Word: clocking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Promptly at 3 o'clock one afternoon last week, Ernest Joiner, 47, editor of the weekly Ralls, Texas Banner (circ. 1,175), planted a cigar beneath his mustache, wrapped a grimy printer's apron about his waist and flipped the switch on the old flatbed press. As the first ink-wet copies of the Banner began to roll, it seemed much like the press run of any of thousands of other small-town U.S. papers. It wasn't. If last week's edition ran true to form, Editor Joiner's own column in the Banner...
...they didn't wait for long. The nodding dilettantes of the 11 o'clock crowd poured in one night and the walls were painted a new and shining yellow, with a bluish trim. Gone were the spattered woodwork and the coffee stains; and there were curtains in the front. The window-sitters looked up from their game of Flarg occasionally, and chuckled unconvincingly...
...move was swift, without remorse, without time for thought or even the introspection of a far away dawn. At exactly 11 o'clock a sign appeared above the counter. Minimum charge 15 cents...
Dismaying, of course; symbolic too. The move was calculated and premeditated, yet still drastic. While the clock cannot be turned back, perhaps, it need not be set ahead so suddenly. A ten-cent minimum would tax the non-coffee drinking philosophers. But 15 cents goes too far; the Bick is, after all, a place for radical talking but moderate deeds...
...meantime, it's a great life. I don't use an alarm clock any more, work when I feel like it. In the past year I had fourteen weeks of night club work and fifteen or twenty concerts. As for the rest of the time, the record business is still mine and I've got to arrange all these engagements myself--I don't have an agent. My program is worked out now so that I can do a whole show myself--about twenty-six songs...