The craft: Passed on from one generation to another

Bound to be musical because he was brought up around a piano

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Fifty or sixty years ago, you could wander into a newspaper office and take up a craft that was pretty much same as it had been for 150 years.
Now, as noted in a recent CBS Sunday Morning story, there is really only one Saguache Crescent, run by Dean Coombs, last of the hot-type publishers.
"The press itself dates to about 1915 -- about as long as the Coombs family has been publishing the Crescent, every week, since 1917. The same intricate choreography -- perfected and passed on, one generation to the next," according to CBS.
"They hooked my baby carriage to the back of that press," Coombs said. "The carriage would go back and forth," rocking him to sleep.
"To put it another way, Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain could walk into the Crescent office and go right to work. The Linotype machine might be a novelty to Franklin (And Twain lost heavily with an investment in a competing machine which, he claimed, “could do everything a human printer can do except get drunk on Saturday night,”) but the cases of hand-set type would be familiar, as would the mutton quads, rules, dingbats, platen pins, chases, quoins, galley trays, and proof press," wrote the late Ed Quillen, way back in 1995.
"I don't actually think there might even be another newspaper in the world using Linotype," Coombs said. "There are none on the United States."
Another paper I am familiar with, of course, The Courier, had a hot type history. The Courier, which is a direct descendant of several papers from Teller County, was started by one Ernest Chapin Gard, who also founded The Palmer Lake Herald, and the Monument Register, as well as about 20 other papers around the country, 11 of them in Colorado.
Gold’s discovery in the Cripple Creek District precipitated Gard and his partner’s race to become the first newspaper in Cripple Creek. He pulled out all the stops to beat William McRea by four days, publishing the first edition of the Cripple Creek Crusher on Dec. 4, 1891.  Descendant of the Crusher and other consolidations, The Cripple Creek Gold Rush still published until 2007 when it became incorporated into Pikes Peak Courier View, of Woodland Park. It is now simply the Pikes Peak Courier.
Gard, and partner W.S. Neal, celebrated the feat by printing in gilded ink — a layer of gold over the regular ink — for the inaugural edition. McRea, four days late and perhaps more than a dollar short, sported vermilion headlines that said “New Gold Field.”

To confuse matters a bit more, the Geddes family armed with a loan from the Golden Cycle Corporation,  Kenneth and Margaret, bought the daily Times-Record of the district on 

April 1, 1941. Descendant of the Crusher and the product of consolidations of the Victor Record and the Cripple Creek Times, the Geddes closed on the deal, and then had to turn around and get an eight-page paper out that afternoon.

"We went to the office the morning after we settled the deal and realized we have to fill up eight pages in time to distribute by 5 p.m.," wrote Margaret Geddes in "Gold Camp Indian Summer."

"We discovered how our lives would be changed on the first day. We met the force, which included a foreman, two Linotype operators, two men for general shop work — and then there was Freddie., who admitted he had a difficult time with second grade," Geddes wrote.

"Freddie had a little boy, Eugene, who also had trouble with second grade. Eugene was bound to be musical, his daddy said, 'since he was brought up around a piano.'"

My own history is reflected similarly. Having grown up watching the hot-type Dolores Star being put to bed every week, I was bound to be inked-stained, as I was brought up around a Linotype. The craft, it seems, is passed on from one generation to the next.
And then there is the Dolores Star.

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.

Today, a rusted Linotype parked on the sidewalk, still calls attention to a craft, almost forgotten.

 

 

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Blast in to the past

“Language is the archives of history”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

People in the newspaper industry may be predisposed to care more about language and usage than the average Joe or Jane.

I consider myself one of those people — particularly as it pertains to obscure language.

Some of our ink-stained terminology of yesteryear and historic industry jargon is in danger of being lost forever because we have abandoned many of the processes from which it spawned.

As a personal contribution to historic preservation efforts, I feel it is my duty as an aging veteran of hot type production and photochemical typesetting to pass on some of my favorite slang and jargon.

To that end, the following obscure terms and definitions offer a glimpse into the strange, twisted world of mid-20th century backshops and printer dens of my misspent youth.


From the hot type pressroom:

Form — Type matter of a page or several pages ready for the press.

Chase or Turtle — Steel frame in which a form is made up.

