-advice given to new reporters at the old City News Bureau
It was an incredibly loud, dust-filled world made of gray steel.
Gray steel decks on which you walked and labored, gray steel racks overhead carrying wires and pipes, dirty gray steel tracks in the floor ferrying curved aluminum plates. And above all, the monstrous grey steel Miehle Goss Dexter presses, called MGDs. They were ten feet tall and bellowed overpowering, pounding noise and ink and paper dust that covered your skin and got into your lungs. The MGDs seemed to be saying the same word over and over again, faster and faster, as they ran up to top speed. It sounded like the name of a Mexican city: “Chapultepec, Chapultepec, Chapultepec.”
It was a world without windows or sunlight and it was manned by ink covered steel-tough men who smoked through the dust and cursed and laughed and made the machines work. It was a world in which I suddenly found myself inserted into in January, 1968. It was the pressroom of the Chicago Tribune, some three stories below the ground in the bowels of the venerable Tribune Tower at 435 N. Michigan. After the leadership of the Catholic seminary system somewhat abruptly invited me to seek another career choice, I began to work there. Remember that job in college that made you really want to finish your degree? This was mine.
Paper converted to steel and back to paper again, that was what the whole place was really all about. Writers on the floors high above would spin their stories, moving their thoughts into their fingers and their fingers to the keys on a metal typewriter and from there onto a piece of paper. The article would always end with the number -30- at the center bottom of the page to indicate “nothing follows”. A copy boy would be summoned by someone yelling the word “Copy!” and he would then take the paper to an editor who would add, subtract, question, or rearrange the paper words and send it to a typesetter. The typesetter sat at a machine called a Linotype and typed in the words, only this time the letters that came out were in little metal slugs, giving meaning to the phrase “line of type”. When the metal words were completed, another typesetter picked larger metal letters for the headline from a specially organized wooden rack, called a “California job case” and arranged the letters in order within a steel frame. His fingers were so practiced that he didn’t even need to look at the job case to see what characters his hands had learned to choose.
If there was a picture to go with the story, the piece of film would be re-shot into a “half-tone”, where the image was broken up into tiny dots on a metal plate. A stereotyper would mount the half tone onto a metal plate to join up with the words. And when the headlines and copy and photos were finally all assembled, they cast the whole thing into a plate maker, which produced a shiny aluminum curved plate that looked like a miniature airplane hangar, about one foot in height. It was a backward-facing newspaper page, but made of shiny silver metal. And it would journey slowly down to the press room a few floors below on little tracked rollers in the floor, motivated by gravity. Somewhere along the route, someone would paint in bright red ink a press number and page number, large enough for someone to pick it out from the others.
My job title was “flyboy”, a non-union job. I had two tasks really, one to watch the little parade of shiny metal plates moving down the tracks in the floor for the ones with my press number on them and then to pick up the plates and set them by the press bank unit with the corresponding page numbers chalked on them by the pressmen. Each main press (there were 24 total) was connected to as many banks as needed to produce the next day’s newspaper. A Saturday edition was the smallest and might use four banks. Sunday editions were the biggest and might use as many as twelve. Each shift started with this process of getting the right metal plates sorted and then mounted onto the press banks. The press foreman and his union helpers, all wearing their homemade hats made of newsprint, made anew each day by the wearer, would fiddle with adjustments that I was forbidden to touch, feeding the plain white newsprint into the banks from enormous rolls from the “reel room” one floor below.
When they finally started the press, all the banks fed into the main unit, which blended all the pages together, cut the sheets, folded them and created the end product: the newspaper that landed on your doorstep. Paper converted to steel and back to paper.
The other part of my job was to watch the output from the press, looking for little red tags called “pasters” The press had to recycle itself every twenty minutes or so and it would produce about ten papers that printed a front and pack page only, with the rest of the inside copies all blank newsprint. The press affixed the red “pasters” so that I could spot them and pull them out of the run. Wouldn’t want someone to sit down with their first cup of coffee and find that their morning Trib was a hollow joke.
An unbroken chain of finished papers moved from the mouth of the press via wire racks up to the bundling machines above us and from there onto the docks from which the trucks fed the city its daily diet of news. And on a Saturday evening, when all 24 MGDs were cranking at top speed, the metal decks fairly jumping below your feet, one could be forgiven for thinking he had wandered into hell. Such an incredible volume of noise and so much ink dust was in the air that the crews were given 30 minutes on and 30 minutes off to get out of the room. Pressmen were legendary drinkers, so they naturally gravitated to the nearby Billy Goat’s under Michigan Avenue during their “off” times.
The shift was not dictated by the clock but by the number of papers you were assigned to print. A gauge labeled “Papers per hour” whose hash marks were one thousand each (60,000 per hour max) told you where you were. If you were lucky, and the press did not need to stop for breakdowns or a breaking story that required you to literally “stop the presses!” for new plates, you might meet your quota in 5 hours, and get paid for 8. Strong unions. After your shift, you were too dirty to get on public transportation, so showers were available. Each shower had containers of powdered “Lava” soap on the walls. It removed most of the ink along with some of your skin. After a few weeks, you were the whitest guy on your block.
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That pressroom is gone today, as are all of the union jobs with it. Pressmen, stereotypers, linotype operators, plate makers, bundlers, and yes, flyboys are all dim memories. Their unions, organized into “Chapels” instead of “Locals” have slipped away, also. The steel and the dust are gone, the papers now printed in a modern offset plant on Goose Island. But the paper is much reduced in size, content, and quality, and the plant produces fewer print copies each month as more and more of us open our “Trib” on an iPad, Surface, or laptop.
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I watch sadly as newspapers slowly die from the inside out, victims of the Internet. When the Internet removed the economic engine of the newspapers, namely the classified ads, newspaper organizations started to make cuts. They started with the editors and the more expensive and experienced writers. Economic reality forced them to turn their backs on what made them so valuable in the first place: sources of reliable information where facts were checked before they were printed.
Newspapers like the Tribune begin now on computer screens, move to digital files, and are assembled in “pagination” software. The conversion to steel is certainly gone, but something more important than the steel is gone, too. Into the vacuum of reliable reporters and experienced editors vetting their information rushed the Internet, virtually void of controls, shrieking non- truths, half-truths, and outright lies. When you consider recent polls, you begin to realize what we’ve lost:
- 25% of American still believe the U.S helped plan the 9/11 attacks.
- 45% of Republicans believe Hillary Clinton was involved in some sort of child sex ring.
- 45% of Republicans cling to the Obama “birther” myth.
- 46% feel that millions of illegal votes were cast in the last election.
- 23% insist the stock market went down in the Obama era.
And 61 million of us just drank the poison Kool Aid and voted against a competent, if unlikeable, woman about whom incredible lies were told. We just put the most dangerous child in the world unsupervised into a room full of loaded weapons.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous 19th century observer of American culture was credited (some say incorrectly, which certainly fits this story) as saying:
“Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”
Part of me wishes we had the steel back, both the steel of the ponderous newspaper production process and the metaphorical steel that was the shared effort to be accurate and fair and scrupulous in publishing information. I know I won’t see either again and I have a sense we as a nation don’t feel very good about ourselves right now. But I’ll keep double-checking what is passed on as truth and I hope you will, too. If enough of us do, then I think we can someday regain some of that goodness. I’d like to feel good about America again, but I may have to wait a few years.