Howard Bryan was two years into a job with the Cleveland Press when he came to Albuquerque on vacation in August 1948.

He sized up the Duke City for a day or so, liked what he saw and walked into the The Albuquerque Tribune, which, like the Press, was a Scripps Howard paper.

Bryan, then 28, introduced himself to Tribune Editor Dan Burrows and said be might be interested in a job when the paper had an opening.

"To tell you the truth," Burrows said, "I'm pretty desperate for someone right now. Could you start tomorrow?"

Bryan, now 87, laughed as he told the story during an interview at his West Side apartment.

"I wired the Press that I had another job," he said. "I never did get to finish that vacation."

Thirty-seven years later, Bryan retired from The Tribune as one of its longest-serving reporters.

Now, as The Tribune enters its final days, after 86 years of aggressive and heartfelt journalism, the memories of Bryan and others provide a window into the earlier times of the paper and its city.

Typewriters and cigarette smoke

In 1948, The Tribune, an evening paper, and the Albuquerque Journal, which came out in the morning, shared space in a Downtown building at Fifth Street and Gold Avenue Southwest.

The Tribune had been there since 1925. The Journal moved into the building in 1933 after the papers signed a joint operating agreement — the nation's first — that allowed them to share expenses and so survive the economic rigors of the Depression.

These were the gritty, down-and-dirty days of daily journalism, decades before digital photos and computer-generated articles.

This was the day of darkrooms and soft-lead copy pencils, a time when the noise of typewriter keys rattled through the newsroom, wire-service machines chimed like Christmas bells while spewing spools of paper onto the floor, and cigarette smoke hung like smog over reporters' desks.

Back then, Albuquerque, with a population of about 75,000, was still small enough and informal enough that reporters could walk to sources and talk to them face-to-face instead of leaving a message on voice mail.

Reporters wore coats and ties. Some wore hats but not Bryan. At least, not then.

"I couldn't afford a hat back then," he said. "I started at The Tribune for $37.50 a week. But that was the same pay I was getting in Cleveland."

There was plenty of work — if not money — to go around.

"Eight or 10 people, including editors, made up the whole editorial staff when I went to work there," Bryan said.

Editor Burrows grew up working on farms and ranches near Roswell in the southeast part of the state, and so he was serious about covering agriculture and the rural lifestyle.

"One reason Dan hired me was that the State Fair was coming up, and he needed someone to cover it," Bryan said of the annual Albuquerque event. "The State Fair was usually the banner headline every day it was going on."

But Bryan's first Tribune story, dated Aug. 26, 1948, just a couple of days after he started, was about a visiting health care authority's speech in support of the Regina nursing school at Albuquerque's St. Joseph hospital.

Bryan was so new to the staff, an editor put the byline "Harold Bryan" on the article. It was corrected to Howard the next edition.

After working in the asphalt jungles of Cleveland, where shooting fatalities and warehouse fires were sometimes deemed unworthy of coverage, Bryan had to get used to what was news in Albuquerque.

"At The Tribune, I'd get a note from (Managing Editor) George Baldwin saying; `Howard, they are painting the flagpole in front of the post office. We need a story,' " Bryan recalled.

"They used to say about George that if he looked out the window and saw three people talking on the corner, he'd send a reporter to cover it."

By George

George Baldwin started at The Tribune late in 1934 and worked at the paper — as reporter, city editor, managing editor, associate editor and columnist — for more than 60 years. He died in 1997 at age 88.

Born in Texas, Baldwin got his first taste of the newspaper business as an apprentice printer at the Bozeman (Mont.) Daily Chronicle. He had been working as a linotype operator, reporter and editor for the Silver City Enterprise in southwestern New Mexico before joining The Tribune.

In his first years at the paper, Baldwin worked news beats all day, stopped at home for supper cooked by his wife, Ruth, and then covered University of New Mexico sports well into the evening. He didn't back off that work schedule until illness overtook him in his mid-80s.

"He was at the paper at 6 in the morning and 6 in the evening," said Harry Moskos, who started at The Tribune in 1953 as a high school student and eventually became managing editor. "I think that's where I got my work ethic."

Baldwin began his days with breakfast at the Court Cafe, which was on Fourth Street, just north of Central Avenue. Then he walked to the old Alvarado Hotel near the Santa Fe Railway tracks to see if any movie stars or other notables were stopping in town on the trains that ran between Los Angeles and Chicago.

