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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Blame it on the Russians

Other factors likely share some of the blame for the collapse of the fur industry here

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Some folks blame the Russians for the end of the fur trade in the Tri-Lakes area.
“In 1946 the fox farms were a good thriving business,” wrote Lucille Lavelett. “The United States made a trade agreement with Russia; Russia traded their furs to the U.S. for a metal we had, to be used to harden steel. The fur market soon became flooded with Russian furs. There was no sale for U.S. furs, and all the fur farmers had to get out of the business.”
In “Monument’s Faded Neighbor Communities and Its Folk Lore,” Lavelett noted that an area off of Baptist Road was once one of the largest and best fox farms in the west. The farm, established by a man by the name of Shelby in the 1930s, was first managed by Dave Gibbs. Gibbs later owned his own fox operation east of Monument on Highway 105.
Famous fur farmers flourished all over the Tri-Lakes area in the middle part of the last century. Jack Duckels, Colorado’s largest mink rancher during the height of the state’s fur industry in the 1960s, got his start in the Palmer Lake area.
“Duckels first raised turkeys and foxes near Palmer Lake in the 1920s. In 1932, he brought three pairs of foxes to today’s First Avenue and Havana Street – far enough away from Denver, he supposed, not to bother anyone with the smell,” according William J. Convery in a recent edition of Colorado Heritage, the state historical society’s magazine.
“To supplement his thriving fox business, Duckels added mink in 1933. The small sideline eventually eclipsed all other operations on his ranch. By 1961, the Aurora rancher employed twenty full-time hands to help feed the daily ration of some 15,000 pounds of meat byproducts, fish, cereal and fresh horsemeat to his 20,000 hungry charges,” Convery said.
According to Lavelett, the Baptist Road fox farm had eight units of fenced pens that accommodated 3,500 breeding foxes. “In 1937, the farm shipped 200,000 furs to eastern markets.”
Other factors might share some of the blame for the collapse of the fur industry here. Rising social criticism (Doris Day, the star of “A Touch of Mink”, turned animal rights activist led the Hollywood charge), the sluggish economy, and the advent of synthetic fur all were factors. But many blame the Russians.
“The rise of foreign competition ironically demonstrated how domestic fur producers had sown the seeds of their own demise. In the heady days of the 1950s and early 1960s, American fur farmers had gladly supplied foreign breeders, trained those breeders’ interns, and sold them breeding stock. Jack Duckels, for one, made extensive business contacts in Japan, Norway, and the Soviet Union. In the 1960s he traveled to Soviet trade shows and invited Russian merchandisers back to the United States to tour his own farm. Shadowed by FBI agents, the Soviets learned the ins and outs of mink ranching and signed lucrative contracts to buy Duckel’s brood minks,” wrote Convery.

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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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