Born To Be a Newspaper Man

by Martin J. McGowan Jr.

Starting with the Linotype

Jan. 1, 1943, was an important date in my life. Three major events centered around that date. One was my graduation from college. The second was beginning my fulltime career in journalism. The third was meeting my wife.

During the fall of 1942 while trying to settle whether or not I would be called into the military, I also needed two courses to complete my college degree. I enrolled in two correspondence history courses at the University of Missouri and finished them. I was granted my Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in History and a minor in Political Science at the mid-year commencement in January, 1943. I did not choose to go back to Columbia, Mo., to receive the diploma formally but chose to have it mailed to me. So, after many school, career and class changes I finally graduated a half year late.

My start in journalism was not very auspicious. My father had an excellent Linotype operator at the Appleton Press named Wallace Ittner. He chose this time to submit his resignation to return to his home in Bemidji. This created a crisis in how to set all the type to put out a newspaper. This was wartime and skilled Linotype operators were always scarce but with many men going into military service they were even more scarce.

My father always turned to Dunwoody Industrial Institute in Minneapolis to secure trained operators. None were available at this time. So, my father came to me and asked if I would like to learn how to operate the machine.

Over the years of hanging around the newspaper I had observed the operation of the Linotype but did not know the intricacies of the machine. Since my father had put me through college at considerable sacrifice I felt I owed him something in return. That would be helping out when he needed me.

One summer he asked me to go to Willmar and work for my uncle, Pat, my godfather, who was then publishing a weekly newspaper called the Willmar Journal. He was doing this in competition with a daily paper and another weekly in town. I was asked to tour the countryside and sell subscriptions. I never have been a salesman and did not do well at that summer assignment.

When I was in Journalism school at Missouri my cousin, Bill McGowan, had his eye on a job with the United Press when he graduated. When he was called up for military service I thought I might be able to fill the job. But my father's need took over and with the new year I began a new job on the Linotype.

Years ago, there were ads in magazines for self-training at the piano. The ads were headlined, "They laughed when I sat down at the piano." The same could be said when I sat down at the Linotype.

At the time this was written I happened to attend a church social gathering where a young seminarian was in attendance. In our discussion I mentioned that my career had been in weekly newspapers. I also mentioned that I began as a Linotype operator.

"What's that?" he asked.

I realized he is from another generation. Most young people today never heard of the machine. Older people may have heard of it but they don't know much about it.

Ottmar Mergenthaler is credited with being the inventor of the Linotype in 1886. Many have called it the most important invention since Johann Gutenberg invented movable type in 1455. For the following century the Linotype was responsible for publishing all newspapers, magazines, books, pamphlets and commercial printing. While the origin was in Germany the Linotype was adapted for setting type in many languages throughout the world. It made for rapid composition instead of assembling lines of type with individual letters picked out of a drawer and returned by hand after the type had been inked and printed.

Anybody looking at the Linotype for the first time must have thought it was a joke. Or else they would think it is one of those Rube Goldberg devices. Those were incongruous machines made famous in cartoons that performed the simplest tasks in a most complicated manner. They usually had a steel ball that rolled down an incline, fell through a hole, hit a lever that pushed something else until after several steps the goal was achieved. So it seemed with the Linotype.

That is a machine that had arms going up and down, keys being punched, wheels turning, brass pieces falling into an assembler, belts going around and hot metal being pumped into a narrow opening, all with the outcome of a line of type being created. Hence the name of the machine.

A competitive typesetter called the Intertype was developed but it did not make much of an impact in the industry. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) also attempted to make inroads into hot metal typesetting but it was not successful and Clemens lost a fortune with his experiment.

The Linotype has an impressive keyboard of 90 keys but it is nothing like a typewriter. At the left side of the keyboard are five rows of keys for all the lower-case letters. They appear on the keys as white letters on a black background. In the middle of the keyboard are five rows of numerals, punctuation marks and what are called ligatures. These are such things as fl and ffl taken together as one letter. These items are pictured as black letters on a blue background. At the far right on a white background are the capital letters shown in black lettering on the last five rows.

Operating this keyboard is largely a matter of hunt and peck though some operators became proficient on working out some shortcuts. The word "the" was easy by tapping three keys at the top of the rows, usually using two fingers on the left hand. It became automatic to find the capital letter T, for instance, which started so many sentences. There were also keys for the em space and the en space. The em space occupied one full space of the type size being set. The en space was half the size of the em space. The two were used to fill out a line after a sentence ended.

Above the keyboard was what was called a magazine. This contained as many rows of brass matrices as there were keys on the keyboard. The mats, as they were called, had letters cut into them on one side and the same letter printed on the other side facing the operator, so he could read what he was setting. When a key was depressed it moved a rod above the keyboard which in turn moved a rocker spring release on one channel of the magazine. This released one mat to fall down on a belt carrying all the other letters that were released. The mats were carried on the belt down to an assembler area in front of the operator to fill up one line of type.

The line had to be full and tight before it could be cast. The unique part of this requirement was done by space bands. These were thin metal bands with a tapered sleeve that could slide up and down. The space bands were released by a long lever at the left of the keyboard which could be tapped by a finger on the left hand. They were inserted between each word and sometime between the em and en spaces as needed.

When the line was nearly full of mats and space bands, a large arm at the right end of the keyboard was pushed down and the assembled letters were raised up and taken over by a clamping arrangement that kept them together and in turn carried them over to the casting area.

