=== Passage A by Edna Ferber ===
Ink. The building smelled of ink, spilled and bled. The printing shop and pressroom were separated from the front office only by a doorway, and the door never was closed. There were the type forms and tables, the linotype machine (a new and fearsome invention to me), the small press, the big newspaper press, the boiler plate, the trays of type, all the paraphernalia that goes to make up the heart of a small-town newspaper. The front room is its head, but without the back room it could not function or even live. The linotype and the small press went all day, for there the advertising was set up and printed, as well as handbills, programs, all the odds and ends classified as job printing. Mac, who ruled this domain, was the perfect example of the fictional printer. He had come in years before, his brown hair curled over a mild brow, his limp shirt seemed perennial. But his eye was infallible, and few if any shrdlus and etaoins marred the fair sequence of Mac’s copy. His voice was soft, gentle, drawling, but he was boss of the print shop from the cat to the linotype operator. Mac seldom talked but sometimes—rarely—he appeared in the front office, a drooping figure, with a piece of news by which he had come in some devious way. Standing at the side of the city editor’s desk he would deliver himself of this information, looking mild and limply romantic. It always proved to be a bombshell. Pinned like a manifesto to a bulletin board in the center of this ink-perfumed building was a typewritten note from my new employer, announcing that on this day, October 17, 1983, I would begin working as a reporter for a daily newspaper. The note formalized my calling in life with a splash of perspective that would stay with me forever: Dan is a former intern at the Daily News in New York and a graduate assistant for the journalism department at New York University. His writing has appeared in the Daily News, the New York Times and the Rocky Mountain News. Soon it will appear in trashcans throughout north-central Connecticut. Please make him feel relevant. Finding my way had not been easy. The internship at the Daily News had ended, the graduate degree from NYU had been shoved in a drawer, and I had returned to living beside the sump pump in my parents’ basement. I spent my days splitting sod for a lawn and sprinkling company alongside Eddie, who had taken to calling me 'Professor,' and my nights typing out professional love letters to the New London Day, the Asbury Park Press, the Poughkeepsie Journal, the Stamford Advocate, the Anywhere Clarion-Bugle-Star-Record-Sentinel, and every other Northeastern newspaper that I had never read.
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tive anonymity of Mavis Staples was puzzling. With an out how to get her out there,” Cropper recalls. “But it improbably deep voice bursting out of a diminutive five-foot frame, she projected the deepest commitment to whatever she was singing, losing herself in every word as though reliving a critical moment in her personal story. And yet she still wasn’t a marquee name like Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross, and Dusty Springfield. Part of this was by design—Mavis enjoyed singing with her family and preferred to melt into the group. Even when her father brought her out front to sing lead after her brother Pervis’s voice changed in the ’50s, she did so reluctantly. “I loved singing those baritone harmonies, I always thought that was the best job you could have,” Mavis said. She also felt a certain comfort being guided by her father, who had essentially taught her how and what to sing. Little had changed in the decades since, even as it was apparent that Mavis had star power. “Mavis was and is a quartet singer,” says Anthony Heilbut. “From a very early age she grew up singing harmony or singing lead in a group with four voices and her father’s guitar. She was trained to sing with the guitar, whereas Aretha sang with the piano. It’s a very different approach.” Not only that, Pops’s idiosyncratic guitar style made it difficult for Mavis to easily adapt to a different context. So, too, was the unspoken communication between Mavis and her siblings, the way they harmonized with her, even the way they clapped hands together, a high-speed ripple that approximated an entire percussion section by itself. “I’ve been singing a long time,” Mavis says, “and I could never find anyone to clap like Pervis and Cleedi.” But Al Bell never forgot the day in Arkansas when the teenage Mavis’s voice bowled him over and left him in tears in what was essentially a solo performance of “On My Way to Heaven” during a Staples Singers show. “In signing the Staples Singers, I thought of it as signing three acts in one,” Bell says. “I wanted to record Pops and Mavis as solo artists. I knew it would add more to them from a personal appearance standpoint, bring them a broader, more diverse audience. I would hear Pops sitting around and just playing his guitar at Stax Records and I thought, ‘I’ve got to get this man down on tape.’ His singing, I knew there was a lot more songs that could have been done with Pops as a vocalist, because he was so distinctive. With Mavis I saw no boundaries at all—I saw her walking past all of them.