Once, in the late '30s, he got a tip that movie star Mae West was on a train. Baldwin got on to look for her, and the train departed with him still aboard.

"Boy, that conductor was sore," Baldwin recalled in a 1996 interview. "You weren't supposed to stop a train in those days. They finally did stop it up by Menaul School and made me get off. I had to walk (about 2 1/2 miles) back to The Tribune offices."

In the '30s, Baldwin's beat stops included the old Hilton Hotel (now La Posada), where he checked in with powerful City Commission Chairman Clyde Tingley, who was usually holding court in a chair on the north side of the lobby.

"Tingley was one of the biggest movers and shakers Albuquerque has ever known," Baldwin said of the man who also served two terms as a Democratic governor of New Mexico and left his name on a city beach and a city arena. "He knew everything that was going on in town."

Baldwin knew just about everybody living in or visiting in town. He interviewed Mabel Dodge Luhan, Taos arts patron, author and socialite, and her husband, Tony Luhan, when they stopped at Albuquerque's old Franciscan Hotel.

He visited Elfego Baca, old-time gunfighter, lawman and lawyer, at Baca's law office at Sixth Street and Gold Avenue Southwest.

He knew famed Scripps Howard columnist and war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who would be killed in 1945 while covering World War II.

As a traveling columnist, Pyle was often in and out of Albuquerque in the late '30s and early '40s.

Pyle and his wife, Jerry, built a home in the city in 1940. It's now the Ernie Pyle Library at Girard Boulevard and Santa Monica Avenue Southeast.

Baldwin and other Tribune reporters fed Pyle tips for column items.

"He was a little shy, but he knew how to talk to people," Baldwin said of Pyle in a 1995 interview. "He would talk to everybody you gave him a note about."

Ed Shaffer, Tribune editor from 1928 to 1944, gave parties for Pyle at the Shaffer home.

"(Pyle) had a great sense of humor," Baldwin recalled. "One night they had a party, and he walked over to this lady who was sitting on a sofa and said: 'Pardon me. You are sitting on my drink.' "

You probably had to be there.

Baldwin wrote "By George," his column about Albuquerque people, until December 1995, slightly more than a year before his death.

It's claimed that Baldwin in his once phoned in 13 byline stories in one day from a national political convention. In his case, that's probably the truth.

Bryan talked with Baldwin not long before his death.

"George said: 'Howard, remember when you and I used to write five or six stories a day? Now, there are people here who don't write two or three stories a week.' "

Wake up — Tribune calling

Tribune reporters of 60 and more years ago would have had difficulty finding characters on their beats more colorful than some of their own newsroom colleagues.

Some of the more picturesque staffers were A.C. "Tony" DeCola, political editor; Carlos Salazar, sports editor; and Irene Fisher, women's page editor.

It was mostly a man's world in newsrooms of that era, but Fisher, who worked at The Tribune from 1928 to 1940, fit in with the guys.

Fisher smoked cigars, lived in a refrigerator car she bought from the Santa Fe Railway and might have punched you in the nose if you called her a society editor. She was more interested in baseball than in so-called society.

Fisher liked a good fight, and her writing packed a wicked wallop in support of chosen causes. One of her most significant campaigns while at The Tribune helped start the Albuquerque Little Theater.

And she didn't back down when she left The Tribune. Just after World War II, she led the charge to demolish what she saw as an ugly and culturally inappropriate wall and bandstand built by the Works Progress Administration at Old Town Plaza.

People said it took the WPA three months and $50,000 to build the wall and bandstand, and it took Fisher just three days to tear it down.

Like Bryan, DeCola had worked for the Cleveland Press before he joined The Tribune staff in 1940. He had the battle-hardened mug of a prizefighter, which went well with his gruff reputation.

"Deep down, he really wasn't so gruff," Bryan said. "But he would scare reporters half to death."

DeCola had a way of deflating young reporters with a sarcastic or condescending quip.

"One time, when Tony was filling in as city editor, the reporter who was covering courts didn't show up," Bryan recalled. "Tony said, 'Howard, I need you to cover the courthouse.' I said, 'I've never covered the courthouse.' He said, 'I tell you what. Just go a couple of blocks up the street until you see a big, red-brick building, walk in and introduce yourself.' "

DeCola was infamous for waking up sources — even high-ranking politicians and government officials — by phoning them at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. to check facts for a story.

