We’ve been having fun watching Dwayne Jones taking apart a lot of our no-longer-used printing equipment and some other things we wanted to get rid of. The most fun was watching him take apart our very old Model 31 Linotype machine. It wasn’t fun for Dwayne, however, because not one bolt or screw was the same size. He had to use a lot of different tools.
Dwayne is part of The Reporter family by marriage. Shannon Whorton has worked here since 1984 and his mother, Linda, worked for us for about 40 years. Dwayne is married to Shellie Whorton Jones who is Shannon’s sister and Linda’s daughter.
We really have no idea how old our Linotype machine was. We did find a book from 1925 about its care and maintenance, but the machine could be far older because they were invented in 1884. And The Rockdale Reporter has been around since 1873.
Linotypes were how newspapers were typeset before the advent of the computer in the 1970s and 1980s which totally changed the way newspapers are put together. Liquid metal was turned into slugs with the words on them. Then the slugs were put together into paragraphs. You can see a photo above of Roland Lawson holding a page of The Reporter. One page weighed over 100 pounds.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, everything was composed upside down and backwards so that, when printed, the newspaper could be read from left to right.
The keyboard on a Linotype had 90 keys. The usual arrangement is that black keys on the left were for lowercase letters, white keys on the right were for capital letters and the blue keys in the center for numbers, punctuation marks, spaces and other items. There was no shift key of the kind found on typewriters and computer keyboards. Linotype operators were proficient if they could compose one galley of type an hour (about 21 inches of type).
The molten metal was on the side of the machine in a cauldron and was kept hot by a natural gas connection. When the paper was printed for the week, the metal slugs were remelted for the following week’s paper.
When I was a Cub Scout and we had the Pinewood Derby, someone at The Reporter thought to drill some holes in the bottom of my pinewood car and pour in some of that hot metal to make the car go faster, and as I recall I did get a plastic gold trophy.
When Ken and Christine were working here, they tried to donate all of our old machines to printing museums, but no one wanted them. Or they had too many already. So it’s kind of sad that our history was sold for junk, but time marches on.
We also got rid of a lot of old computers that were out of date. But for some reason that wasn’t sad, so I guess we shouldn’t be sad about the Linotype. It’s just an outdated piece of equipment. But the history of it does make me wince a bit. kyle@rockdalereporter.com
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