Being born out of your era sucks.

One of the profs here at the journalism school has organized a weekly series of journalism movies. It started a few weeks back with the original 1931 version of “The Front Page,” starring Pat O’Brien and Adolph Menjou. I missed the next few, but this week’s installment was “Foreign Correspondent,” starring Joel McRea, which came out in 1940. All the movies in the series were nominated for Oscars, and some of them won (including “It Happened One Night,” the first ever to win all five top categories).

As both a reporter and a movie buff, of course, I find them great good fun to watch. But especially with the older flicks, it’s a little bittersweet. It reminds me that I was born a good 50 years too late.

I always tell people that had I been a reporter in the 1920s – the age of “jazz journalism” – I would’ve been a hot property. If you’ve never seen “The Front Page,” which takes place in that era, rent it. It was written by two Chicago newspapermen, and while the picture it shows is recognizably stereotypical, it’s got the tone of the era down cold. It was a time when many a reporter had a bottle of bootleg hooch in his desk and he’d sample that frequently, but only after literally pounding out a story on his typewriter. Reporters in those days were hard-living, hard-writing, foul-mouthed smartasses. I once got suspended from the daily in Fargo for dropping some f-bombs in the newsroom; back in the day, if you didn’t drop at least a few every shift, you were considered the one straight-laced guy in the office and a little odd.

Yeah, it was a romantic time.

I’m lucky, because I came into the biz at a time when some of that romantic era still remained. By the time I started my first newspaper job, hot type already was a fading memory. (“Hot” type means that newspapers were printed with lead type, which was melted and put through a machine called a Linotype.) But I did work in one place that occasionally used a Linotype for specific jobs, and it was the coolest machine ever. It hissed and clanked and moaned when Cliff, my Linotype operator who could have come right from central casting, fired it up. A whole room full of them must have sounded like robots having an orgy. They were so noisy, in fact, that during the heyday of hot type, newspapers were the leading employer of deaf people, one of the few groups who could work around that much noise.

I love to talk about such things. My kids and I were once in a museum that had a Linotype, and I bored them into a coma explaining how it works. But talking about them reminds me that I’m closer to the end of my life than the beginning, and in some ways, what’s left of my era is rapidly slipping away. In pursuing my master’s, I’m doing what I can to make sure I don’t become a totally unemployable dinosaur. But when most of the people I’m sitting in class with are half my age (or less), I have to keep reminding myself that, as cool as I find Linotypes, I might as well be telling them stories about using buggy whips.

Really, though, what my younger colleagues don’t really know is that a little of the romance yet remains. A few of you reading this probably have taken tours of the local daily’s newsroom, so you might have had a little exposure to it. But it’s hard to see how exciting a newsroom is when it’s not under pressure. When you’re pushing deadline, or there’s a big story breaking, there’s no better place on earth to be. Especially at a place where there’s a group of good, experienced reporters, it’s amazing to see the old pro ooze from every pore of everybody on the staff. Editors bark out orders (I used to love to watch Terry DeVine, who was an old Marine sergeant, do that), people call out for help with this or that fact or word, everybody’s step is a bit livelier and quicker. It’s one of those rare, lovely times when life is like the movies.

That kind of fun is still common in the news business. Young reporters today don’t know it, but the juice and electricity you find in a newsroom ties all of us in the 21st century in a very real way to the people who did the same thing we do a century ago. If you’re old enough to know that, you get a kick from practicing journalism that you wouldn’t get in other professions. You don’t see a lot of movies about early 20th century computer programmers. Can’t imagine that would be real interesting, anyway.

So I’ll keep going to the movies and taking what they offer: a glimpse into the romantic era of a profession I love, a profession that still, in odd moments, offers the same attraction to me that it did to the guys who wore the straw boaters and the three-piece suits.

And if you ever want to hear about how a Linotype worked, drop me a line.