Trumpet story post mortem

 
     As someone who loves his job, I don't keep scrupulous tabs on my hours. The penumbra between working and not working is so gradual and hazy, that doing so would be impossible. Am I on the clock lying in bed in the darkness, thinking about the lede to a story? Sitting in Orchestra Hall listening to a symphony? Life and work are like two ballroom dancers, in tight embrace, gliding across a polished floor. Best not to try to pry them apart.
     Technically, I'm scheduled Monday through Friday. But every Sunday morning I'm prepping Monday's column. Not that I'm complaining. Monday afternoon might find me working in the garden. Both the Sun-Times and I seem satisfied with the arrangement.
     I'm expected to turn in three columns a week, to run Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Before the blog, I used to smile, inwardly, when somebody said they read me "every day," thinking, "What are you doing the other four days — hallucinating?" But now of course there is this blog, where that is possible.

      Though sometimes circumstances dictate that I write one or two extra columns in the paper, reacting to breaking news events, and I don't mind those —it's good to be wanted. Though last Sunday's epic about trumpets was something of an exception, because involved so much work — what with driving to Elkhart and three trips downtown connecting with Conn Selmer and the CSO. I was ready to involve Schilke, another trumpet company in Chicago, and a guy who makes mouthpieces in the Fine Arts Building, when I realized I had gotten far beyond anything that could reasonably be put into a newspaper. The column got shifted to Sunday, because there is more real estate to fill, which was fine, but I didn't want to then disgorge an extra column too.
     The original plan was to miss Monday. But then I decided to break off the two Morgan Park High School students from their reduced role at the end and let them shine a bit in their own column. So that ran Monday. And Tuesday, batting out a blog post about the Seder, I fluttered my fingers over the keyboard and thought, "You know ... this is good ... maybe it should run in the paper." So we ran it Wednesday, and I'm glad, as a lot of readers seemed to really appreciate the column.
     But I did take Friday off, mostly to show I can. I d0n't want to be one of those guys who can't not work, can't step off the treadmill. Though it left me with the question of what to run here. My first thought was the picture above, a Conn Selmer worker checking the straightness of a length of tubing. And a few words to go with it. A whole lot of words, now that I look at it.  One does tend to go on. And on.
    There was something about the photo that appealed to me; the pose, obviously, something almost triumphant about his attitude, like the Bowman and the Spearman, the deco Native-Americans on horseback at Michigan and Ida B. Wells, with their straining bows. Maybe it was his goggles, or the red — his shirt, some kind of scoop device in the foreground, and that beam — cutting the industrial gray.

     There's something appealing about photos of people in protective gear — masks, gloves, helmets. They must appeal to the little boy in me. Like this stooped fellow with his blue balaclava and ear cups. When I see guys who have jobs like this, grinding burrs off trumpets eight hours a day, I remind myself once again to try to appreciate the job I have, one that takes me wherever I want to go, when I want to go there. Because sometimes I forget.

     There are difficulties. A story like the trumpet piece, you are so immersed, it can be hard to stop. I get used to working on them, and hate to just let the subject drop. As it is, I plan to circle back to the CSO. 

     I hadn't planned on stumbling across the voodoo hacks — Bud Herseth's silver bridge ending up as patches on the bell of Esteban Batallan's trumpet — but in giving space to that, I had to lose some cool details of the production process. I woke up Sunday morning thinking. "I didn't mention the Crisco." The factory lubricates one of the 490 steps to make a trumpet with Crisco oil, which I found charming, the out-of-place foodstuff in a manufacturing process, like discovering that deep at the stern of a diesel ship is a collar of lignum vitae, a dense, oily wood;  the shaft passes through it, from the engine room, outside the hull, connecting to the propellers.
     Nor did I mention the workers who go over the finished trumpets, circling dings and scratches in a red china marker so they can be buffed out — nobody wants to spend $3,000 for a trumpet that arrives with a ding or scratch in it. Imagine doing that all day.
     There were two interesting errors in the original story. At first I called the organ on stage at the CSO "a church organ," which prompted two readers to observe that church organs are found in churches. I changed that to "pipe organ." And originally I hyphenated Conn Selmer. I had asked Mark Dulin, the artists' rep, whether it is hyphenated or not, and he said it wasn't. But working for the company didn't necessarily make him the final word, and looking over the corporate material, the hyphen seemed to be used more often than it wasn't, so we went with it, because the crown in the logo seems to be a hyphen. Then after the story ran, the Conn Selmer folks asked if we could take it out and, since it's their company and they should be called what they want to be called, I laboriously plucked all those hyphens out.

      I've gone into the weeds, haven't I? Time to wrap this up. I need the day off.

      You might wonder why I take photos at all — with ace photographer Ashlee Rezin right there. Three reasons, I suppose. One: force of habit; the paper was without a photo staff for many years, I just got used to taking my own photos. Two: it's quicker to take a photo than jot down the details of a scene, and I use them in constructing my story; and Three: to use here. I don't want to seize the work of my photographer colleagues, and so take my own shot to illustrate my blog posts, though the pro shots are always better, and I often seek permission to use them. Nobody has ever said 'No.'

    Anyway, a bit of background, in case anyone's interested. If not, well, there's always tomorrow.

Jim Dwyer buffing trumpets at Conn Selmer.