Today is the last day on the job for longtime Daily News-Record employee Mary Martin — this after nearly 53 years on the job as the editorial assistant and in other positions. Back then, she was looking for a part-time job. “My children were small, and I wanted something in the evening, so when my husband came home from work during the day, he took over,” Martin said.
Martin started out working downstairs in the composing department as a part-time teletype setter-operator and proofreader. Reporters would bring their stories downstairs to be typed into the system. Sometimes, the reporters' copy was typed out; other times they were written by hand, Martin said.
“I first started here on October 25, 1971. I was one of three people at the time who typed stories for reporters. What I typed in came out on yellow tape, which was put in another machine with film that came out wet.
It had to be laid out to dry, run through a waxer, trimmed and pasted onto cardboard," Martin said. Then Martin and others would proofread the pages before they were sent to press. After about 20 years, Martin started doing the obituaries.
"I don’t remember when it was, how long ago it was,” she said. “The managing editor at the time, got tired of the reporters having to stop their stories and take obits over. So he decided to have one person to do the obituaries.
That’s where I came in.” Funeral directors would call the Daily-News Record, and Martin would type the obituaries in, taking the.
