Late June morning in Oregon. The sky is a grey glow. The air chill. It is a flannel shirt and warm socks kind of day. A mug of coffee and mind wandering.

My sister Lora and her husband Carl visited recently. Carl is a long-time friend of Lydia and a high school friend of mine. Lora and Carl married a few weeks before Lydia and me in our sophomore year of college. That was 54 years ago. When we are together it feels like only yesterday. Our talk this visit wound its way back to our first year of marriage.

Carl’s parents, Charlie and Julie were the only non-student married friends we had. They treated us like adults rather than kids. They invited us to dinner. We talked about “not school” things. Our wedding present from them was a giant cardboard box full of kitchen spices and needfulls. We filled our new home with all the makings for wonderful smells and foods because of their generosity and understanding. They gentled us into the adult world that was not sheltered by the ivy cushion of academia.

Charlie worked for The Journal, the Portland evening paper and so it was that, in our first summer break, Charlie arranged a job for me at the newspaper. It was a job that Carl had worked in previous summers, but he now lived in Eugene. I was going to make lead ingots for the linotype.

The linotype made lead print in rows as the letters were typed into the machine. Lead ingots hung in hot buckets. The lead melted and then was extruded into tiny forms that quickly cooled and made the print type. The letters were then placed into blocks to form the sentences and paragraphs. The blocks were used once then broken up for reforming for the next edition.

My job was to collect the used lead, melt it in a huge furnace, then pour the molten lead into ingots, ready to go back on the floor to be used again. A major city newspaper, The Journal, used a lot of print. I poured a lot of lead.

 The linotype was a dinosaur by the time Carl and I worked at the paper. Computers and digital processing were rapidly replacing mechanical processes though we didn’t know it. In truth, even newspapers were becoming part of the past. Every night, I’d gather wooden boxes of broken-down type on a hand cart. Larger boxes were delivered to the door of my little smithery. I shoveled scoops of type into the melting pot. It was not easy. I was a skinny runt who weighed 110 pounds after a big meal. A scoop of lead probably weighed 20 or 30 pounds. The lip of the pot was about my shoulder height, and I learned that many partial scoops of lead were much easier than a few full scoops. I made freshman mistakes. Left the spigot running and over filled ingots. I didn’t reload the pot often enough and so had to wait for the type to melt. I overloaded the pot and the new lead cooled and thickened the melt. I had to wait some more. Eventually the ingot molds were filled and cooled, and emptied several times as I worked my way through the stacks of type. Some I delivered to the linotypes. The rest was stacked in reserve in the smithery.

The memory connects Carl and me. We worked in a proud endeavor just before it approached the digital age. Our children and grandchildren have little understanding of the physical work it took to produce a newspaper on a daily basis then.

It was only a summer job. It got us through the summer thanks to Charlie Steers.

It was hard work done alone. It suited me.

Blessings

Posts