COLUMN: Dispatch

How's that saying go? "You can never go home again." Pshaw.

I can go home any old time I want to. My parents would LOVE it if I went home again. I don't know if my mom has so much as nudged a knick-knack in the past twenty years. I can go home just fine. I just can't seem to go back to WORK again.

My first ever job was (surprise) DJing at a teen dance club in my hometown of Galesburg. That dance club is now a parking lot. I worked for years at the Top 40 radion station in Galesburg, whose studios were in the basement of a downtown shopping mall. Not only does the station no longer exist, but I think that whole mall might now be shuttered. The office job I once held is now an empty room in an abandoned downtown building.

I'm all for progress and advancement and the dawn of a new future yada yada, but I hate having a front row seat to watch my favorite memories literally turn to dust.

That's why I winced when I got a shocking photo message this week from a former co-worker -- they're tearing down the old Dispatch building in downtown Moline.

Well, truth be told, we don't know exactly WHAT they're doing to it. The new owners are thus far keeping plans close to the vest. I've heard they may retain most of the main structure, but I can tell you with grim certainty that our old distribution center and our less-than-old warehouse area are now rubble. Whatever the future might hold for that spot, I guarantee it won't resemble the building I worked in for over 20 years.

As a structure, it wasn't especially lovable. It didn't have a magical vibe or an ambience worth remembering for generations. From an architectural standpoint, it was borderline insane. Newspapers and printing presses are especially strange beasts not given to form or flow, and it certainly showed. Over the years, a hodge-podge of various expansions and renovations had turned the place into a Franken-building of nooks, crannies, and a layout that made no coherent sense to anyone but newspaper people. 

When I first started at the Dispatch in 1994, I seldom wandered around the place -- I was too afraid of getting lost. I knew how to get to my desk, how to get to the break room, and that was about it. If you wandered down some hallway you didn't know, you might end up running into a room full of ink, press operators covered in ink, or rolls of paper so big Indiana Jones would be quaking in his boots.

When customers at our front counter would ask to use the restroom, we'd usually say no -- only because they'd need a map, a compass, and a minor in cartography just to find one. "Sure, it's just through the little gate here, hang a hard right, then jog another right at the copy machine and go through the door. When you see the stairs, take a right, then an immediate left. Then another left, a quick right, and it's the first door to your right. If you end up in a room full of what appear to be angry accountants, you missed a turn. If you end up at a giant scale, you've gone too far. If the floor starts shaking, it's just the press firing up. Here's my cell phone number if you get lost." Seriously.

Once, I was training a new co-worker on her first day. "I'll be right back," she said after a couple hours. "I need to go move my car." WE NEVER SAW HER AGAIN. The official explanation was that she must have picked a lousy way to flee from a job that wasn't for her. I'm convinced she's still there wandering the halls to this day, trying to find her way back. They say on moonless nights, you can still hear her ghostly pleas: "Excuse me, how do I get to the classified advertising department?"   

Also, our building had alarmingly few windows. Inside, you lost all sense of time, direction, AND weather. On every floor by the elevator, there was a single inauspicious light bulb jutting out of the wall. "What's the point of that?" I asked naively as a new hire. "Oh, it's the rain light," I was told casually. If the weather outside was bad, the folks in customer service would turn those lights on to let us all know to bundle up if we were headed outdoors.

Our building never pretended to be an architectural marvel. It could somehow be simultaneously both hot AND drafty. Mice would occasionally run across my desk -- one absconded with a Hershey's Kiss I'd just unwrapped. I once witnessed it rain in a stairwell. EVERYONE had at least one trapped-in-the-elevator story. 

Still, it's hard to believe that weird old building might soon be unrecognizable, because the ghosts of its former occupants will haunt my heart forever. Its where some of the best and worst memories of my life happened. It's where I met some of my dearest friends. Its the halls where legends like Russ Scott, Brian Nelson, Marla Angelo, and Laura Fraembs once tread.  

Times change, and so does the landscape around us. The downtowns we see today won't look anything like the downtowns a hundred years from now, and that's okay. Here's hoping the Quad Citians of the future will still be lucky enough to have a building somewhere full of hard-working weirdos providing daily news, information, and advertising. And I hope those weirdos don't forget to check the rain light before they head out without a coat.