Most Crimson employees stay with the million-dollar corporation for less than four years, but three employees have devoted a collective 62 years of their lives to the building located at 14 Plympton St.

Elizabeth B. Woodley, Brian M. Byrne and Patrick R. Sorrento have seen multiple generations of students pass through the building.

Woodley has kept The Crimson's accounting books for the past 15 years; Byrne has endured an early morning work schedule six days a week for the past 17 years to operate The Crimson's presses; and Sorrento has acted as The Crimson's production supervisor and late night advisor for over 30 years.

What's the Bottom Line?

One of Woodley's earliest Crimson memories is of Commencement 1984, which took place just two months after she began working there in April.

"I remember coming in and stepping over bodies," Woodley says. One student, a sleeping photographer, was blocking the way to her desk. "I stepped over him and didn't wake him up," she says.

Woodley says she enjoys working in a student-run environment.

"I think it would be hard to get back into the corporate world again," she says. "I don't need the supervision [because] I work very well by myself."

However, Woodley says life in the building isn't perfect. She contrasts the atmosphere of The Crimson today with the "fun and lively" place she believes it used to be.

For example, Woodley says the tension between the news and business sides of the building--which she believes to be prominent today--was less obvious in earlier years.

She says she used to visit the newsroom, and reporters would reciprocate by visiting the business department.

In the summer of 1985, Woodley says she had the summer Crimson staff over to her Dorchester, Mass., home for a barbecue. She also attends every inaugural dinner, which is the banquet held each February to welcome the incoming executive board.

"I think I've been a great friend [to Crimson editors]," Woodley says. "I still get postcards and pictures of their children."

"I guess I can say I've been The Crimson psychologist," she says, mentioning that she often has to "make [students] go to class."

Woodley says she can "cope with kids of this age" because of her experience with her own two children, Pamela and Lance, who were teenagers when Woodley began working at The Crimson. She says her children, and now her grandchildren, continue to keep her young.