Photo of Eldon Cort

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Eldon Cort, who kept newsrooms across north Florida running with copy from The Associated Press for nearly 40 years, retired from the news cooperative June 1, 2002.

During his 50 years with the AP, the veteran technician worked on machines from the old Western Union teletypes to the latest computers that transmit hundreds of times faster.

"The new computer equipment is much more dependable and requires far less maintenance," he said. "And you don't get your hands dirty like with the old ink ribbons."

Cort's Florida colleagues celebrated the retirement with a prime rib dinner June 8 attended by the Tallahassee staff as well as AP representatives from Miami, Jacksonville and Pensacola and a member from The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.

Cort, 65, liked to be close to the news. He was monitoring a police scanner on Saturday, his day off, and was the first to hear about the death of Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles in December 1998.

"I heard a signal seven on North Adams Street and knew the governor's mansion was somewhere in that neighborhood," Cort said. "I drove up there and when the ambulance came they opened all the gates and I knew there was big trouble."

Cort then telephoned the supervisor in Miami and began rounding up Tallahassee staff by phone. The Chiles obituary had been updated only days earlier and was put on the wire immediately upon the confirmation of his death, giving AP a clear break on the story.

Cort worked in member newsrooms across north Florida and south Georgia, often times spending up to two weeks at a time in the 1960s, driving 38,000 miles in one year alone.

"I had 152 printers in the field during the late '60s," he said. "Now there are two. Everybody uses computers and furnishes their own equipment if they print at all."

He was the third member of his family to work with the news agency. His father, Horace, was a longtime AP photographer who covered the Normandy invasion in World War II and the civil rights movement in the South. He retired in 1973 after 38 years with AP.

An uncle, Walter Cort, was a technician in Portland, Ore., for 35 years.

Eldon Cort began his AP career in 1952 as a copy boy in Atlanta and had stops in Montgomery, Ala., New York, Des Moines, Iowa, and Raleigh, N.C., before accepting his Tallahassee assignment in 1962.

He was a teletype operator in Montgomery before he was trained as a technician in New York in 1958 and 1959. (June 1, 2002)