Never thought to take a picture of the Compugraphic machine the typesetter used back in the early newspaper days, but I found one online that looks a lot like it.

One thing I regret about my early days in the paper business was not taking any photos of all that obsolete tech. Although they’d be in black and white and I probably would’ve lost them by now.

There was the big blue Compugraphic machine used by the typesetter, a lady who turned your copy into column-wide strips that printed out on Kodak paper. They came out smelling of photochemicals and you had to dry them out before you could paste them up.

The typesetter could only see half a column at a time. If she messed up, that section had to be done again and pasted onto the rest of the copy.

There was the machine where you typed in your headlines. In a few pre-set fonts and sizes. Biggest size was 72 points. My editor back then called that the “Second Coming of Jesus font.”

There was the waxer. You fed copy and photos through it it and coated the underside with wax, so you could stick them down on the layout sheets – newspaper sized paper, with a light blue grid on it. We used light blue pens to circle errors to be corrected. Blue wouldn’t photograph at the press.

I got so sick of having sticky hands on press day. A friend’s band once made a song about that called “wax on my ass.”

There was the big camera in the dark room we used to make half-tones – the photos with dots. If you tried to put a regular pic in the paper, it came out looking Xeroxed.

There were all the little tools you took for granted: border tape (black tape in different widths, used to put a black boxes around ads), sizing wheel (to help figure out the settings on the dark room page camera. “Where there’s a wheel there’s a way.”).

There were the layout tables, tilted at an angle. Underneath were shelves full of clip art books the ad production people used. The art had to be cut out with an X-acto knife and stuck to the page – with wax. I used to help them from time to time. I was really good at cutting the border tape straight. (Cut through the corners at a diagonal.)

I remember the tables in the back, where we had to insert (rectangular) circulars into the papers when they came back from the press.

We made a little assembly line. All hands on deck till we got it done. “You know they can train monkeys to do this shit,” was my usual joke. Your hands would be black at the end of the day.

There was a machine at the press that could do it automatically, but it broke and they didn’t want to pay the guy who knew how to run it. Kind of ironic when I think about how technology affected newspapers in the long run.

Change came quickly and slowly at once. We got computers, learned PageMaker and QuarkXpress, In Design for the folks who really stuck it out. Some tools you just used a bit less till next thing you knew, they’d be covered in dust, forgotten until the next cleanup day.

And gradually, I noticed I was almost by myself in the newsroom. Lot of jobs you just really didn’t need to run a small newspaper anymore.

It’s crazy to remember how not-advanced the tech was back then, how we got it done, and how many friends I had in the newsroom at the beginning.