Reading backwards, pouring lead, hanging on a Star

Comparing notes with other ink-stained wretches 

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

My first paying job in the newspaper business was folding the Dolores Star as it came off the press when I was six years old. It didn’t pay much – unless you can count the experience and education.

A penny per paper comes to mind, but it may have been less. Even at that rate, with two or three others (usually bigger, faster, stronger, smarter) working the same 700-paper circulation, you were lucky to come away with a buck from the afternoon. I wasn’t in it for the money.
Longtime southwest Colorado resident Ellis Miller recently related to me similar experience, recalling the tools of the trade at the time.
“My uncle Tom Johnson was the owner/editor of the Dolores Star prior to the Pleasants. It was located in the brick building you mentioned and Shorty Lobato was the "printer's devil." I used to be fascinated by the Linotype machine. Uncle Tom typed with two fingers, very quickly and efficiently, I might add. I had the job of going to the newspaper office after school and folding papers. My tools were glycerin to put on my fingers to make handling the paper easier and a "bone" which was just that, a flat piece of bone, maybe 5" x 2" that was used to crease the papers. It was an exciting environment, indeed.”
But other jobs reared their ugly head from time-to-time in the busy paper environment. My long-time favorite was the scratch pad business. You literally could (with limits) decide how much you wanted to make, in a very short period of time.
Making scratch pads, I determined was an art. In the days before 3M came up with the “Post It,” we would salvage whatever paper came off trim-to-fit jobs and clamp it down in a nice, even-edged stack, trim an even tighter edge, then slather one-side with the bright green or red plastic padding compound. Then let it cure a day or so, and usually trim the stack again in the paper cutter and separate. The paper cutter, which was back near the rope-driven elevator platform, was a much-feared piece of equipment with a long lever, a tightening wheel-driven clamp, fence and a razor-sharp knife-edge. Given the right circumstances, you could of whacked off pretty much any body part if you weren’t careful. Being cautious and not trying to cut something too thin produced the desired product usually, resulting in … Viola! “New & Improved” scratch pads.
But the manufacturing process was only part of the fun for me. I liked the sales process. Remember these were the days before electronic calculators; so just about every business scribbled out calculations for sales tax, or used them to determine how many rolls of roofing to sell to cover seven squares of roof, or to draw pictures of the part they were trying to order.
When you had gathered the right amount of various sized pads, in various colors, thicknesses, paper weights, etc… it was time throw them in a box and hit the street.
I sold stacks of white 5 ¼ “ x 8 ½” pads to the hardware store, bundles of smaller pads at the garage where my Dad worked, heaps of scratch pads to the grocery stores, loads at the Forest Service building, and I was just getting started.
Another job at the shop that I eventually learned, was labeling the papers for the mail. Much more difficult and mechanized than it is today, the label machine usually required an ability to hold your face right to get the labeler to work properly. It had a series of hot type labels set in ‘stick’ of type that rode in a carriage above, and a gummed roll of two-inch-wide paper that would feed through, cut, and place the semi-wet label on the papers. You had to “air the papers out” a bit so the labels wouldn’t get knocked off until they were dry. It was a major pain in the butt.
Near the top of the food chain, at least in the Dolores Star office, was actually running the linotype, something that I never did more than casually. I remember that Dan Pleasant was considered the ace at the board there, perhaps ostensibly for his skill and ability to avoid “Widows and Orphans.”
Linotype keyboards were originally arranged by how frequent a particular letter would come up. There was a key for each letter in the alphabet: for upper case, and lower case, and a bunch of extra keys for numbers and symbols.
The first two vertical columns on the left side of the board read “ETAOIN SHRDLU.” When the person running the beast screwed up, it wasn’t easy to go back to delete it. You had to finish the line before tossing the slug and re-keying a new one. Because the bad line was going to be tossed back in the pot, the industry habit developed to do what was called a "run down", creating this nonsense phrase to signify the error. It was supposed to be easy to see a “run down” by those putting the pages together — but not always.
Thus, the practice sometimes resulted in the phrase accidentally getting in to print, instead of being tossed when the stick of type went to the compositors and eventually to lock-up. The error happened frequently enough in hot type days that “ETAOIN SHRDLU” eventually appeared in most dictionaries.
Several years ago I enjoyed discussions with another "ink-stained wretch" while comparing notes about the "old days" of hot type. The weathered newspaper veteran seemed to enjoy it as well.
"It was refreshing to hear words like "Elrod, Ludlow, type lice and one of my favorites, pouring pigs," noted Rich Leinbach, Director of Publishing Systems for the Goshen News in Goshen, Indiana. For the uninitiated, a "pig" was a lead casting used in Linotype typesetting machines. And, on hearing of our common reference points, he told the following story.
"This brings me to a fond memory of pig pouring, back in the late 70s. I was fresh out of high school and although our newspaper had already converted to offset, we still used a decent amount of hot type in our commercial printing department.
"It was late one day and I had the job of firing up the lead furnace to pour a fresh batch of pigs. I had the pot filled with molten lead, had skimmed off the dross and was just beginning to pour the pigs when the valve broke, in the open position.
"Needless to say, gravity took over and the entire pot of lead became one giant pig on the floor, in a matter of a few minutes.
"To make matters even worse, just after my masterpiece had cooled into a solid mass, the entire staff of "Big Wigs" came parading through, after a late meeting. There I stood, pry bar in hand, trying to get rid of the evidence before anyone could find out. Ah . . . those WERE the good old days."

Photo information:

1. A smaller job press, with circular platen, used to print cards.

2. Engraving art to drop in layouts. Assemble pieces of metal type, were gathered into words and lines using a Linotype, or even hand-picked and collected on a composing stick, which are then transferred to a galley,  before being locked into a forme and printed.

