My mother’s uncle, Harry Young, was the circulation manager of the Register-Mail, the daily newspaper of Galesburg, Illinois.
In those days, any city of 35,000, such as Galesburg, and many cities even smaller, had a daily paper—despite the cost and difficulty of printing the news every day.
There was no Internet. Computers were huge machines that took up whole rooms, and only rich corporations could afford one.
Almost everyone subscribed to the daily paper, giving it the ability to charge good rates for advertising space.
People got spot news from the radio, had done so for decades. Television was a new thing; most of the channels had an announcer behind a desk, reading news, for 15 minutes at six p.m. But to really get the news, you needed a broadsheet paper like the Register-Mail.
Did I mention, Dear Reader? It was made of paper!
They printed it fresh, with new contents, every day.
Reporters went out into the community, spoke with people, attended meetings, photographed events. Then they came back to the newspaper building—yes, newspapers had buildings—to a place called the newsroom, and pounded out their stories on manual typewriters, the kind with ink ribbons that were struck by metal bars with letters engraved on the end of them. Reporters and other typists had really strong fingers.
The stories rolled out as sheets of typewriter paper and were handed off to copy boys, who carried them to the copy desk, where an editor corrected errors with a blue pencil. Then it was off to the composition room, where skilled eyes and fingers, working from the edited copy, formed a body of type, one line at a time, out of molten lead.
Sometimes there was blank space left over at the bottom of a column. You couldn’t just press a button to adjust the spacing, so instead you inserted a filler—something like, “Patagonian sheep bear wool only on the southern side” or “Bituminous coal sales increased last year to 370,000 metric tons.”
Through a series of arcane steps, all of these story-bearing type elements came together on a printing press, which impressed the type lines in black ink on long rolls of paper. The newspaper’s large pages—six to eight columns wide—were cut, folded, assembled into a compact publication, and stacked in bundles of fifty or one hundred.
At this point, Uncle Harry’s people—squads of paperboys and girls plus a few adult drivers for newsstands and rural deliveries—carried the newspapers to the reading public, in time to be read before supper. After supper, they were used to wrap the garbage.
Lots of other people were involved besides those already mentioned—clerks, librarians, stenographers, mechanics, pressmen, and part-time reporters called stringers. A typical small-city daily might give full-time work to dozens of people, and part-time earnings to many more.
#
Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha lived in a small, tidy brick bungalow on West Grove Street. It’s still there, decades later—or at least it was the last time Google drove by.
Uncle Harry’s job was a day job, but it didn’t end when he left the Register-Mail building in the afternoon. Sometimes a subscribing household was skipped from the delivery. When they called the newspaper office around suppertime to complain, the call was forwarded to Uncle Harry’s home phone. He always had an extra copy or two in the car. Either before or after supper, he would drive out and make the delivery himself. This was a routine part of his otherwise managerial job.
Uncle Harry wore a suit and tie to work and wing-tip shoes that he kept highly polished. He made good money and supported himself and Aunt Bertha well. They had no children but lavished attention on their nieces and nephews.
They belonged to the Lake Bracken Country Club. Not for golf; they didn’t golf. But they loved to fish and spent many fine summer evenings fishing Lake Bracken, either from a boat or from the shore. They ate what they caught.
Uncle Harry broke his leg one time by stepping in a hole at Lake Bracken while carrying a load of fishing gear. Took him a long time to mend, since he was getting older.
He worked at the Register-Mail until he was too sick to work anymore. He died in his sixties from complications of emphysema, having been a lifelong smoker. Aunt Bertha—a happy, sweet woman who was a favorite of all the nieces and nephews—was devastated. She died soon after, of a broken heart.
#
In balmier days, we enjoyed their company. My sister and I were great-niece and great-nephew to them. Uncle Harry had a wry sense of humor and always delivered a laugh line at family gatherings. Aunt Bertha did not work outside the home, and her household chores were not onerous, so she often piled us into her Ford Victoria and took us swimming at Lake Bracken.
There was a large clubhouse that overlooked the swimming beach. The lower story was given over to locker rooms and showers for swimmers. The upper story had a dining room for evening events and a daytime snack bar just off the dining room. It was a swell place, but it burned down years ago and was never replaced. Lake Bracken these days is mostly a golf course and a suburban community. I think there is a small clubhouse there, away from the lakeshore—a nineteeth-hole kind of place.
Times change.
#
These days, journals of paper still exist, but they are less relied on. The Register-Mail still delivers a print version six days a week “for a retro feel when consuming the news.” (For example, if you’re a very old person.) But don’t worry—the print subscription includes the eNewspaper as well.
Today we have something called a news cycle, and it is 24/7/365. People pick up information on the fly—through their TV, their laptop, their tablet, their phone. By something called Bluetooth.
Bluetooth used to be an embarrassing dental condition. After that, it was the name of Norway’s king. Now, it’s a window to the world.
There’s no longer any need to touch a smeary piece of paper. You can have your content beamed straight into your head. Nobody needs linotype operators anymore. Nobody needs pressmen.
And, frankly, why bother to pay an editor? Fact-checkers? Reporters? Nah.
Even mere rewrite men are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence.
More and more, our window to the world is filtered by something people trust precisely because they mistrust their own intelligence.
Uncle Harry might not have a job in today’s world. Aunt Bertha might have to go to work, perhaps as a barrista, and would certainly not have time to take anybody swimming. But that’s okay, because the swimming beach is closed anyhow.
#
Look at all we’ve gained.
Until next time, Dear Reader, blessings be upon you.
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
