Still, in the early days before the full automation of publishing a mag (we still pasted-up pages on boards and didn’t lay them out on a computer screen), all of CT’s writers and freelancers contributed their stories on the more modern 3.5 floppy disk so we could load them into the company’s publishing system and edit them -- no email in those days either. All of them except Smokey!
In the interest of time, his stack of yellow legal pad pages were sometimes given to a green editorial assistant (who likely didn’t know a camshaft from a cucumber, let along what race engineering Smokey was talking about) to type up and enter into our publishing system for a first draft – and then I’d go over it and clean it up.
You can imagine what sort of errors could be introduced with this method. No, actually, you can’t. Putting racing tech info of this magnitude in the hands of a naïve typist was just asking to be burned. I know because I’ve had my fireproof editorial underwear blasted away by Smokey via the telephone, which began with this deadpan answering machine message: “Grissom. This is Smokey. Call me.” I later learned not to flinch when I heard this opening because he used it no matter the nature of his call to me.
We couldn’t turn over his writing to an editorial assistant for preliminary typing – I had nightmares one of them would lose their bearings while trying to decipher Smokey’s hand-written code and fill the air with some hand-held automatic firepower. I didn’t have the time to do it, but I had to speed up this process; we had to get Smokey to put his writing in some sort of digital format so we could eliminate some of the transcription errors (and bawling outs).
I called him and broke the news that we had to at least come a little bit into the 20th century with his submissions. He was quiet for too long, but I appealed to his interest in reducing our errors (and his being pissed off about them) and he finally said, “I think we have a computer around here somewhere.” I felt like Prometheus giving man fire! We were going to have light and be warm after the cold dark days.
Smokey would still write out his manuscripts, but his assistant would then enter them into the computer, and they’d send me both the floppy disk and a copy of the hand-written manuscript (they’d keep the original to make sure we didn’t screw up). What could go wrong? I could hardly wait for his next submission.
When I saw the “FL” postmark on the package I knew it was his next Q&A column. With fine anticipation I tore open the package and immediately was not feeling so mythic. There was the hand-written copy, and there was a floppy disc. Exactly as we agreed. Only the floppy disc was one I hadn’t seen for about 10 years – it was a 5¼-inch format disk. The type that originally gave the storage medium its name – it really was a floppy.
Don’t panic. I reasoned! I had worked with computers, and knew that it wasn’t that bad -- the 5¼ had replaced the original 1969 8-inch floppy and was still in use in the mid-‘80s. It was only 1993. All I had to do was unearth a 5¼ floppy disc drive that would mate up with the computer system the company had at the time. Sure. No eBay in those days either kids. What time machine was I going to use to find this computer hardware relic? How was I going to explain to Smokey that we couldn’t read the disk he’d sent us because it was old technology? The guy detested computers and this would just prove their worthlessness, again – and confirm mine, again.
Bless the IT people! After a few days of excavating (and pleading by me), they discovered a previously used 5¼ floppy drive gathering dust in some remote dungeon of the company. They made no promises about its worthiness – they were glad to get rid of it, and it had that famous “One and One” Warranty: one foot or one second, whichever came first.
I didn’t care; we hooked it up to a PC (with one of the IT guys’ sublime help – he was curious to see if this was all going to work) and inserted Smokey’s floppy. Much whirring and grinding noises ensued as the drive head tried to read the disk. It was like waiting for an engine to fire up the first time after a rebuild: is it going to spit the rods or burble along? Was this ancient drive going to eat the floppy or read it? Two file names appeared on the nearby PC -- Smokey’s assistant had saved it in MS Word and as a text file – it was going to be OK! Cake from now on.
My rising spirits lost full altitude as soon as I opened the Word doc. Suddenly, the screen was jammed from margin to margin with text – page after page of it. No capital letters, no paragraphs, minimal punctuation, and no carriage returns: The assistant had typed it up just as Smokey had always written it on the yellow legal pad pages! All we had now was a digital copy of what he had been sending all along. We had taken a stationary leap into the future. At least we had eliminated one step and I would get full blame for any future errors.
There’s no crying in publishing, but some of us came close that day. Smokey did teach me you could get bit trying to teach an old dog new tricks. And I thank him for that.
