Working for the ‘weekly squeak’ as 15 year-old for 15 cents per column inch PERSPCTIVE Unusual police vehicle crashes — such as the one shown above 20 years ago when a Manteca Police unit ended up driving off a rural dirt road into a drainage ditch right after they vehicle the officer was pursuing did — were a routine occurrence for a while in Lincoln in Placer County. Forty-nine years ago in February I became the sports editor of the “weekly squeak”, the name that almost everyone in Lincoln called the News Messenger that has been publishing every Thursday since 1891. It’s not as a big deal as it sounds. I was a high school sophomore at the time. I was paid a dollar for every photo that ran, a dollar for every roll of film I processed, and 15 cents per column inch. Depending upon the season it was 1½ to 3 pages a week.