Photograph courtesy of the Los Gatos Museum collection
The 'Los Gatos Mail-News' occupied the second unit from the left in the Beckwith Building, seen here during a 1892 Admissions Day parade.
'If you expect to rate as a gentleman, don't expectorate around here." Such was a sign over the wash basin in Andrew Falch's Los Gatos Mail-News office in the Beckwith Building on E. Main Street.
It was the mid-1920s and Falch, like all publishers of small weeklies, had to maintain a print shop to fill out a week's employment for his printers and to make ends meet.
His eight-page newspaper was put together mainly on Mondays and Tuesdays and was printed Wednesdays on a flatbed press. The process involved printing four pages at a time and then flipping over the sheets of newsprint and printing on the other side before running the paper through a separate folding machine.
On Thursdays and Fridays, all hands turned to job printing. Bars of lead were melted into liquid and poured into molds to produce "pigs" to be dropped into the Linotype's melting pot.
This was the age of tramp printers who, like the wandering ranch hand, crisscrossed the nation. The reasons why these competent men took to the road were many--an unhappy home life, alcoholism, debts, a crime, perhaps, or just plain wanderlust.
These tramps, particularly the farmhands, were welcomed in the plains states for the news they brought from the outside world.
When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed San Francisco but killed very few, hundreds of men disappeared, for whatever reason.
Falch brought to Los Gatos a marvelous new piece of equipment, the Linotype, invented by German-born Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854-1899).
Metropolitan news pages placed their fascinating rotary presses lengthwise behind glass for pedestrians to see.
Falch placed his Linotype sideways near the front window where the operator, Sarge, a World War I veteran, could return the salutes of small boys who stood in the street until Sarge could pause and acknowledge them with a "highball," army talk for a salute.
Even with a Linotype setting eight-point body type for news columns, larger fonts of lead and wood letters were used in advertisements and headlines. The largest type in the shop was referred to irreverently as "the second coming of Christ type."
One tramp printer brought with him a story of a strange bit of bribery that was exposed in another California town.
A political administration that stayed in power for an inordinate number of years was finally unseated. The new administrators found that the Town Hall's basement contained enough printed forms to last an eon or two. The publisher's print shop had flourished during that uncriticized administration.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 5, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.