Old romance thrives as time presses on
Editor’s note: This column originally published May 21, 1996
I learned about newspapers from the top to the bottom because I loved newspapers. I worked in a press room as easily as I later worked in a city room. I learned the composing room before I really learned composing.
Love is about romance. Newspapers were always romantic even when they were cynical, brutal, loud and even wrong. The presses - the sheer mechanics of daily newspapering - made the romance as fresh as valentines in the morning.
The heart of the romance is in the sound of the press when a paper starts its run. Pressmen in some places still scurry around the bowels of the beast with little paper hats in their heads to keep the ink from soiling their hair and to keep hair from getting entangled in the rollers.
Some people - like me - think the presses sing when they are rolling, making sounds akin to undersea whales. Streams of paper roll up and down through the beast and the ink slapped on the blank sheets is dried instantly by rows of gas-fed flames. (That’s what they mean when they say a thing is “hot off the press.”)
The romance is also in the click-clack chatter of old Linotype machines in rows worked by the operators, all of whom knew more about good English writing than the best columnist in the best daily. Ask them; they’d tell you.
The Linotype was literally a machine that melted lead down and created a “line of type” by pressing the soft lead with slots of letters. It was created at the end of the last century, and it nearly lasted to the end of this one. It was and is as gawky a machine as you’ve ever seen, sort of what Big Bird is to a regular bird.
I thought about it today because Associated Press carried a nice little feature story on the wires about an old-fashioned print shop in Montpelier, Vt., which was shutting down, killed by computers.
Jim Sheridan, great-grandson of the shop’s founder, said the business opened in 1903.
“I took it as far as I can. It’s the computer that’s stealing all my work.”
The story led me to think of one of the nice touches in the new Daily Herald building on Algonquin Road. Someone had the foresight to put a Linotype machine in the downstairs lobby. It is a nice beast and it is a nice reminder that all newspapers in the modern age were founded on romance and on gimcrack solutions to mechanical problems of production and distribution. Romance is about circumventing the reality of things with the promise of things only imagined.
I worked as a printer’s devil and proofreader for Wicklander Printing Co. in Chicago when I was putting myself through college. I played cards at lunch hour on “stones” with printers and operators and molded lead bars for the Linotype machines. I learned enough to appreciate the men who knew how to make the words into lead into forms into pages into printed matter.
I still walk through the Sun-Times building downtown on my way to and fro and still pause at the window wall to look down at the great presses and the men who make them work and still wear little paper hats. Romance. Prick me and I would bleed ink, not blood.
The modern newspaper has become computerized, and a place like the Daily Herald can do magic tricks with multiple editions for many readerships. I’d be the last guy against progress.
But I’d be the last guy against remembering the song of the presses and the minuets of the Linotype machines and the anvil chorus from a half-dozen makeup men pounding a page of lead down into the hollow of a chase on a stone.
The music plays on with different songs now. Wicklander thrives with its offset presses and computers down on South State Street while their old quarters - and the quarters of hundreds of print shops with extra-strong floors to take the load of tons of lead - has been transformed into Printer’s Row on Harrison Street, one of the best of the hip new south Loop neighborhoods.
Jim Sheridan in Vermont told the AP he has taken computer courses, wants to become literate in the new medium and that his father has promised to set him up in business with a new computer. Good for him. Don’t let nostalgia blind you to reality.
On the other hand, don’t let the era of the old presses pass without a sigh or a little wave goodbye.