Yesterday's newsroom had its stories.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

Thirty years ago today, I walked into the newsroom of The Bulletin in Bend to begin my journalism career. I was 22.

I remember my first assignment as the sports editor. Feeling smug - hey, I was a professional now, not some college punk - I set up an interview with the Bend High football coach at his home.

Later that day, I adjusted my clip-on tie, walked to his door and greeted the coach after he arrived. "Hi, I'm from The Bulletin."

He looked at me, then at my notebook. "Well, thanks for coming by but the other carrier was here last night to collect. I paid him."

There would be other humiliations in my journalistic career, not the least of which was being bucked off a horse named Rusty while doing an elk-hunting series. But beyond such humiliation, there's been change.

Thirty years ago, I typed stories on a typewriter in a newsroom hazier than Harrisburg on a bad field-burning day. When, a few years later, it was announced we were shifting to something called computers, I wondered if I could survive without the clackety-clack sound of my Underwood.

One old codger took it further. "I'll work on one of those contraptions when hell freezes over," he said. It did. And he did.

Change sometimes comes easy, sometimes not. I don't miss the pack-a-day smokers whose residue turned our keyboards yellow. Or having to fix corrections by repeatedly resending individual paragraphs containing the fixes. Or, on Fridays and Saturdays, sandwiching 18 hours of work around a three-hour slab of sleep. (The La Grande Observer sports editor simply brought his sleeping bag to work.)

But I do miss the chatter of The Associated Press teletype. I miss the magic of exchanging scores with other east-of-the-mountains sports editors on the "C" wire, a sort of caveman's e-mail. And I miss the levity of small-town newsrooms.

I can't imagine, today, setting up an elaborate April Fools' joke as I did with the local community college basketball coach in Bend. Just before deadline, he called my assistant sports editor, Mike Francis, to report that he'd just signed a 7-foot-6 center from Sweden named Loof Lirpa (35 points, 25 rebounds per game).

Francis, now an associate editor in the editorial department at The Oregonian, hung up the phone. "We gotta redo the sports cover." After he feverishly rapped out the story, I read it, then asked him to check the spelling of the kid's name - backwards.

He flew out of the newsroom in a huff.

Newsrooms were grittier places back then. Smaller. Messier. Noisier. Now, newsrooms look and feel like insurance offices with police scanners. We have ergonomically correct work stations. There's no threat of a smoker accidentally lighting his trash can on fire, which a guy in Bend once did.

Editors have all been to those training seminars and rarely go ballistic. Twenty years ago, I remember an editor-reporter argument ending in a typewriter being shoved off a desk.

Bulletin Publisher Bob Chandler, aka God, was Mount St. Helens in a bolo tie. Once, when I dared to show him I spelled a word right that he thought I'd gotten wrong, he looked at it in the dictionary I'd handed him. He paused. "Welch," he harrumphed, "get a new dictionary."

Each day, community characters spiced up the newsroom: morticians with death notices, political gadflies arguing our editorial stances, pet-of-the-week dogs.

Now, most newspapers have security guards and the people you see are watering our indoor plants.

Not that I miss certain aspects of yesterday's openness: for example, the lady who walked in one April day and, from across the newsroom, pointed a menacing finger at me:

"You, Bob Welch, are a pathetic excuse for a journalist! You're boring, inaccurate and biased. You can't spell. You stink!"

The newsroom fell silent. My face went Stanford red. "One other thing," she yelled. "April Fools' from Mike Francis."