That's 30 for now...

Peter Rukavina

And so it ends. Or at least starts its fade to black. I’m about to close the iBook here at the Fleet Center and head back to my hotel for the night. In the morning I head out to the airport and make my way back to Charlottetown. I’ll now doubt have more to say about what this experience has been like.

By the way, “that’s 30 for now” is the sign-off line that Ken Bosveld used for his column in the Waterdown Review, my old hometown paper, and the vehicle I used to attend my first political convention, 20 years ago, when John Turner beat Jean Chretien to become leader of the Liberal Party.

Comments

Submitted by Lisa Howard on

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My father who started as a journalist in the 1950s had this to say re 30:

“It’s an old story dating back to the late 19th C.
First electrical transmission of news was done by telegraphists
using morse code. They would tap out thousands of letters using
dots and dashes. They had standard codes of indicating punctuation,
paragraphing etc.
30 was the code for end of this story.
Writers would type it in before sending copy to
telegraph office. It got to be a custom used on
all copy even local copy.”
bye
dad

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Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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