etaoin shrdlu

This is a little on the long side, prompted by a friend's email.

A longer time ago than I sometimes care to contemplate I was a copy boy at the Boston Globe. A friend posting about the slow demise of the newspaper business prompted me to think about it.

I was a co-op student at a large eastern educational factory which enabled me to pay for my education by alternating job and semesters at school, and because I was interested in writing and considered journalism as a possible career choice I took the job at the Globe. It paid only slightly above minimum wage and consisted of the most menial of work. I sat at a desk two seats away from the dayside City Editor, one Al Monihan by name. His brother was editor for the "Lobster Shift," (more on that in a bit).

I logged stories as the writers around the room wrote them, measuring the inches and entering the reporter's name and the time. Monihan or his Assistant Editor, Callahan, would edit them a bit; but then I carried them to the copy desk where the blue pencils would fly. I would be sent to get coffee for the City Editor or his Assistant—the reporters in the pool were expected to get their own, thankfully—and sometimes would be asked to take a "cut" down to the composing floor below. Cuts were photo engravings of pictures taken by the news photographers mounted on inch high blocks and had a typed caption attached. I had to take them to the desk where the pages were assembled (more about this later, as well). I sometimes was sent to the "morgue," where the files of old stories were kept, to find something the editor wanted. Other than that there could be a lot of simply sitting around listening to the reporters gas and chivvy each other.

The newsroom was all Irish and Italian, BC grads if they were grads. The editorial offices on the far side of the newsroom was all WASP and Harvard. There was a bit of a war between them.

Al Monihan wore blue oxford button down shirts, open at the neck with a tie loose but knotted. I never saw him in anything else. His jacket was always on the back of his chair. He always had a cigarette in his mouth. He smoked unfiltered ones that would hang stuck to his lip as he yelled at the reporters. The other copy boy who was sometimes there would bet me how long the ash would get before it would drop. He was the definition of irascible. The stories were typed on old uprights, usually with two fingers (none of them could touch type), on 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of what looked like rough newsprint. If they went more than a page, Monihan would tape them together as he got them. I remember one day him screaming at one of the guys as he held up what had to be six feet of taped pages, "What the hell is this, Tarbi, an epic!"

Once in a while I'd be asked to go down to the composing room and get a mat to bring back to Callahan. A mat was a yellow plastic or fiber looking page sized piece that was used to make the plates that went on the presses, so it looked like the page would look with the type readable and showing the pictures from the cuts. Callahan had a fetish about how the front page presented itself. He believed that the Globe was a "local paper" and that it should lead with the local news and not devote the front page to national or international news. He and Monihan would argue about it vociferously, sometimes Monihan would win, sometimes Callahan.

I later heard that Callahan had died of a heart attack covering the first visit of a Pope to the United States. He was a devout Catholic and had asked to cover what he thought of as the story of his life. He was a gentler man than his City Editor, and sitting beside me in his white shirt and tie, neatly together at the neck in contrast to his nominal boss, took the time to tell me how to handle my job and answer questions.

One day between coffee runs and when it was quiet in the newsroom I decided to follow what happened with the copy I logged. I watched discreetly at the copy desk as the piece was edited. Then it was weighted with a piece of lead and dropped down "the slot," an actual open slot in the desk, and dropped to the floor below. I scooted to the stairs and ran down, getting to the composing table as someone was picking up the story. It was cut or torn into parts and each part was annotated with type style and size and given to a linotype operator.

Mergenthaler Linotype machines may have been the most complicated and fascinating pieces of machinery that occupied only about eight square feet of floor ever created. It looked like the console of a great cathedral organ with multiple registers and racks of type. Unlike a typewriter which separated the most frequently used letters to avoid jamming, the linotype organized its letters by frequency. The test line that sometimes used to creep into papers was "etaoin shrdlu." The machine had huge levers and gears, and to one side a hot pot of melted lead with an ingot hanging into it on a chain. The brass type kept in the machine was not reversed, but it was indented—the letters graved into the brass. You could read them. The operator would enter the story, line by line, each line generating a "slug," a line of type. and the slugs would slide into place in "the stick," a column width metal pan or frame that held them. He (they were all "he'" then) would enter spacing between letters to get the lines adjusted.

The sticks of slugs would taken to the composing table.  They would be adjusted to fit the page so that continuations worked. At the composing table the backwards raised type would be assembled in page sized wooden frames along with any of the cuts on the page. The frames would be tightened and the type hammered to make sure it was completely flat. Sometimes this would be inked and a page would be hand printed to see how it looked. But usually it went into the machine that made the yellow mats, once again with the type not reversed and indented into the mat. These would be taken to another machine that formed them into half cylinders and filled them with lead making a half cylinder plate that would be taken down to be put on the huge presses.

The presses occupied two floors at the end of the building away from the newsroom. The various half cylinders were put into place on the printing rollers in the order needed to print the paper correctly. Then the paper could be printed. The time from copy desk to press was about a half an hour as I remember. Not much at all.

The whole floor was an industrial space and smelled of hot lead. I wonder how much of a hazard it was and if OSHA rules would allow it today. Certainly the noise when the presses started to roll would be a hazard. The whole building would shake.

The input was huge rolls of newsprint, multiple pages wide. These were mounted on a trio of rollers so that as one roll ended the other could be pasted with it on the fly and the print run could keep going. At the other end sharp knives cut the pages apart as they streamed off and they were automatically assembled into sections and folded and the finished papers layered between the wires of a conveyer that took them to the loading dock.

I found the process fascinating and am a little sad that technology has replaced it. Those presses could roll for as many as six or seven editions a day. Usually there were three: a morning, an afternoon, and a late. They matched the shifts. Dayside did what became the afternoon edition. The afternoon people did the late or evening edition. The Lobster shift was responsible for the morning paper, usually a minimal replate of the previous evening. The whole paper didn't have to be recreated each time. A lot of the back sections stayed the same along with all the ads, the comics, the syndicated columns, and the like. The front page and some of the front section would change so it wasn't the daunting task you might think to do six or seven editions.

I was there for one six edition day, when the Kennedy baby was dying. It was Boston and the newsroom full of Irish Catholics who idolized the man. It was all hands on deck, and a furious round of plating and replating front pages as the story evolved. Boston had three fairly vigorous papers at the time, though one was already on shaky ground, and there was a lot of competition to get the stories out first. I'm glad I wasn't there a few months later in November of 1963.

That's all gone now. Where I live now we had two papers, one a fairly solid evening paper, one a not so strong morning Hearst paper. The evening paper decided to switch to a morning edition and go head to head. The other paper died within a year or so. Now our morning paper seems to get a little thinner week by week. As I said to my friend—makes me feel like a trog.