That was done on a large, geared wheel which usually had four openings for various sizes of type and line length. The type that was being prepared for the casting was carried over and down in front of the open hole on the geared wheel. The mats and space bands were placed in the hole and a bar came up from the bottom to push the tapered sleeves of the space bands upward, thus filling the line.

To get a line of type hot metal is needed. This is kept in a pot with a plunger. The metal, made up mostly of lead, but with elements of tin and antimony for hardening, was heated to 350 degrees. The heat was kept on all the time except for weekends. A timer clock turned it on early Monday mornings so it would be ready to use.

After the assembled line had been put in the geared wheel the metal pot came forward to merge with the back side of the wheel containing the mats and space bands. The plunger would give a sharp push and push the hot metal into the indented mats with the letters at type height. Then the pot would pull back, the geared wheel would rotate over a trimming blade to smooth the bottom of the line. When the wheel completed one revolution it stopped and a blade mysteriously came from behind and pushed the cast line of type out of the mold in the wheel and onto a tray with other lines that had just been cast.

To dispose of the mats and space bands that had been used to cast the line a long arm came down from the back and top to pick them up. The space bands dropped loose and were pushed to the area where they were kept to be used again. The arm took the mats up to a long bar that ran across the top of the magazines of mats.

This was called the distributor bar and it was quite a creation. The mats had a V-shape at the top with teeth in various combinations cut into the V. Somebody figured out a combination for those teeth so that each channel of the magazine had a different combination. As the mats were pushed along the distributor bar, when they came to a place where the teeth combination met a spot on the bar that would not hold the mats, they dropped into their particular channel in the magazine, to be used again.

There were about 20 mats of each of the major lower-case letters kept in the magazine. This allowed for a constant supply of the letters as one line was being assembled, another being cast and a third being distributed. It would bring pride to any operator who could "hang" the operation of the machine. This meant that an assembled line would be held up as one was being cast. The operator was faster than the machine.

Early model Linotypes usually had just one magazine. It was called the Model 8. I started on a Model 14 which had three main magazine and one auxiliary on the side for special large type. Later we acquired a Model 31 which had four main magazines and two auxiliaries. The Model 32 was the top of the line with four main and four auxiliaries. That machine held a lot of various type faces. With more magazines on the machine it was a fairly simple matter just to crank up or down to put the proper magazine in place. Otherwise they had to be unloaded by hand, hung on a wall and a heavy replacement put in place, which took some time and effort.

With the Model 31 we acquired a tape machine that would feed perforated tape into the machine to set type. With Linotype operators at a premium on quantity and salary, it was easier to find a competent typist who could perforate the tape with a regular typewriter to be fed into the Linotype keyboard. Thus we could be setting type on two machines at a time.

One of the worst things that could happen on a Linotype was a "squirt." This happened when the line being cast was loose. When the plunger in the metal pot went down and the hot metal was pushed out it would spray all over where the line was loose. It would lock up the machine and could burn the operator. It took quite a while to clean up a "squirt" and get the machine back in working order again.

There were some other duties associated with the Linotype. The space bands had to be cleaned and scraped at least once a week after the paper was published. The scraping removed bits of metal that may have stuck to the band. Each band had to be rubbed in graphite on a tray to make them slippery so the sleeves would not stick.

After the paper was published each week the pages had to be torn down and the type melted. All the used "slugs," as they were called, were dumped in a pot that was heated to melt the metal into liquid form. The metal was poured into long steel molds called "pigs" where the metal hardened into long bars with a hole at one end. The hole was used to hook onto a feeding line which fed the metal into the pot as the metal was used. In earlier days the metal was poured into small "pigs" which had to be hand fed into the pot. That required the operator to get up and go to the pile of "pigs," thus slowing him down.

My earliest recollection about the Appleton Press is when I was about eight or nine years old. I would go to the office on Saturday mornings and watch the printer's devil of that era melt the metal type for the Linotype. He would pour the used "slugs" down a chute from the main floor into a pot in the basement. I don't recall how the pot was heated but I recall him scraping the dross or impurities off the top of the melted metal and ladling it into the small forms. Then all this metal had to be carried upstairs and piled by the Linotype.

When I started on the Linotype I was so slow that we had to call for outside help. We asked Edgar Bromstad, the Linotype operator at the Milan Standard seven miles away, to come to our shop several nights a week to set enough copy to get out the Appleton Press. He did this for three months after which I felt able to take it over. However, I had to work almost every night of the week to get the job done.

I was also doing some sports writing and a column for the paper. I typed copy for these items on a typewriter on weekends. Then I took the paper copy to the Linotype and set it over again in type. I finally decided to eliminate one step. I composed the column and sport stories directly on the Linotype. Of course I didn't get to edit the copy before I set it. This made it a bit more clumsy if I discovered mistakes in the final product.

Linotype operators often had the reputation of being drinkers. I didn't have the time for it, but I can think of two operators we had who did imbibe. Occasionally we would find empty pint bottles under the Linotype. I can well understand why they might take to drink after four years of operating the pesky machine.

All this may be more than you really wanted to know about the Linotype machine. However, since this machine is a fossil gone off into newspaper history I thought its story should be told. While the machines are no longer available in this country, parts are available for any machines still running for specialty book or legal publishing. To get a complete new machine it may be necessary to go to the headquarters in Germany.

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