Looking back from the other side

Image above: Rows of galleys and pages. And yeah, most everyone smoked back then.

Sept 25, 1977. I was a year out of journalism school and working the first of my eventual five newspaper jobs. I was the newest and youngest person on staff. My job was working on the sports desk writing headlines and such in the morning and shooting assignments the rest of the day.

I started at the newspaper before I graduated and I’m sure I didn’t look a day over 14. I would go to a shoot and when I arrived the people often thought I was there to collect for their subscription.

But this September day was the last ‘hot type’ day for the paper, the last of its kind in the state. The NY Times was already transitioning as well. But we were a small-town newspaper.

‘Hot Type’ meant the type was formed from hot melted lead. It was late 19^th century technology. It was noisy, physically demanding, slow and a specialized craft.

It may have revolutionized newspapers in the late1880’s but was now disappearing fast across the country as the cleaner quieter faster computer-based ‘cold type’ took over. It was as much of a revolution as the change from film to digital.

Many of the ‘back shop’ men, all men of course, had been working with these linotype machines their whole working career. The machines were very old and often while one man would type another would have tools in hand to keep it working.

As someone typed a story into the linotype, each key sent the letter up into a matrix to cast lines of text from molten lead into metal slugs, lines of type one column wide. The slug would then slide back down, stacking up to create that story.  Each linotype had a long lead ingot or ‘pig’ hanging over a heated pot on the machine and slowly lower to melt it.  Each stack of slugs would then be placed into a ‘galley’ on a cart and the page would be assembled. At the end of the day all the type would be melted down and reformed into new lead bars.

The back shop would run ‘proof’ on galley section pages after assembled to look for mistakes. But those guys would always prefer you didn’t find a mistake. They didn’t like having to break open a galley and make corrections.

They wouldn’t normally run a proof on interior pages. In my sports desk job I was expected to go back and read the galley upside down and backwards to check for mistakes. The type was backwards and from the other side of the galley where I was allowed the type was upside-down as well. It’s surprising how often I was ‘accidentally’ kicked in the shins to keep me away. But I did learn to read upside down and backwards.

The galleys would eventually end up as curved metal pages that were wrapped onto the press.

When the pressmen assembled the whole thing and the presses cranked up the whole building would shudder. In the newsroom when the floor shook we all knew it was time to grab lunch and get started on tomorrow’s issue.

Some of the back shop men were able to transition to the new process. But there were some who just could not make the change and lost their jobs. It was a great early career lesson to me that change was inevitable. To succeed you have to embrace it.

One of the all-time great experiences is to stand at the end of a press watching the papers come off with a photo you shot hours before staring back from page one. I would often go back when I had a front page shot and watch. The press guys at first didn’t love having me hanging about but soon came to enjoy it when they saw how much it meant to me.

I count myself lucky to have experienced and documented that moment at the beginning of my career. And now it’s fun to look back from this end of my career.

If I made mistakes in my descriptions of the process forgive me. It’s been 49 years.

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