Final Run
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 เม.ย. 2013
- On Sunday, April 28, 2013 the Goss Metroliner printing press at main office of The Herald in Everett, Wash., printed its final edition. Printing operations are being relocated to a Sound Publishing central printing location near Paine Field.
I did this for so long, I remember when the plate burners used those brittle, smoky electrode sticks to expose the plates. I went from flyboy to operator from 1972 to 2005; from newspapers to job shops to businesses forms, in San Diego and San Luis Obispo/Atascadero/Paso Robles, CA. on 8 and 12 unit Goss Urbanites, as well as 7 unit Fairchild News Kings and 9 unit Fairchild Color Kings, in addition to Harris and Didde Glaser roll-to-roll web presses. The in-between times were spent on Hamada, Multilith and A.B. Dick sheet fed offset duplicators. A desire to make myself more valuable drove me to learn how to operate and maintain an SLS 1000 10-station inserting machine, IDAB stackers, and various portable conveyor tables and tying and strapping machines. Because the press work often went later than the composing, camera and plate making departments worked, it was necessary to gain a working knowledge of those processes, too. In one shop I also got to climb around for hours on and explore a non-operational early 20th century 12 unit, 3-story-high Hoe letterpress, sporting brass guard- and handrails, that had been shut down in a labor dispute years before our press was installed. The press was still webbed, rolls in place, thick-skinned ink still in the fountains. In a time of powerful unions, they shut it down and walked out in the middle of a press run. When I first started printing, it was because that was the first job I could find. I never dreamed it would become a life long trade. I couldn't believe the things those wild, insane bastards did. The whole trade at the time was like that; every one of the people I worked with either drank too much or couldn't drink anymore. Drugs were ubiquitous and no one wore ear protection, and the labor laws in Cali back then allowed for overtime pay after 40 hours, but not after 8. Consequently, it wasn't uncommon to work a shift of 40 hours straight, then get sent home before OT pay began. I'm astonished that no one got flattened. Safety laws and measures were ignored, but nobody cared; that was for female orifices (the intended word wouldn't pass the TH-cam™ Mythical Council of Elders® Code). Boy, were we stupid. Does anyone recall monkey poles? We'd climb down the pole holding on with one hand and gripping a 90 lb. steel roll shaft in the other. What idiocy. The terminology was wonderful; outside of the pressroom, if you said to someone, "After we mounted the new blankets, I went up on the balloon to adjust the trolleys so the webs would feed." they would back away slowly and use soothing words to keep you calm until psychiatric help arrived. I had become one of those wild, insane bastards when I wasn't looking. I couldn't wait to get away from the stink of ink, but a few years after retiring I found myself wishing I could stand on an ink-stained diamond patterned deck plate once again and cut color; or stand at the console, finger on the go-faster button as I yell over the roaring silence of the press, "SAVE 'EM!" When I left after uncountable trips up and down those cold steel ladders, my legs were as hard as that steel, but my knees were shot. It's just as well; I didn't have to watch the big, heavy Sunday editions, like I threw when I was 14, shrink down to the pamphlets they have become today; or see the presses that created them get cut up and sold for scrap because now the individual papers are all printed at one facility in another city. No one wears square paper hats anymore. What a shame.
I was in newspaper operations for 45 years. Did nearly everything in production from prepress to the dock. It was sad day for me when the last newspaper I worked for folded. The presses scrapped and building torn down to make way for condos.
Fare thee well my ink stained Brothers ...
Are these printing press just for newspapers or can it do other jobs?
44 years for me, and it was time to get out while I still had a pension.