Visit to building sparks nostalgia

Is it my imagination, or does nostalgia come in waves?

You’ll be minding your own business, doing something not out of the ordinary, then something will click. Maybe it’s a sound. Maybe a face. Maybe a bit of old music. And when it hits, nostalgia pours over you like a wave.

You’re no longer in quite the same place. Part of you has been transported back in time.

It was a Saturday morning, and I’d joined fellow Rotarians bagging up flowering crab trees — little more than whips, really — to give to fourth graders as a community project.

Ordinarily, the work would have been done in a muddy spot at the back of Cook’s Nursery. But after several rainy days, that venue was considered too muddy by far.

Instead, the dozen or so volunteers gathered in the old building behind J&P Custom Plating in Portland. It’s officially “The Annex” these days. But the old building has seen numerous uses over the years.

An ugly brick structure, it used to stand by a siding for the Penn Central Railroad. But the Pennsy tracks are long gone, and the name Penn Central is as forgotten as its predecessor, The Grand Rapids and Indiana.

Just the same, the ugly pile of bricks struck a chord with me and memories started flowing that morning.

You see, back about 67 years ago, that was the digs of The Graphic, a tabloid-sized, photo-heavy weekly newspaper that my parents started a year after I was born. The newspaper occupied less than half the building, as I recall. Two truck bays and the south end were the home of an outfit that seemed to be in the business of plucking chickens.

We were working on the trees in one of the truck bays, the one closest to what had been the newspaper’s home. And when I walked back to get a cup of coffee, I looked up at the battered walls and found myself in another time.

Some of my earliest memories are of going to The Graphic with either my father or my mother. That was the paper’s home from the time I was 1 until I was about 8, when operations moved to the former W.H. Hood building on Main Street.

What do I remember?

The smell of ink. The smell of paper. The skittering noise of rats in the darkness at the back of the building.

The newsroom was furnished with about four wooden desks pushed together so they could share a telephone, and the desks were always covered with a mountain range of paper.

Years later, my Uncle Jim Luginbill told me that my Aunt Jean nearly set those desks on fire one day. She and Jim were not yet married, and she was trying to make the best possible impression on his parents. She was working at The Graphic and was smoking a cigarette while she worked. For some reason, Jim and his parents showed up at the newspaper office unexpectedly. Knowing that her future in-laws didn’t approve of smoking, Jean quickly put her cigarette in an ashtray and moved some of the mountain of papers to conceal it. Then she hurried out the door.

When general manager Manon Felts walked in a few minutes later, there was a bonfire taking shape on the desks. It wasn’t the last time his quick actions saved the day.

The old offices were darkest in the back. And an old desk there was as black as ink.

At one corner of the desk was a snow globe, a souvenir from somewhere. It had a lighthouse inside with a barber-pole stripe around it, and a kid could create a blizzard simply by giving it a shake.

The desk, I learned later, had been a cast-off from Peoples Bank. It was headed for the dump, and the newspaper needed every bit of equipment and furnishings it could find.

These days, it’s in my office. Before the late Quentin Imel retired, he refinished, restored, and rebuilt the piece so it could have a new life.

As a reminder of Quentin and Manon and Aunt Jean and Dick Arnold and my parents and all the rest of “the Graphic gang,” I couldn’t wish for anything better.