College students like to eat. But working at The Daily Orange brought new meaning to the phrase “midnight snack” for the late-night staffers who prepared the newspaper for print in the decades before the world went digital.

When the paste-up people — the staff members who cut out and pasted typeset words onto sheets of paper for the printing plant — finished production at 744 Ostrom Ave. around 3 or 4 a.m., they then had to deliver their work to the printer, which was sometimes a 20-minute drive from campus.

As the night went on, the paste-up people — or PUPs, as they were known — got hungry. By the trip to the plant, they were starving.

“Working late plus students equals munchies,” said Kathy Drouin-Keith, a PUP and writer who started at The D.O. in 1989.

This is how “PUP food” — now the nightly snack break for members of The D.O.’s editorial staff — was born. It remains just as much a tradition at The Daily Orange as it was 35 years ago, although it has moved much earlier on the clock. And unlike in the late ‘80s, it’s eaten in the house and not after being picked up from Wegmans or Denny’s at the end of the night.

“Talking about traditions and nomenclatures that exist, that you don’t understand why it’s there, it’s just what we did,” Drouin-Keith said. “And I guess there weren’t any grown-ups around to tell us any better.”

The PUP role was vital to pre-digital production.

The elements of a page were typeset and printed on a laser printer. Each PUP had their own Exacto-knife, which they guarded the way people nowadays guard their iPhones, Drouin-Keith said. With the knives, they would cut out each section and paste it according to an already-made design. Then this paper was rolled onto a galley proof to make the pasting firm.

These proofs were what staffers physically delivered to the printing plant each night.

When Bill Ehninger, a designer in the mid-’90s, would drive back to campus after accompanying friends on the printer run, the sun would be rising and he and his coworkers would see people who’d slept and woken up to a new day.

“I used to relish the righteous indignation I would have for people as I was driving home from the plant after dropping off the paper,” Ehninger said, laughing. “And seeing people who had slept for the night, taken a shower, eaten breakfast and were on their way to work.”

It’s unknown when the PUP food tradition moved into The D.O.’s compact kitchen.

“One of my favorite things about D.O. myths is it seems they’ve been around for time in memoriam,” said Tito Bottitta, a designer who came just after Ehninger. “But they might only go back four years because turnover happens so quickly.”

Based on the anecdotes around PUP food, the current form of the tradition likely came about before the mid-’90s. No matter the year, recent D.O. alumni can probably share a funny PUP food story. Bottitta remembers someone using up the money on their card for Kimmel Food Court on PUP food one year, going to Taco Bell to bring back tacos back for everyone.

At that time, though, the hours of feast were much closer to midnight. The premise was the same: Someone brought in food for everyone still working to eat. Ehninger said it was often the presentation director who ended up providing.

For the spring 2018 D.O. staff, PUP food is significantly earlier than it was for Ehninger and Bottitta — 8 or 8:30 p.m.

Now, the “editor-on” — as in, the staffer on duty to stay late and review all final pages with management — brings in food following the final page design meeting of the night. After each night’s meeting, the editor-on yells “PUP food,” and staffers assemble in a (sometimes) orderly line to enter the kitchen and get their meal.

Some people push the envelope on PUP food. Kennedy Rose, an assistant news editor, usually bakes pies — Oreo, peanut butter moon pie, banana cream — after polling the house on flavors. Another assistant news editor, Catherine Leffert, recently brought in 10 boxes of 20 McDonald’s chicken McNuggets. The less adventurous bring bags of chips or boxes of store-bought cookies.

For the current staff, PUP food is a mid-production snack. For the real paste-up people, the time meant so much more now that they look back on it.

When Steve Dorsey worked at The Daily Orange in the early ‘90s, “PUP food” as a proper noun didn’t yet exist. But the PUPs ate. Early in the night, the paste-up staffers sometimes brought in food or grabbed it from a nearby food truck, which Dorsey called a “PUP appetizer.”

“I remember them being closer than people I had in other parts of my college life,” Dorsey said of his D.O. colleagues. “Like a clubhouse.”

Published on March 6, 2018 at 2:43 pm

Contact Billy: wmheyen@syr.edu | @Wheyen3