Gordon McCormack had been hawking newspapers on the corner of Broadway and Brand Boulevard in Glendale for 17 years before newspaper racks were moved in on his territory in the early 1970s to ultimately take his job.
“This corner used to be worth 300 papers a day,” he told the young reporter from the local paper. “With racks, I’m lucky to push 100 papers a day now. I can’t make a decent living on that.”
He finally gave up trying in 1973. The hawker lost his corner to a row of iron slot machines that took your dime and never said thanks or asked how your day was going.
Never gave directions when people were lost, and never took a day off in more than 40 years until racks started losing their corners and were taken off the streets.
McCormack went home that last day to the one-room apartment he rented around the corner from where he had made his living hawking newspapers. His income had dwindled to $100 a month and he was applying for state aid.
He was going to miss it, he said. He had met a lot of nice people selling newspapers.
The next morning, for the first time in 17 years, the thousands of motorists who drove by that corner every morning to work and every night coming home would not see the little man with a stack of newspapers in his arms.
Would anyone care or miss him? Did they even notice him in all those years? There was only one way to find out in 1973. Write the story in the local paper and ask.
“Give me 15-inches and make it fast,” said the city editor, George Gunston. “You’ve got two hours until deadline.”
George was a tough old Aussie who would quit the paper a few months later. He had been sitting in a bar around the corner when a guy walked in carrying a purse. It was a fad just catching on with men who didn’t want fat wallets in their back pockets or a comb sticking out.
The guy put the purse on the bar. “Bloody, hell,” George said, and moved his family back to Australia.
I was five-graphs into the story when George reached over my shoulder and ripped the top half of the paper from the typewriter carriage, and stuck it in a pneumatic tube that shot through a hole in the ceiling to the composing room above to be set in type.
I was staring down at an empty carriage trying to remember exactly what I had written and what should come next, flipping through my note pad looking for the answers. All around me reporters were banging away on their typewriters as deadline drew near.
It was madness, total chaos. It was exhilarating, a pure adrenaline rush. I loved it.
“C’mon, people, you’ve got 10 minutes,” George yelled. We finished in nine. Then, we sat back to hear the most beautiful sound slowly start to build and shake the entire newsroom.
The presses were warming up in the cellar below. Bells were going off, phones were ringing, wire service machines were incessantly, loudly ticking out news from around the world, and George had only one question left to ask.
“What do you have for tomorrow?”
The afternoon paper hit the racks about 4 p.m., just about the time Gordon McCormack would normally be getting ready for the traffic coming home from work.
I stood on his corner watching cars slow down, ready to pull to the curb, but there was no little man with the newspapers in his arms waiting for them.
Most people took a long look and just drove off, but a few hopped out and put a dime in the rack. They needed something to read while having dinner. They took one last look around for Gordon, then drove off.
The calls came first, followed by the letters a few days after the story ran. They all missed seeing Gordon on his corner.
Many people said they had never bought a paper from him or even given him a second thought, but now that he was gone they missed not seeing him there anymore.
They thanked me for writing about this man who sold the news but never made it, until he lost his corner.
It’s been a long time since I thought about Gordon McCormack hawking newspapers 50 years ago, but I had an interview to do last week and the guy suggested we meet for lunch at the Glendale Marketplace. He asked if I needed directions.
Nah, I told him, I knew exactly where it was. Brand and Broadway. Gordon’s old corner. It used to be worth 300 papers a day.
Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.