I began my career in journalism as an apprentice printer at the weekly Bristol Enterprise, working after school and during vacations, sweeping floors and melting lead for the Linotype machines, and learning how to set hand type for the headlines. That required learning how to read upside-down and backward.
The Linotype machine, operated by Warren Sleeper, Frieda Kuplin, and Pearle Gray, would lower “pigs” of lead into a heated pot that melted the lead and allowed it to flow over a set of matrices, the molds for the letters and punctuation marks that had been selected by the Linotype operator from the 90 keys on the keyboard. Black keys on the left were for small letters, white keys on the right were for capital letters, and blue keys in the center were for numbers, punctuation marks, spaces, small caps, and special characters. The matrices would fall into what was known as an assembler, forming a line of type that served as the mold for the lead slug.
The individual slugs, along with any hand-set headlines, would go into a galley (tray) for proofing, which was done by running an inked roller over the type, then putting a paper over it and running a clean roller over the top. Proofreaders then would be able to read the results and determine whether there were any errors.
Photographs and illustrations required special preparation, meaning a trip to Franklin’s Journal-Transcript with an envelope full of photos that they would convert into plastic reverse images. Back at the Enterprise, those photos would be mounted onto blocks of wood and inserted among the blocks of type before the whole business was clamped tight in the “chase” and wheeled over to the press.
Victor Field, whose family owned the paper, taught me how to mount photos, make proofs, and, eventually, to do the darkroom work.
Watching Dud Gray and Melvin Defosses run the cylinder presses, I finally got my chance to print the paper, first on the smaller Pony press, which printed two pages at a time, then on the larger four-sheet press. It took some coordination with the machine’s rhythm to flip some air under each sheet, feed it into the grippers as the cylinder spun around, and throw the impression lever to allow the cylinder, as it carried the sheet, to press it firmly across the chase holding the type as the platen went in and out. The cylinder would continue around and release that sheet, ready for the next one. If not timed right, or if more than one sheet of paper got under the gripper, the paper would crumple and it would be necessary to stop the press, peel off the paper, making sure to get all the pieces, wipe down the cylinder, and make it ready to start up again.
Offset printing was fairly new, and the Enterprise had both offset and letterpress machines for the printing of letterheads, envelopes, and booklets — as well as the annual Bristol Rotary Club calendar that included birthdays and holidays. Printing the calendar meant many trips around the table, collating the individual months. Then there were the dreaded town reports that meant hours of setting type, proofreading, and many late-night printing sessions before they, too, were collated and trimmed on the giant paper-cutter.
It took a while for me to learn all those processes, but it was a wonderful learning experience.
Eventually, I would learn phototypesetting, which replaced hot metal with “cold type” — photo paper on which a light flashing through a filmstrip containing individual letters took the place of setting lines of type. The photo paper would be pasted down on “flats” to lay out the paper.
Then came a chance to write stories, take photographs, and edit copy. By the time I left The Enterprise, cold type was on its way out as computers transformed printing once again.
It was years later, while I was serving as publisher and editor of The Telegram in Franklin, that I first came up with the idea of a News Café, where people would be able to peruse the daily news while sipping coffee and eating pastries. I had in mind a physical café on the patio outside the newspaper office. It never happened, and the other newspapers where I would work — The Citizen, the Union Leader, and the Laconia Daily Sun — never took up the idea when I proposed it there. It would not happen until after I had established the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Liberty Independent Media Project and changed the concept to a virtual café.
The Liberty Project was intended as a means to present news stories that largely got ignored by the traditional press. I thought the stories about people overcoming adversity, about cultural events and trends, and about forgotten history would serve an unmet need, and that the project could be funded through donations, sponsorships, and the sale of the videos produced, as well as the sale of news content to newspapers that had been forced to cut back on their reporting staff.
Today, paid subscriptions to the News Café are the main supporters of the Liberty Independent Media Project, with much of the other support having fallen off. That is why “subscribe” buttons appear on the daily posts — trying to persuade more free subscribers to convert their subscriptions to paid ones.
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I love this. I remember that when you did this very well. You didn’t mention Dartmouth in your journey though. That was an important step.