In 1977, the Houston Bureau was responsible for coverage across North America. As managing editor, it was my job to organize the bureau and beef up its news coverage. My staff of writers and editors in Houston rotated between assignments, working on English-language news and feature stories for . Many stories were rewritten, edited and translated to appear in sister publication, At the same time, the Houston staff also wrote stories for the company’s magazines, and

In 1977, computers were uncommon; telephone and teletype were the only way to communicate. The staff in Houston and Jeddah would write their initial story on a typewriter. The Houston Bureau had four teletype machines, several for incoming and several for outgoing stories. When a story was ready to send to Jeddah the reporter would sit at the teletype, type the story and transmit it to Jeddah, where it would print out on a teletype machine at the office, which at the time was near the old Jeddah Airport.

Another of my major responsibilities was to hire journalists who had just graduated from college, or graduated a year or so earlier, and had a little experience. They would be assigned to cover news and feature stories in Houston for from three to six months. If they showed potential, they would be transferred to Jeddah. If we hired a dozen reporters in Houston, only one or two would make it through the training period and be offered a job in Jeddah.

Everything ran smoothly at the Houston Bureau, until 1979, when the editor-in-chief of and came to town on a six-month assignment. At that time I showed him how the bureau operated and how reporters were trained and prepared for their transition to Jeddah.

Six months later, when that editor returned to Jeddah, he talked to management there and asked me to transfer to Jeddah. Neither I nor my wife Sabia had ever traveled out of the US very often. We had traveled to Mexico once or twice on newspaper assignments, and vacationed in the Bahamas — that was it! Luckily, of course, as part of my duties at the Houston Bureau Sabia and I attended many official Saudi events in Houston and were comfortable with the culture. It was still a big decision to have to pull up roots and leave our families in the US — but we accepted the challenge.

We arrived at the old Jeddah airport on a hot summer night and were greeted by the editor-in-chief, who I had worked with in Houston. He proceeded to drive us to a company-owned apartment and said he would see me at work the next morning.

In the morning I took a cab to the old building to begin work. I never figured out if the building was located in the parking lot of the Al-Sawani Department Store; or if the department store was located in the parking lot. Both buildings were on the same parcel and it was very convenient to be able to walk down the street to the market.

Now my role had been reversed, as managing editor of the Houston Bureau I had to make sure my staff sent news and feature stories to Jeddah every morning; now when I came to work I would check the teletype machine, cut off the long rolls of stories sent in by our bureaus in Houston, Washington and London, and give them to sub-editors.

The sub-editors would cut the teletype text into individual stories and then, using tape, piece each story together. Using a manual typewriter, they would write headlines, tape the headline on the story and then edit the story using a lead pencil. After the story had gone through the sub-editing procedure it would come to the editor, who would double-check the material, make any necessary grammatical or headline changes, and he would slip the story into a pneumatic tube which took the material downstairs to be typeset.

An hour or so later, after the story had been typeset, a proofing copy would be brought upstairs and that version would go through the same procedure. Sub-editors and the editor would double-check the typeset version, it would go back into the pneumatic tube, changes made and the layout team would complete the final layout of the newspaper.

The front page of the newspaper would usually be completed at midnight and everyone working in the building could feel the entire building begin to shudder as the presses began to roll. The day’s work done, everyone would go home.

Every morning at 9 a.m. there would be a “budget meeting” attended by reporters and editors, and at which I would receive a telex outlining the stories the Houston staff was preparing for the following day. We would map out a plan of which stories would appear in which section of the newspaper and what important news was happening. When the late-morning call-to-prayer came, everyone would go home, have lunch, take a nap, and head back to work at about 4 p.m.

Going home for lunch was always traumatic ritual. When I came home for lunch Sabia would have the morning issue of spread out on the table, where she had circled every typographical error in the newspaper with a permanent marker. After about a year she stopped that routine, not sure if she found something better to do or if we got the errors under control.

As newcomers to Saudi Arabia, for both Sabia and me, our day-to-day experiences were exciting and I often wrote about them in the Family section of We often accompanied friends to Red Sea beaches all around Jeddah and Makkah, where we would camp overnight and swim in the pristine waters. Sabia could not swim, but managed to snorkel out to the underwater reefs allowing the salty buoyant water to carry her with the current.

I would often write weekly columns describing our experiences: Sabia’s first visit downtown Jeddah to the souq; visits to the appliance and electrical visits to the beach.

Sabia fit right in. She was the first blond-haired, blue-eyed American in our neighborhood and every trip on her own was an adventure. She heard many stories before coming to the Kingdom and had imagined how horrible her lifestyle would be living in Jeddah and was pleasantly surprised by what she found.

She enjoyed traveling downtown with many friends on the bus and in family cars from which she would shop in Bab Makkah. She enjoyed lunch and dinners with our friends at their homes and attending weddings and one-year birthday’s of our friend’s children.

When our tenure to Jeddah came to an end it was a very sad experience. I was transferred back to the US, where I continued to cover assignments and write for for several years. We missed Jeddah and our friends there (and still do) and had no idea we would ever return to the Kingdom.

In 1988, our life brightened dramatically when I was hired to work as a staff writer and editor with Saudi Aramco in Dhahran. We returned to Saudi Arabia in August, exactly a dozen years since I first joined This time, however, we were accompanied by our 10-month-old son, Chris. While we were living in Jeddah many of our Saudi friends often urged us to have a child. The first thing we did after our return to the Kingdom was to travel from Dhahran to Jeddah, where we showed Chris to these friends and he was blessed by one of our dear friends.

We lived in Dhahran for 16 years, where I worked for Saudi Aramco until I retired in 2004. Our most recent departure from Saudi Arabia was even harder. We added many friends to those we made in Jeddah — we miss our long-time friends and would love to return to the Kingdom, but realize that now our return is even less likely.

I enjoyed and cherished all the years I worked for Saudi-owned companies in the US and in Saudi Arabia.

Who knows, in 2011, Chris will graduate from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He plans to go on for a medical degree — and perhaps might work in Saudi Arabia.

— Dave Kaiser joined in 1977 as managing editor of the Houston Bureau; in 1980, he transferred to Jeddah, where he was editor of in 1983 he was managing editor of the national bureau in Washington, D.C.; since 1984 he has been a contributing writer, who submitted stories while working in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and from the US after 2004 when he and his family returned to the US.