3.  The label machine usually required an ability to hold your face right to get the labeler to work properly.

Hart Lee on the Hardware Store in the Star

The Best of Hart's Stuff from Rico

By Hart Lee,
The Dolores Star Press
copyright, 1968,
compiled, edited and published
by Lawrence and Marilyn Pleasant
MCMLXVIII
From the Files of the Dolores Star
(also known as The Splatter)

from Friday, August 16, 1963

Did you ever go into a store or someplace of business and and come out with more than you bargained for — Now for instance take Taylor's Hardware store, we have been trading there off and on for the last twenty or thirty years. Any time you go in there the first thing you see is an old beat up water bucket setting the front counter slushing over with hospitality — been setting in the same place ever since old Sy Perkins bought his wife her first two piece under ware. Then the two pouch hounds which are the trade mark of the joint are always found asleep in front of the nail rack — and should they be missen, you'll find the outfit out of gear and running on the rocks.
Sometimes you just drift in the place don't want to buy a thing, then you find a comfortable chair and watch television which is turned on as soon as the janitor shows up in the morning until its time to lock the doors, and you'll always find somebody around that's got time to shoot the bull for awhile. In fact nobody is in very much of a hurry. Take your time and live.
A lot of times you'll go in and ask for something — say a ram rod for a 10 gauge shot gun, well it might take a little while to find 'em but its a bet they have a dozen of the things when they do run them down.
And if they don't have what you want they'll grab a want book and order it for you whether it is a pound of roofing nails or a trainload of combines — Just a darn nice place to trade.

The last devil in Dolores

Practicing the craft the old fashioned way

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Getting in a rut has been described as nothing but a grave with both ends kicked out.

But slowing down, taking a look around, remembering …

It is an inexpensive, entertaining, comforting and valuable exercise in my game.

Among my earliest memories, oddly enough, are times spent in a newspaper office. I say ‘odd’ because, I have, for the most part, spent pretty much of my entire life in one newspaper office or another. Given that experience, you would think something else, other than ‘the business,’ would stand out in my collective recollection.

But the ‘ink in veins’ description is real. And ‘the business’ has changed so much in the last 45 years, I can barely recognize the newspaper office of my misspent youth.

When I talk with most current practitioners of the craft, their eyes glaze over, and a blank stare appears when I start to discuss the world of burning-hot lead, pouring pigs, the clang and crunch of the linotype, of ‘turtles,’ chase, and quoins.

But that is the world of the first newspaper I came in contact with.

The first time I set foot in the Dolores Star, I might have been all of three years old. My next-door neighbors, Larry and Marilyn Pleasant owned “The Star” at that time and their son Andy, was a few months younger than I.

Andy and I played in the attic balcony office, somewhat out of danger of running our tiny fingers through the machinery in busy office below. The Star then, was in between John Lambert’s (the one-legged blacksmith) and Mary Akin’s little shop, but with growing job printing and the tendency for the Pleasants to collect stuff, things were pretty tightly crammed in there. A huge, white, clapboard cabinet contained a few toys in the overhead office but the real entertainment was below.

As the business grew, (and the amount of stuff collected), it became increasingly necessary to find a bigger home for Dolores Star.

The Exon Mercantile Building, built by old man Exon shortly after the town moved up from Big Bend in 1891, was just across what we called Main Street then, and on the corner.

It was a typical turn-of-century, brick building, with decorative cornice work and wood floors, an office up front that looked out on the sidewalk though large windows, and a massive open room with wooden shelves that ran up the walls all the way to the 12-foot pressed tin ceilings. There was another long room extending the length of the building on the side behind the office; and wooden locker-like storage rooms near the back of the open room. Behind them was my favorite ‘old building’ feature of all time — the rope and pulley-powered platform elevator to the basement. Out the back door on the downriver side, was another room that had been the old smoke house. A barn and assorted sheds filled out the property toward the back.

The move of “The Star” building to what formerly constituted Exon Mercantile was quite a deal, as I remember it. Linotype machines, and presses, and other heavy printing equipment rolled across the street on iron pipe, that was moved from the back of the machines, up to the front. Tons of iron inched forward across the street, pushed and pulled by straining men and a few women. Amazingly, I think moving the big stuff took less than a week. But for years afterward, additional items (some involving the newspaper or printing business, but much of it, local historic arcana) continued to collect in the sprawling buildings at the corner of Fourth and Main.

I remember everything from ore buckets to Victrolas; abandoned post offices, to entire antique telephone circuits; sheep crooks, mineral samples, old bottles, insulators, WWII scuba gear, old magazines, old-fashioned irons, eye glasses, dentistry tools … and the list went on. It was a virtual ‘valuable junk’ paradise spread out over nearly half a city block and interspersed with various-era, still-functioning, newspaper and printing equipment. I loved the place.

 Time spent there was a ‘living history’ project, as they still produced the paper on one of the last remaining hot type operations in the state. They still etched photo plates on wood blocks in the meat locker turned dark room. Several linotypes still clanked and clunked, and burning lead burrowed its way into the wooden floorboards. The world of chase and “turtle” and “hell box” and “pouring pigs” was still alive as it had been at the turn of the century. And I was the closest thing to a ‘printer’s devil’ as 1970 had ever seen.

Photo Information:
1. The flat-bed press at the Dolores Star with 'Shorty' Lobato feeding the maw and Marilyn Pleasant catching papers.
2. Marilyn cranking out copy, later to be set by linotype, as she practices the craft.
3. Even when printed, the paper still needed to get delivered, hopefully without incident. Marilyn and two of the youngest and last devils in Dolores, wait for resolution of a small Star crisis, at the time.
4.  Some of the living history of the place included at least one abandoned post office as Bill Bowden and Larry Pleasant demonstrate.

Photos courtesy of Tim Pleasant.

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