Wisconsin and “The Union”
When I was 21 years old I had a great boss. The problem was, he had a terrible boss.
He’d hired me, cold out of college, the year before. It was a strict union shop – United Press International, Wire Service Guild – and so it paid on seniority and I didn’t have any, so that first half-year all he had to pay me was $8,710. Six radio sportscasts a night on a network serving a thousand stations, and a two-minute commentary and I had to write breaking updates and reports and call up players for interviews, and I had to take in the “feeds” of interviews from our stringers at the ballparks and edit them by hand with a razor blade and splicing tape, and on the weekends I also had to ‘engineer’ a newscast or two, and every once in a long while I’d get back-to-back days off. Read more »