The Star Tribune's five-block move to 225 Sixth St. South came 50 years too late in my opinion. Of course, there wasn't a spiffy office tower in which to occupy a couple of floors back then, but being located at this address certainly would have made the race to last call for the Morning Tribune's sports staff much less hectic in the mid-'60s.
I was a copy boy in that department at that time. Although technically not of drinking age, I had developed a taste for beer.
The Court Bar was the saloon that the night sports crew was determined to reach before the clock struck 1 a.m., and no more orders were accepted.
The Little Wagon was closer and more notorious as a newspaper bar, but indications were that the Wagon had a more-stringent view as to when a clock actually had reached 1 a.m.
Back at Tribune sports, the copy editors sat on the rim of a large desk with a slot cut into it. Inside that slot, sat the person in charge of making up the sports pages for the next morning's edition. He was the "slot man'' and made the decisions on what display articles would receive, and what the limits would be on length.
The Tribune sports editor of the time – some guy named Hartman (danged if I know whatever happened to him) – would make his desires on display known to the slot man, and those were followed to a degree, if not to a tee.
Bob Sorensen was the slot man on many nights. He was known to all as "Sorehead,'' even though he was far from that.
If you were to ask me the one person most-influential in my desire to become a newspaperman, it would be Sorehead, for the casual, "this beating deadline stuff is fun'' attitude that he brought when the phones were ringing, the copy was arriving and chaos reigned all around him.
