The countdown to the Toronto Sun's 40th anniversary this Nov. 1 continues.
More tidbits from its birth from Ron Poulton's 1976 book Life in a Word Factory:
(Eaton) Howitt didn't get a clear look at the Sun's city room until 48 hours after he had started running for his new employers.
When he got the chance to settle in, he found that the sports department consisted of one small room containing three desks for five people. The copy was being marked on an orange crate in a corner. Three reporters were writing and two couldn't sit down.
Sun sports editor George Gross and the rest of his staff began coping with these surroundings at 9 a.m. on that Sunday when Howitt's cup of loneliness was running over in New York (his last Tely sports assignment).
. . . Outside the Sun building, future executives and a horde of hastily recruited kids were running upstairs, downstairs and all around the town. The children blitzed apartment houses with a letter signed by Doug Creighton to announce the coming of The Toronto Sun.
"At the same time," Creighton said, "the rest of us were slapping Sun stickers on Tely boxes and spraying as many of them as we could with paint. We even managed to move some of the boxes to the right side of the street to accommodate the in-bound traffic."
When the edited news copy began to flow, Gross found he had to share the Sun's entire fleet of cars (two Volkswagens and a Cadillac) in order to get his sports copy to the Inland Publishing Company presses in Mississauga, 20 miles across the city.
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