Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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• December 2011

In Praise Of The Journalism Bar [Drenching Sadness With Beer]

Posted Dec 16, 2011 by Jeff Houck

Updated Dec 16, 2011 at 05:38 PM

It took just 24 hours for the Facebook notice to show up, the one inviting everyone for “Just One More Round. Or Two. … Hell, Maybe Three or Four.”

The replies were swift.

“Are you kidding? Wouldn’t miss it.”

“I’ll be there early!”

“Looking forward to it.”

This is what we do when colleagues leave the newsroom. We drink.

Not crazy, liver-bruising, commode-hugging drinking, although that has happened before with great notoriety. It’s usually just a pint. Or two.

When someone finds a new job, starts a new business, gets fired, married, divorced or laid off, we find our way to the nearest pub and hoist a couple in their honor.

This week was a particularly excruciating one here at the Tribune and TBO.com, with eight score plus five co-workers let go. Which is why the Facebook invitation went out.

It wasn’t really necessary to tell everyone that the gathering would be at Four Green Fields on West Platt Street. It’s the unspoken de facto clubhouse for Trib, TBO.com and WFLA staffers, both current and former.

Why? Because it’s close. Because it’s a perfect hangout.

The Guinness is delicious, the bartenders are tolerant of poor behavior, the shepherd’s pie will fill your belly for a week and the bathrooms are clean as late as 8 p.m. In the spring, we perch on the picnic tables out front. In the summer, we sit under the air-conditioned thatch roof, trade war stories and complain about our co-workers. Until they show up. Then we buy them a beer.

I wish I knew how many times I’ve introduced myself to a stranger at Four Green, only to hear, “Yeah, I used to work at the Tribune, too.” Even when they leave the paper, they never go far and it never leaves them. They always come back to Four Green Fields.

It’s been like this at every newspaper where I’ve worked for the past 22 years.

When I started at the Pensacola News-Journal in 1989, I fell in love with journalism, not in the newsroom but at Trader Jon’s, the skanky Navy bar on the downtown waterfront with the water-stained pool tables. On wobbly bar stools, I sipped and listened to seasoned pros tell secrets they could never print about the people they covered and things they had seen.

At the Anchorage Times in Alaska, we’d gather next door at the Keyboard Lounge, home of Six-Toed Mordechai’s café. (The cook allegedly had an extra appendage). After the paper was put to bed, the sports guys would stumble their way in minus-15-degree wind chill to a closet-size bar a few blocks away named Darwin’s Theory.

Servers at Darwin’s wore T-shirts adorned with a chimp in a Hamlet pose, contemplating a human skull. On the back was the phrase, “A smart monkey never monkeys around with another monkey’s monkey.” It is the truest phrase I’ve ever come across in my career.

In 1992, the paper was bought and closed by the crosstown competition. More than 400 of us were out of work very far away from the Lower 48. Those early days of unemployment were a blur of anxiety and panic, but I do remember that first night started at the Keyboard. I don’t know what I would have done without a place to say goodbye to my friends.

When I made it back to Florida, the El Cid was where everyone from the Palm Beach Post’s main office hung out. The Post was the first good newspaper I joined. Reporters crafted their words. Editors buffed them to a sheen. Photographers routinely shot stunning images. We designed bold pages and took big risks. And on good nights, after we had cleaned the competition’s clock or won a big award, we’d walk 37 paces across Dixie Highway (I counted once) to the Cid and act as if we had won the Lombardi trophy.

I’ve joked about newspaper newsrooms being the Island of Misfit Toys, that we aren’t suitable to do anything but this great job.

That’s a lie, of course. We chew on pressure like Skittles. We chase great stories like a thousand-dollar bill blowing across the ground on a windy day. If you can get tight-lipped people to tell you things, if you can dig out information nobody wants you to know, if you can be creative with the sharp tip of a deadline pointed at you, you can do anything. Except math. That stuff is like kryptonite to a journalist.

Even the worst amateur mathematician can tell you the numbers are not good in any form of journalism today. But we keep doing this because it means a great deal to the people who live around us and, when we do it right, what we publish positively affects the lives of people who have never read a word of the paper.

No job lasts forever. Still, if you do what I do, you hold on as long as you can. You try to be that hair on the shower wall that won’t wash off.

And when that’s not possible, you go find the only people on the planet who know what a grand adventure all of this is and you empty a glass.

Or two. … Hell, maybe three or four.