The Willow Glen Resident Point of View Carl Heintze Technology replaced hardy, profane printers Computers have revolutionized the newspaper business, indeed, all publishing. But in my heart they'll never replace the human printer. Printers were a hardy, profane, immobile lot, almost all men, who all were members of the International Typographical Union, one of the oldest unions in American organized labor. To get to the top of their craft they had to serve a long apprenticeship. When they finished it, they "slipped up," as the saying went, inserting their names on a slip board in the plant where they worked. Once they got a permanent situation, their seniority allowed them to hold it for as long as they wanted and for most of the printers that I knew, that was for life. Printers set type, mostly on linotype machines, devices that set a line of type at a time, dropping it into a galley. But printers also read proof and put the pages of a newspaper together, fitting the type set by machine into a page form on what was called a "turtle," a four-legged wheeled metal cart that held a single page. The makeup men, as this group of the Back Shop was called, were the elite of the printing business so far as I was concerned. They could make type into rubber. Under their hands, it got longer or shorter depending on the hole on the page they were filling. I learned all I know about type from them and, I learned it all at their side, listening to endless dirty jokes of poor quality and yelling back and forth with them. We had to yell because in those days the Back Shop was a roar of sound. The linotype machines clattered; the other type-setting devices rattled--it was a noisy place, but it never seemed to bother the printers much. A lot of what they yelled was nonsense--one printer's favorite phrase that he repeated often during the day was "hair like wire." Don't ask me what it meant. I doubt if he knew either. It was just a way of letting off steam from the pressure under which they worked. Most of them had been at the craft for at least 25 years and many as long as 35. They lived by a thick book of rules that regulated almost all phases of life in the Back Shop. For instance, no one except a printer could move type anywhere. We lowlifers from the front office could point at type and tell the printers where we wanted it to go, but we couldn't actually touch the type in any way. To do so risked the wrath of the local shop steward and a lot of trouble. In time--in spite of all their barnacles and bum jokes--I came to love all my Back Shop fellow workers, though I expect most of them would turn over in their graves if they heard me say it. They worked short intense hours, doing a combination of monotonous and creative work. The hours were short, but they were hard. Then suddenly they found themselves obsolete. The "new processes" as they were called, roared in through the Back Shop door: computer-set type, photo layouts, pasteups and finally desk-top publishing. The craft which the members of the ITU had learned so painfully over the years of their apprenticeship was disappearing. And so, alas, did the printers. One by one they took retirement, often early as they were replaced by new machines. The linotype became a museum piece, the ITU lost much of its influence in the business. Off-set printing became the accepted method of reproduction. The Back Shop grew as quiet as a tomb. And it must have seemed that way to the departing printers. There was no tomorrow for them except at the ITU home in Colorado or wherever they took their pensions when they left the business. In the end, their skills were not as moveable as mine or the skills of other reporters. For we learned to use first electric typewriters and then computers. Writing didn't change all that much, even in the way in which what we wrote was reproduced. That's all sad in a way, for being a printer always seemed as if it must be a very rewarding trade. What you produced appeared final and complete every day when the last deadline had passed. Printing won't ever be that way again, I don't suppose. And maybe it shouldn't be. But I'll always have a place in my heart somewhere for all those old-timers who taught me type can be rubber and whose profane, happy, enduring lives I'm proud to say I shared with Ted and Myron and Al and Jim and Val and Carl and Tony and a whole lot more. [ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Willow Glen Resident, February 3, 1999. ©1999 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.