone now, along with the smell of hot wax, photo chemicals and body odor. It’s the place where newspapers were made to look like newspapers. Let’s just say composing and editorial didn’t see eye to eye on taking pages back more than a dozen or so times because you wanted to rewrite a story lede. I knew beer and donuts would get me another rewrite and it did.

In another old desk drawer I found the plaque honoring veteran Journalist Jack Bacon as Colorado Press Association Journalist of the Year in 1996. Jack was editor of this and many other papers. He was an old wire service guy, could hold a smoldering cigarette butt and type like the wind even though he’d blown one of his fingers off years earlier. He was a class act that grumbled out the door of the newsroom every night at impossible hours and came back a while later knowing that today was going to be a new and fun day.

Behind my bookcase was an illustration of a possible Aurora housing development that had town square-like places with shops and cafes on the first floor and condos up above. The illustration was horribly tattered and yellowed, but the stamp was clear: 1989. Former Councilwoman Ingrid Lindemann had given me the schematic years ago. She was a consummate neighborhood activist who grew up in Germany. She liked the idea of a walkable, sustainable community because she grew up in one. She never stopped stumping for the kind of community designs that no one seemed interested in back then, but which are all over the toniest parts of Denver these days. I liked the idea, too. I hated it that so many of her peers dismissed it out of hand, asking who in their right mind would want to live above a French bakery? Now, Aurora is looking at these communities as light-rail finally builds out here. It’s going to be incredible when it finally happens.

Sweetest of all in our ultra-modern setting at Iliff and Peoria, as I unpacked the oddities of decades of newspapering, is an old note from my editor at the Denver Post. It’s written on the back of a tractor-fed news budget from sometime in the late 1980s. It says only “Greg Pierson 6.2 inches.” Greg created the journalism school at Metro State College a long, long time ago. He was a funny, bitter, smart-ass, old-newspaper guy who dragged me and dozens of other local journalists into this business. He taught me and my ilk how fascinating the world is, what an awesome responsibility journalists have, and above all, “accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.” My editor handed me the scratch paper on a weekend shift, which is the shift the plebes pull. “Obit,” was all she said and walked away, unknowingly announcing my mentor’s death. I knew that despite everything Greg had taught me in j-school, this would was a tough final exam. I knew I would ace it.

So this is a new place to ply my trade. New technology. Actually, a whole new world for journalism. Fancy, hip digs from which to tell new stories about Aurora, and to leave a few behind for the next guy.

Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com