Well, just like that person, this week marked 50 years since my arrival in journalism. Few will remember it, but in 1973 there was a Minister of Education, named Julio Rodríguez, who had the idea that the university course would start in January, so that he had just finished COU (university orientation course), that previous generation called Preu, and looking for a job to entertain me until classes started, I found an ad in the late evening El Noticiero Universal where they were looking for an assistant.
I went there, to the editorial office of Llúria cantonada Diputació, ready for anything. I had enrolled in Economics and it had never occurred to me to pursue journalism, but I passed the test, an interview with a venerable assistant director who left for lunch while leaving me a text to write by machine Since it took a couple of hours, I repeated it two hundred times and presented it unpolluted. “Can you start tomorrow?” he asked me and I answered in the affirmative. The next day, December 13, 1973, I woke up with a fever but, even so, I went to work. My employer saw me in such a bad way that he sent me home, and after a week in bed I returned to the place without a fresh start on the 20th.
Since El Ciero was an afternoon newspaper, I started at 6 in the morning a job that consisted of cutting teletypes and leaving them on the desks of the sections. The older ones, who were the majority, ordered me “girl do this”, or the other, and the younger ones didn’t even pay attention to me, while a cartoonist gave bullfighter passes with the previous day’s newspaper as a cape.
All of a sudden, the shouts, the rushes started and everyone entered the teletype room, distracting me from my task. It was just after 9 in the morning and the news of the attack on Carrero Blanco arrived from Madrid. It was a crazy day and I was fascinated. “This is the bomb”, I thought, and not because of the one that ended the life of the then Prime Minister, but because I clearly saw that this was my place, my home, my passion and my life. And here I continue, celebrating my jubilee.
