Born To Be a Newspaper Man

by Martin J. McGowan Jr.

The War Years

Putting out the Appleton Press during the war years was challenging. We did it basically with three people and one part time Printer's Devil on Saturdays.

My father did most of the news work and wrote his personal column. We received some country correspondence from nearby towns and rural areas. One young woman gathered local news items, handled the classified ads and did the bookkeeping. I was quite well strapped to the Linotype until we had enough copy to fill the paper. My father had to do double duty with some of the heavy back shop work like making up the pages with the type I had set as well as some advertising composition. I joined him in making up some pages.

The type was locked up in steel forms called chases, often weighing as much as 50 pounds. Then these pages had to be carried back to the press and placed on the bed, four pages to a run. My father was in his late 50's at this time and he hadn't done such heavy work in a print shop for years. It ultimately affected his health and had had to retire to his home by 1947, where he could continue to write his column and supervise work on his yard and garden. He began to write a garden column along with his personal column.

When we put the paper to bed my father handled the mailing and I fed the newspaper press. The mailer was a hand unit that ran a strip of addresses through a glue pot to affix glue on the bottom. Then the unit was pressed on the upper corner of the front page and the address was clipped off and left on the paper.

I fed the big newspaper press four pages at a time, first printing one side of the sheet and then the other. The second time through the press we attached a folding machine, a contraption of rollers and moving tapes that carried the sheet through and folded it into an eight-page section. If we had a 12-page edition it meant we had to run an additional four pages, half a full sheet, and have somebody stand at the folder and insert the extra four pages in to the folder as the eight pages came off the press.

After all the papers had been addressed they had to be sorted and sacked into postal sacks according to their destination. By this time, it was at least midnight Thursday and my father could go home. I still had more work to do.

I took the postal sacks to the post office and dropped off three bundles of papers for news stand sale at cafes in town. Then I headed off to Correll to drop off a bundle of news stand copies. From there I went back through Appleton to Holloway to the east to drop off some mail and news stand copies. The final jaunt was to Milan to the south for a similar procedure. Then finally home about 3 a. m. We usually slept in on Friday mornings and came to work late morning or by noon.

The school boy helper we had come after school to sweep out, clean up the mess of paper and begin tearing down the pages and sorting the hand set type from advertising. He then dumped the type I had set into the basement metal pot to melt it all down into liquid and pour it into molds for the Linotype machine.

Those years were mostly drudgery keeping the paper alive. I began to wonder if it was worth all the effort. I asked my Dad if he wanted to keep on. Maybe we should sell the paper before the schedule killed him and I didn't feel I was having much of a life working most nights. I didn't seem to spend much time with my family. We couldn't go anywhere since we didn't have a car. We did acquire the 1934 Chevrolet that Betty's father had carefully treated. He put it up on blocks for the winter and didn't use it much at other times. I later envied a used Ford at Marquardt's Ford agency. There were no new cars, of course. Once in a while we drove my father's 1939 Ford, the car we used for our honeymoon.

But my father said he wanted to keep the paper alive. It provided the only income he had and I don't know how much it would have brought in wartime. When the war was over my father noted we had cleared up all the debts of the paper, probably the first time that situation existed.

That condition didn't last long. We plunged into debt again by purchasing two job presses that were used for commercial printing, or job printing. One was a German Heidelberg press, called the windmill, because of two arms that flew in circles. One arm picked up a sheet and put it in place for printing while the other arm picked up the printed piece and deposited it in a collection pile. The other press was another German press called the Kluge. This one could print 12 x 18 auction bills and other large items.

All of this took personnel. We were lucky to have two local brothers work for us after the war. One was Loren (Luke) Johnson, who was proficient on the Heidelberg, and his brother, Curtis, who was our printer. They later went on to publish their own papers, Loren at Argyle, Minn., and Curtis at Hawley, Minn. After I sold the Press to Bill McGarry in 1965 the Johnson brothers got together and purchased the Press from him and returned to Appleton.

Our Linotype operator after the war was Bertil (Bert) Larson who was no speed demon but did the job efficiently. With his arrival I was able to take over the editorial duties and my father was able to take it easy at home. He still collected a salary as publisher and wrote his two columns. We did a reader survey at this time to see what our readers liked in the Press. I was surprised to discover that my column had a slightly higher rating than his. I couldn't believe this for I thought his column was far superior to mine.

Before the war years were over we were saddened by two deaths. The first was cousin Bill, who was shot down during the D-Day invasion in June, 1944. The other was the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As for President Roosevelt, certainly the greatest president of the 20^th^ century, his death was a great loss. It still stands out in my memory when my father came to me while I was operating the Linotype to tell me the president was dead. We both paused a moment to contemplate what would happen next.

My father had met Roosevelt while he was campaigning in 1932 and was pictured in a news photo in the Minneapolis paper sitting beside the future president. My father was also an elector for Roosevelt in the days when the names of the electors appeared on the ballot and not the name of the candidate, although it was stated who the electors would vote for in the formalities after the election. A large sketch of Roosevelt stood prominently on my father's office wall, which I took over after his death.

Elmer A. Benson was named to fill out an unexpired term in the U.S. Senate. He happened to have a seat on the Senate floor next to Harry Truman, then the senator from Missouri who became president on Roosevelt's death in April, 1945.

After he became governor and then lost to Harold Stassen in 1938, Benson was still a political power because of the weakness of the regular Democrats. Roosevelt still looked to the Farmer-Labor party for support in Minnesota. Benson happened to be in Washington in January, 1945, and he returned to report that Roosevelt was in failing health. He delivered his inaugural speech that year seated in a wheelchair in the well of the House chamber rather than standing. Roosevelt died just three months later.

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