“When the end of the world comes,
I want to be in Cincinnati because
it’s always 20 years behind the times.”
– Mark Twain
Richard March Hoe’s Six-Cylinder Printing Press, circa 1860
My Pulp
Fraction
by Jamie Jobb
A decade after World War II ended, I turned ten myself when we lived at 257 Main Street. That was two blocks from “Big Muddy”, the nickname everybody in town had for the Ohio River. Our town – Middleport – took its name from the historic fact that it was the mid-river port located halfway between Pittsburgh where the Ohio begins and Cincinnati where the Redlegs play ball. Right smack-dab in the middle of the Midwest, our town also was right smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. We knew, because we read about it in our Ohio history books.
Big sternwheelers – now major Mississippi River tourist attractions – still plowed past town. Those huge steam-powered vessels danced an odd rondo on the water as the incessant beat of their smokey pistons drove that ever-roiling churn of their big wheels chopping Big Muddy into well-regulated wakes from stern to shore. We’d rush down to the river to watch these majestic vessels stroll far beyond the outer limits of our small-town childhood fancy.
Every-day riverboats were the workhorse tugs which pushed barges full of coal; most men in our county, including my dad, were miners. Whenever the occasional “show boat” paddled past town, everybody knew it was a throwback to another time. Radio was well known then and television was a mere infant, so we still saw an occasional house of Vaudeville on the water. St. Louis writer Jeannette Cooperman recalls halcyon days before my birth, when her Big Muddy (The Mighty Mississippi) offered an evermore diverse variety of river-born commerce – the very Adventures of Huck Finn:
“The river was not, in those years, a sullen and muddy conveyor belt for barges. There were circus boats stuffed with clowns and poodles; theater boats wailing over villainy; opera boats that sent heralds ashore to trumpet their performances. Minstrels did the Cakewalk and the Buzzard Lope and the Buck and Wing, told tall tales, sang spirituals, shook tambourines, mocked current events. All the persuaders were on the river: preachers and card-readers, lecturers on mesmerism and the significance of bumps on the skull.”
* * *
The Daily Sentinel building – 111 Court Street, Pomeroy Ohio
KA-BOOM! Another sudden wooded thump knocks upon our front porch; we hear it all throughout the house! The mailman cometh; and another newspaper from another city stumbles to the front door of 257 Main. Some of my friends collected baseball cards, postage stamps, rare coins, dolls; I collected American newspapers. I ordered them through the mail and kept them in my room, stacked one atop another. This ever-expanding Paper Collection quickly became my own self-guided tour of The United States. Me – a budding author stuck in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere – learning to write by rustling up America’s great newspapers and hoarding them into my room.
As we studied Ohio history in school, I became most interested in our state’s big dailies. Some were nationally famous, like The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Akron Beacon-Journal, The Toledo Blade.
I delivered our six-page paper, The Daily Sentinel, all over town on my bicycle. Being so small, The Sentinel rolled neatly into a tight tube thinner than the neck of a hand-held condenser microphone. Sometimes I delivered The Athens Messenger when their carrier couldn’t do his Middleport route. Usually the same subscribers got both papers, so it was easy to cover for him. Our town was six blocks wide and 12 blocks long. Can-a-corn!
Every other Saturday, I also had to “collect” for the papers. I’d get off my bike, knock on everybody’s door to gather their subscription money, which usually was spare change: lots of nickels and dimes.
That’s when a nickel actually could buy something!
My best friend Tom’s family ran Rall’s Ben Franklin, our “five-and-dime” store. We were too small a town to have an actual “department” store where things cost more than a dollar. That was upriver in Pomeroy where Elberfelds had their four-story building with the big sign you could read across the river. I kept my paper route money in envelopes marked for who paid what. After I covered my costs for the papers, I’d spend any remaining nickels and dimes on my Paper Collection.
At first my Collection started small, as I was mostly interested in Ohio papers. Our state capitol, Columbus, had The Evening Dispatch which was delivered to our town, as well as The Star and The Review which were not. I knew Cleveland also had The Daily Record, The Post and The Call – none of which we could find in Middleport, unless it came in the mail. And that was the same situation for Cincinnati which had The Enquirer and The Post.
Every one of those daily papers was a whole lot thicker than The Sentinel’s six pages. Of course, they came from places that had a lot more news than Middleport.
