I can't help but smile when I hear Tribune old-timers recall how in April 1954, The Trib moved into more "spacious" quarters at Seventh Street and Silver Avenue Southwest.

Spacious?

I started with The Tribune at Seventh and Silver in 1976. But even though the building — shared by The Trib and the Albuquerque Journal — had been expanded before I arrived, it seemed to me anything but spacious.

The Trib newsroom at Seventh and Silver, was, in fact, a dimly lighted box in which staffers seated at metal desks were jammed up against a horseshoe-shaped rim where news copy was read and edited.

The newsroom didn't have windows because they had been covered over as a precaution after Albuquerque's destructive Roosevelt Park riots of June 1971. Instead, there were lights behind curtains that were intended to give the illusion of windows — but didn't.

So the old newsroom at Seventh and Silver was dim and cramped. But it was lively. It crackled with energy in a way today's spread-out, computerized, digitized, smoke-free, sound-muffled, well-mannered newsrooms do not.

As deadline approached, it reverberated with the racket of wire machines, typewriters and the volatile reaction of editors who were not afraid to display their impatience or displeasure.

"There was a lot of stress-induced freaking out in the late '70s," said Jack Ehn, The Tribune's editorial page chief, who started at the paper in 1978.

"City Editor Pete Pence was known for ripping copy out of my IBM typewriter — once so hard it caused the roller to spin for a couple of seconds. In fairness, I was pushing deadline — as usual."

Managing Editor Harry Moskos, now mellowed with years and living in Knoxville, Tenn., had a reputation back then for kicking trash cans across the newsroom.

Editor Ralph Looney, the man who hired me, could also be expressive.

Bill Naegele, a Tribune writer and photographer from 1974 to 1988, recalled the time Looney stormed out of his corner office, the first edition of The Trib clutched in a fist above his head, his face red and his language blue, only to be stopped in his tracks by a group of grade-school kids, their eyes wide in alarm, who were on a tour of the newsroom.

Naegele said Looney clamped up midsentence, folded the newspaper and walked briskly back to his office, closing the door quietly behind him.

"I never did find out why he was so upset," Naegele said.

I worked fewer than nine of my 31 Tribune years at Seventh and Silver. In 1985, The Tribune and the Journal moved to our present location at 7777 Jefferson St. N.E.

It is spacious here — and beautiful. Rabbits, birds and squirrels roam across groomed grounds. A cafeteria offers two meals a day, and The Tribune newsroom is expansive enough to accommodate the infinite amounts of clutter journalists tend to collect.

And there are windows everywhere.

But even after more than two decades at the Jefferson newsroom, I still think of it as the new place.

The old place, the building at Seventh and Silver, is gone, torn down years ago to make room for a parking lot.

I'm glad, however, I had a chance to know the aging, bleak cell of a Trib newsroom that was in that building. Maybe I didn't appreciate it then, didn't realize its importance.

I understand now that it was a link between the newspaper founded by Carl Magee in 1922 and the paper that is reporting, editing and publishing its final stories now.

It was a connection between the golden age of newspapers and the fading days of print journalism.

Tribune staffers who moved to Seventh and Silver in 1954 were moving out of a building that founder Magee opened at Fifth Street and Gold Avenue Southwest in 1925.

The careers of some — such as reporter-editor-columnist George Baldwin; reporter-columnist Howard Bryan; sports editor Carlos Salazar; reporter-columnist-copy editor Katy Woolston Andresen; and editor and copy desk chief Pete Giannettino — stretched across all three eras and through the newsrooms at Fifth and Gold, Seventh and Silver, and Jefferson.

Seventh and Silver was a bridge in our history, spanning a gap from a time when newspapering was being done the tried-and-proven way to now, when newspapers are clawing at any new idea that will keep them alive and viable.

When I started at Seventh and Silver, we were still using typewriters — electric, of course.

And the copy desk had a pneumatic tube — like those you use to make drive-through bank deposits — to send copy to the composing room. That was cool. And very old school.

Our idea of high-tech back then was using a tape recorder.

And because we were Downtown, the heart of government, our techniques and habits were often similar to those of reporters from an earlier era.

Some of us could walk to our beats. The Trib hired me to cover City Hall, which was in easy hoofing distance. If I had a breaking news story between editions and no one in the newsroom was free to take it over the phone, I could run from City Hall to my newsroom desk in 10 minutes. I was, after all, only 28 then.

It was a different time, a time when we felt closer to the stories we reported.

When we moved to Jefferson in 1985, we moved not only into spacious quarters but into the computer age and — even though we didn't realize it at the time — the front end of the decline of newspaper readership.

It has been great here. I love the sunlight-flooded newsroom, the rabbits in the landscaping and the green chile, chicken enchiladas served in the cafeteria.

But I'll never forget that old, dark box at Seventh and Silver. My longest-enduring friendships started there.

And being there gave me the chance to rub elbows with history — the people and the ways of the great, old days of The Albuquerque Tribune.

I wouldn't trade that for all the windows in the world.

Ollie Reed Jr. has been a metro, sports and features reporter during his 31 years with The Tribune and has served as arts editor, features editor and TV/movie editor. He could've been the editor but was too smart for that.