Newsroom lore has it that Judge Harry Robins, New Mexico Republican Party chairman, once returned the favor, calling DeCola at his home at 3 a.m.

"What's the news?" a groggy DeCola asked.

"Oh, nothing," Robins is reported to have said. "I'm just at the airport about to leave for Washington and wanted to make sure you knew what time I left."

Salazar was born in Las Vegas, N.M., in 1925 and moved to Albuquerque in 1940. In 1946, after World War II service with the Navy, he joined The Tribune as a "temporary" summer sportswriter. Except for 14 months of Navy service during the Korean War, he never left the paper until his death in 1998 at age 73.

Salazar, the only Hispanic on the staff when he joined The Tribune, started learning his craft as sports editor of Albuquerque High's newspaper. Over the decades, he covered an array of sports, whether Lobos basketball or State Fair horse racing or the Indianapolis 500 or beyond.

One evening, while Salazar was having dinner at a New York City hotel, boxing great Muhammad Ali joined him at his table and told him he was going to refuse induction into the U.S. Army. Salazar's story the next day made nationwide headlines.

In 1985, he lost part of his left leg to diabetes, but it didn't slow him down enough to notice.

"I remember back in 1985, Carlos was set to cover the Hearns-Hagler fight — one of the great fights of all time — but the doctors wanted to amputate his leg," Jack Welsh, an independent sports writer out of Las Vegas, Nev., recalled at Salazar's funeral in June 1998.

"Carlos said: 'Look, Doc, I'll be back Sunday night. Couldn't you cut it off Monday?' "

In the newsroom, Salazar was a familiar sight, sitting at his desk, fingers on the keyboard, a phone tucked between his head and shoulder, tugging periodically at a collar open under a loosened tie.

That is, he was a familiar sight to those who could see him. Some couldn't because of the mounds of notebooks, sports press books and reams of sports stats piled atop his desk.

Newsroom legend has it that when someone tried to clear away Salazar's desk, the person found an uncashed check dated about 20 years previously and an uneaten sandwich about that old.

"He never threw anything away," said Moskos, the former managing editor.

Salazar's career was a keeper. In 1987, he became the first sportswriter inducted into the Albuquerque/New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame.

Get it first; get it right

Harry Moskos had just finished his junior year at Albuquerque High when he went to work for The Tribune on June 16, 1953. The paper was still at Fifth and Gold.

Burrows, the editor, hired Moskos to operate the paper's UPI telephoto machine, a job that consisted of synchronizing the transmission signal with the receiving signal.

Times being what they were, John Milne, superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools, came down to The Tribune offices to make sure the machine was safe for one of his students to use.

From that start, Moskos would go on to become The Tribune's managing editor and editor of Scripps papers in El Paso and Knoxville, Tenn.

He recalled some of the early stories he helped The Tribune cover — the 1955 crash of TWA Flight 260 in the Sandia Mountains, which killed 16; the 1958 crash of a private plane near Grants, which killed Hollywood producer Michael Todd and three others; and the search for two Albuquerque children, a brother and sister.

Moskos can't remember the year of the missing children story, but he can't forget much else about it.

"I happened to be at the (children's) house, which was on the West Side, when one of the rescuers looked in a refrigerator on the porch," Moskos said. "And they were in there, both of them dead."

In April 1954, The Tribune and the Journal moved from the building at Fifth and Gold to new offices at Seventh Street and Silver Avenue Southwest.

Some Tribune staffers, carrying boxes filled with newsroom belongings, walked the two blocks west and one block south to the new building.

Moskos, still in high school, said he was the last Tribune employee to leave the newsroom at Fifth and Gold.

"I stayed there to answer the phones until they were set up at the new place," he said.

The new offices, built by Albuquerque Publishing Co., made it possible for The Tribune to expand its staff, which had never exceeded a dozen editors and reporters before.

It was a step into a modern era in journalism.

But Moskos said that, despite the changes in location and technology, some things about The Tribune are the same in its last days as they were in its earliest.

"I think you still have the same basics of accuracy and fairness," he said. "You still want to get it first and get it right."