Later I learned about other newspapers in our state: The Ashtabula Star-Beacon, The Chillicothe Gazette, The Gallipolis Daily Tribune, The Logan Daily News, The Marietta Times, The Dayton News Tribune, The Zanesville Times Recorder. None of them were delivered in Middleport, except through the post office.
Pretty soon my Paper Collection had jumped state lines. Of course, if only for our town’s namesake purposes, I needed to save copies of The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and The Pittsburgh Courier. But I also sent for other famous midwestern papers: The Chicago Tribune, The Sun Times, The American, The Bulletin, The Daily News, The Daily Star; The Detroit Free-Press, The Cadillac Evening News, The Battle Creek Journal, The Carbondale Free-Press, The Kansas City Star, The Omaha World-Herald, The Cedar Rapids Star, The St. Louis Post Dispatch!
From the midwest I looked east and sent for copies of The New York Times, The Herald, The Tribune, The Post. The Boston American Citizen, Evening Globe and Evening American. The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bulletin and Daily News. The Baltimore American, The Buffalo Evening News, The Washington Post, The Hartford Courant.
Unlike Noah in the Bible, I collected only one of each critter.
Every paper from every city seemed to smuggle another exotic smell into our house. I can’t recall any specific aroma, except for that ever-vague sensation of slightly damp and distant pulp, slowly deteriorating as the day’s news fades … More about that later. Just know, if you don’t, that the Ohio Valley at times can be a place of very high humidity with all the stifling aromatics associated with such dense climates.
My Collection was ever-growing. In the South, where the press had more graceful mastheads, I ordered The Memphis Commercial Appeal, The Bristol Virginia-Tennessean, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Atlanta Constitution, The Asheville Citizen, The Charlotte Observer, The Baton Rouge American, The New Orleans Daily Call, The Birmingham Post-Herald, The Mobile Press-Register.
Out West, I collected The Anchorage Daily Times, The Phoenix Arizona Sun, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Denver Post, The Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News. Over the months leading into junior high school my Collection continued to expand. And although I collected Superman and Archie comic books just like everybody else, I knew I was the only kid for miles around with a growing heap of news-pulp lurking in his house.
* * *
Middleport’s Carnegie Library in Street View
I would never have been able to contact a single newspaper in America were it not for The Middleport Carnegie Library, conveniently located on Third Avenue around the corner from our house. It was one of those small-town American one-room libraries spawned by the vast philanthropy of Pittsburgh’s famous Carnegie family.
Although I was not fond of Melvil Dewey’s Decimal System, I spent hours in our little library being particularly fond of Nancy Drew mystery stories (813.5209). Then one day there among the reference books, I stumbled across something that solved a huge mystery for me. It was a thick title that contained up-to-date listings of American newspapers – with actual street addresses printed right there for each paper. Where you could actually send somebody a letter!
My paper route was giving me spare change of my own to circulate, so I started writing letters to American newspapers: “Dear Circulation Department, I would like a copy of your newspaper. Here’s a dime for the paper and nickel for postage. Please mail it to 257 Main Street, Middleport Ohio. Thank you.” I tried to make my signature look as friendly as I could.
Each of these hand-written requests contained my return address printed large on the envelope and at the top of each letter, with a nickel and a dime taped right under my signature. So it wouldn’t rattle around in the envelope. These were correspondence tips Aunt Frank taught us. Back in the day when people sent real money in the mail and it would get to the intended destination without someone stealing it along the way.
The Daily Sentinel itself eventually took note of my odd hobby. Chet Tannehill, who’d come back home from the war to edit his hometown paper, wrote about it in the About Town column. I’m sure Mom complained to somebody about my nasty habit; it’s a small town, so word got around. She called it “a fire trap”. I kept the papers in a pile on the floor of the closet in my room. The pile was getting to be as tall as I was … and it was beginning to force my clothes out of its way as it grew. Mom noticed this. And Chet found out.
But Tannehill appreciated my budding interest in the press so he hired me to be The Sentinel’s stringer for Middleport High School basketball games he couldn’t attend. I’d cover those games, verify my statistics with the official scorekeeper and report back to Chet as soon as possible. Indeed, we had to work fast: The Sentinel was a daily paper! And in a town of two thousand five hundred people – not all of whom knew how to read – word spread quickly by word of mouth. Suddenly I had deadlines!