Printers furniture — Any piece of metal or wood used to make up a form.

Wrong-face — Type of a different font than is desired.

Dirty case — Type matter in which wrong-face letters appear.

Pi — Tangled mess of type.

Hell box — Receptacle for type and furniture that is to be melted up.

Quoin — Metal wedge used to lock up type in a form.

Stickful — Amount of type, about 2 inches, that can be set in a composing stick used in hand composition.

Leads — Metal strips, 2 points thick, used for spacing between lines of type.

Heel nick — “Feet” attached to the base of handset type that allows a typesetter, by feeling, to find the type’s bottom.


From the newsroom:

Boiled story — A rewrite of a longer story condensed to fit later editions.

Local room — The part of the newsroom devoted to gathering and writing news of the city in which the paper is published (now often called the city room).

Telegraph room — The part of the newsroom devoted to gathering and writing news from other areas of the state, nation or world (now called the wire room).

Fudge edition or plate — A printing method that uses a different roller on the press to print extra editions that contain late-breaking news, final scores or stock market statistics.

Ready prints or patent insides — A cost-savings method in which publishers or editors acquired from syndicates newsprint that already had one side of each sheet filled with feature articles and general material. Local news was printed on the blank side.

Widows and orphans — A widow is when a paragraph ends on the first line at the top of a page or column, leaving perhaps only a single word or syllable. An orphan refers to a paragraph beginning at the last line of a page or column.

Butcher — A copy editor lacking skill.

Bulldog — The early edition of the newspaper.


From headline writers:

Decks — The several parts or layers of a headline.

Banks — Less prominent decks between display decks.

Crossline — One-line headline across a column.

Dropline — Deck of several lines, italicized.

From graphics and photo desk:

Wood cuts — Pictures laboriously carved by hand in hardwood blocks; until the 1880s these were the only illustrations available for newspaper use.

Half-tone — Blackness of an impression, broken into contrasting tones by use of fine dots created through a screening in the photo process.

Ben Day process — Named after a New York printer, this is a printing method that imitates half-tone work in the background of line etchings by means of a special film that creates a stippled effect.

Mortises — Holes cut through plates for inserting type or smaller cuts.


Names for various type sizes:

Microscopique — 2.5-point type

Excelsior — 3-point type

Agate — 5.5-point type

Brevier — 8-point type

Bourgeois — 9-point type

Long Primer — 10-point type

Small Pica — 11-point type

Pica — 12-point type

English — 14-point type

Paragon — 20-point type

Canon — 48-point type


Phototypesetting composing rooms:

Hot board — Used to dry photo paper.

Ticker tape — Pulled off the wire feed and fed into a phototypesetter for Associated Press and United Press International stories.

Wheel — A typesetting device upon which flexible film-like strips of type were placed. The wheel would spin into position to highlight a selected letter. Light beamed through the film-like material to burn the letter on photosensitive paper.

Multirule — A slide rule-like tool used to measure type used in copy and headlines.

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On type lice and pouring pigs

"Madame, we are the press. You know our power. We fix all values. We set all standards. Your entire future depends on us." — Jean Giraudoux, The Mad Woman of Chaillot (1945)

I enjoyed recent discussions with another "ink-stained wretch" on 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."

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Twain on risk vs. return in tech investing

Well-known author invested as much as $300,000 in compositor before pulling the plug

“Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.” __ Mark Twain

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

When considering printing technology, no one knew those risks better than Mark Twain. His pet project, the Paige Compositor, nearly sent him and his family tumbling into bankruptcy and never did see mass production. But the former printer’s devil would never give up on the idea of using new inventions to enhance the presentation of the written word.
He would have been awe-struck with the possibilities of news aggregators, interactive novels, and new and improved display technology. But he most certainly would have wanted to get in on the ground floor of the most promising of the lot. And he would have promoted it vigorously.
“All other inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton gins sewing machines, Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses, Arkwright’s frames – all toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and in the far lead of human inventions,” wrote Twain in letter to his brother Orion, in 1889.
The Paige Compositor, an automatic-typesetting machine invented by James W. Paige, was designed to save time in the printing process. The well-known author invested as much as $300,000 in it before pulling the plug on the project.
“Though the Paige Compositor was faster than the Linotype, its 18,000 parts were prone to malfunction. Paige’s invention exhibited superior technological achievement, but its price and temperamental nature made it unattractive to a business world that had already embraced the Linotype. Still, it is regarded today as one of the finest examples of nineteenth century mechanical engineering,” notes The Mark Twain House & Museum, where the only remaining one in existence resides in the basement. It has never been taken apart since it was loaned to the museum by the Merganthaler Linotype Company and installed there in 1958, for fear it may be impossible to put together again.
In addition to his investment in the compositor, Twain is also credited with writing the first novel in America to be written on a typewriter. Twain, in his autobiography remembered that first as the manuscript for “Tom Sawyer” in 1874 but typewriter historian Darryl Rehr holds that it was “Life on the Mississippi” in 1882. Regardless, the Remington Typewriter Company seized the opportunity to drop his name to promote its product for years following the disclosure in his autobiography.
The Twain (Clemens) House in Hartford Connecticut was one of the first to have a telephone in that city and revered author was known to pal around with eccentric inventor of alternating current, Nikola Tesla.
“I have just seen the drawing and description of an electrical machine lately patented by Mr. Tesla and sold to Westinghouse Company, which will revolutionize the whole electric business of the world,” wrote Twain in his notebook in 1888.
Later Twain visited Tesla’s lab and they both frequented The Players Club in New York and attended parties with contemporaries such as a Teddy Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, and John Muir.
Tesla’s inventions, of course, have made possible some of the wondrous developments of the modern day. Like a “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Twain already saw such possibilities. But, as he was also fond of mentioning, “The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.”
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Recalling hot type

Talking with someone that lived this history

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

In talking with Ken Geddes about hot type newspapers and history years ago, I suddenly felt twinge of familiarity, a sense that I had been here before —“déjà vu all over again,” to paraphrase Yogi Berra.
I also realized at the same time that I was talking with someone that lived this history.
Maybe he was seeing if my story held up as well.
When I told him that I grew up in the “hot type environment” of the old Dolores Star, he asked a question about the form that held the type together for a page.
“What’s that called?
I mumbled something about a “turtle” or several pages being on a form, and switched gears to the linotype. It has been 30 years at least since my “printer’s furniture” and “hell box” days, and many of those years confused and immersed in a “cold type” soup. Mentioning that an old linotype from the forerunner of Gold Rush newspaper still resides in the town hall, I think, effectively deflected suspicion.
Geddes knew the Gold Rush newspaper— before it was the Gold Rush. His mother and father owned and ran the Cripple Creek Times-Record (which later became the Gold Rush) for about ten years starting on April 1, 1941. They purchased the paper from Bill Kyner and it was still a daily at that time.
“We went to the office the morning after we had settled the deal and realized we had to fill up eight pages in time to distribute by 5 p.m.,” wrote his mother Margaret Whitehill Geddes in her book “Gold Camp Indian Summer.”
“We discovered how our lives would be changed on the first day,” noted Margaret Geddes. Ken’s dad (also Kenneth) had been superintendent of schools for the Cripple Creek and Victor school district for a number of years prior to buying the paper.
“We met with the force, which included a foreman, two linotype operators, two men for general shop work — and then there was Freddie. The years go by we still fondly remember and quote Freddie, who admitted he had a difficult time with second grade.
“Freddie had a little boy, Eugene, who also had trouble with second grade. Eugene was bound to be musical, his daddy said, since he was ‘brought up around a piano,’” wrote Margaret Geddes.
When they shifted from a daily to a weekly, in the early part of World War II, they naturally faced complaints about the change.
“I remember Charley Searles, an old friend who had been an early mayor of Cripple Creek saying, ‘Well, a fellow has to die by Wednesday to make the news!’ Soon, however, people got used to having things ‘rationed’ for the war effort, accepted this as just another ‘sacrifice.’”
Ken himself, who for a time between his freshman and sophomore year at Colorado College, helped in the back shop. So chances are that he knew the answer to the question I mentioned earlier.
After reading his mother’s account of running the paper, I was tempted to give him a quick call with the answer.
“I believe it was a CHASE,” I would say identifying the steel frame in which a hot type printer form is made up. It is all coming back to me.
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