With its old flatbed press, The Daily Sentinel had no way to print color comics, so it had no Sunday paper. On Sunday Middleport got The Messenger from Athens or The Dispatch from Columbus. Both of them were big out-of-town papers with colorful comic strips bundled around them as they arrived before church on the Sabbath: such a mean tease full of devilish temptation for kids on their way to Sunday School!
Not long after I started writing for The Sentinel, I ranted to my friend Tom and my cousin Mick that Middleport deserved better local news coverage on The Day of Rest. I convinced them to join me in making our own newspaper for our town: The Sunday Times. Tom and Mick were the reporters and I was the editor.
Of course it contained all the local news we knew for that day, handwritten out in neat columns and impressed upon carbon paper so we could “print” three copies of each edition. Then we stuffed our paper full of all the advertising and comics we could find, then handed it out to our parents and siblings – one copy for each house. I’m not sure people appreciated our weekly effort of informing our town in our best hand-writing. But my cousin Cindy, who still lives in Ohio, recently recalled: “When you moved away, I was sad. We knew we weren’t gonna get that little newspaper … we weren’t gonna know the news in Middleport any more!”
* * *
Rock 'em, Sock 'em Front-Page News!
After we left Ohio, I wrote for high school newspapers in Alabama and Florida. Then in Miami, I edited our junior college paper which won national honors. I was lucky to have outstanding journalism mentors with solid student staffs at all three schools.
Ever-present at Birmingham’s West End High in her elegantly bobbed hair, Martha Trantham was faculty advisor of The Welion wherein she challenged us to write-and-rewrite so we’d get every word right. In Miami, Mable Meadows Staats led our Southwest High Lancer to national scholastic honors while requiring me to cover other athletes who weren’t necessarily members of my social circle. At Miami-Dade Junior College, our Falcon-Times adviser Barbara Garfunkel – “Miss G” – was a tiny focused woman with a huge personality and a nationally-renowned mentor of every famous newsman in town.
Each journalism teacher demanded accuracy of her student staff. I learned to find authorities on the spot of a story, take lots of notes, spell everybody’s name right and keep plentiful lists. I still scribble in Reporters Notebooks, those long thin spiral writing pads that perfectly fit into the palm of a writer’s hand. And my propensity to think in terms of lists has been duly noted in more than one drama-writing workshop.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, I introduced myself to Newspaper Movies which showed up on late-night tv or in occasional theater reruns: “Front Page Story”, “Five-Star Final”, “His Girl Friday”, “Meet John Doe”, “Citizen Kane”. I was particularly impressed by Jack Webb as the gritty editor in “-30-” which is typographic code for “the end” of a newspaper story. Jack reminded me of Miss G.
As a young sports writer, I thrived on the smell of newsprint and the roar of the crowd. But I also foresaw that underneath all that ink, the yellow parchment – like stage-light – eventually fades. I moved to California, where writing led me into electronic and digital forms of mass communication. Thereafter I only appeared in newsprint as a contributor or infrequent correspondent.
But old movies weren’t necessary for my recall of distant days on “The Desk and The Slot” – journalism jargon for the heart of the newsroom, where stories got edited and headlines got made. The Slot was a U-shaped desk with the desk editor seated at the center of the U with copy editors seated around the outer edges of The Desk.
That way the desk editor could deal individually with each copy editor who read the text for accuracy, grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. Then they wrote the headlines and tossed the head with the copy back at the editor in the slot, who reviewed it before marking up his page layout and sending the copy with headline downstairs to The Composing Room.
* * *
Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype
Marvin Reed, the man who offered me my first “backstage” job as a movie theater usher, also helped land my second “backstage” gig: working right out of high school in The Miami Herald composing room. I there stayed a little under a year, but that was long enough for me to learn how newspapers get made from the inside out. It was an incredible and thrifty processes to watch, all those people producing new issues of the paper everyday from scratch.
After the headline and copy dropped down pneumatic tubes from the newsroom upstairs, the head went off with a compositor who set those lines into type by hand. Meanwhile the story went to a Linotype operator who worked a Mergenthaler line-casting machine to transform the copy into hot type. After briefly cooling, that type then went onto The Floor where compositors arranged it into neat columns and rows, all arising out of solid lead that had been molten mere moments ago.
In this solid form every word was printed upside down and backwards, a mirror image of the text. Compositors were incredible craftsmen who could spot a typo or bad grammar by reading backward-cast words in their proper reverse order. I felt these guys were twice as eagle-eyed as any copy editor upstairs.
During my brief time there, the composing room went through enormous change with the advent of automation and “cold type”, which started the long, slow industry-wide transition from letterpress to offset printing. Letterpress worked like rubber stamps; offset was “indirect” printing, with no upraised letters ever touching the paper. The Herald had invested in a huge mess of letterpresses but still had lots of room for expansion.
Frequent visits to The Herald’s press room exposed my ears to the tremendous roar of those mighty machines. The presses sat in long rows in a four-story cavern, a factory really, with huge rolls of paper unspooling underneath the ever-wheeling web of letterpress plates. Those long strands of pulp wove upward throughout the presses before getting elegantly folded and cut into an assembled parade of overlapping individual papers.
Those fresh papers flew upward on conveyor belts – just like in the movies – to the top floor where they were counted, bundled and then dropped back down through the building on spiral chutes leading to a dock full of trucks waiting to deliver those bundles to scattered paperboys all across town. Kids like I used to be.
Years passed before I realized that as a teen I’d been exposed intimately to the inner workings of two major forces of American entertainment commerce: the movie studio and the daily newspaper. Both were industrial-strength institutions, meaning they conceived and produced their products (cans of movies and copies of newspapers) all within a single compound of focused workers knocking that product out the door every day.
Over time, my hearing fell victim to the mighty roar of The Herald’s letterpresses. Now the building that housed them no longer stands there, that mighty press room leveled down to bare ground that’s now become prime-time waterfront real estate in Miami’s mad postmodern intercontinental luxury boomtown.
* * *
Norris W. Alfred: 1913-1995
After leaving journalism, I still subscribed to our local paper – wherever I lived. But in 1980, I also signed-up for a weekly newspaper from a small midwestern town I’d never known, right smack dab in the middle of Nebraska. This odd periodical, The Polk Progress, had a strange motto on its masthead: “Slower is Better”.
That catchphrase started to make sense after I got to know the paper’s editor, Norris Alfred, who became a regular pen pal. This was long before email or internet communication. As an experienced pulp collector, I felt it my civic duty to support this esteemed small-town editor who was widely respected by America’s mainstream media. Indeed, Norris had just been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize!
I knew nobody in Nebraska, but I knew to subscribe to The Progress based on local chatter from San Francisco journalists and broadcasters. I just wrote a letter as before, to start my subscription.
When The Progress began arriving in the mail, it was clear why the paper attracted so much national attention. Norris Alfred’s whimsied opinions were sparkled throughout his regular reports on the direct local effects of last week’s weather, his leisurely bird-watching “news”, his internationally astute editorials and especially in his catchall column: "Polking Around".
By persistence of vision and revision, with long hours by himself on the desk, linotype and letterpress, he kept his newspaper alive until 1989.
Five years after his passing, The New York Times recalled how Norris got his start as a small-town editor: "I was saddled with debt, a precarious business in an unsubstantial building, and I planned to publish a newspaper each week with a 1913 Linotype and an 1890 big cylinder Babcock press."
But after many mechanical breakdowns, he was ready to call it quits when a farmer came in to town to renew his subscription. "I better pay for two years,” said the farmer. “Then I won't have to come to town so often." Norris knew if a subscriber put that much faith in his paper, then he'd better keep publishing. But in 1971, nine years before I knew it existed, Norris Alfred was already recalling how his hometown had changed:
"The average age of farmers has increased and so have their waistlines. This is probably also true of farm wives but due to The Progress’s polite-news-only policy we refrain from definitely asserting it as a fact. Chickens have disappeared from farmyards. Milk cows have followed the chickens. Barns are surplus and are needed only as a place for the farmer to go and lick his wounds after an argument with the wife. The building is also used as a shelter for motorcycles, Mustangs (the car, not the horse), the boat, pickup, camper, machinery parts. Occasionally the dog or cat wanders in and looks around. Even today's farm children don't know where milk comes from."
On March 22, 1980, I wrote Norris to express my initial impressions about his unique weekly: “Unquestionably, The Progress is the most eagerly awaited publication that comes to our mailbox. Perhaps this is strange, for we’ve never visited Polk and have no relatives there. But somehow your newspaper … draws daily life on this planet into focus, while other media merely muddle the view.”
That letter to Alfred also included something I’d found in a Berkeley offset print shop – a little poster with a big message. Norris wrote back six days later to say he’d print it in his next edition and “It will be set in poster type and put on permanent display in The Polk Progress Printery.” Sure enough, the statement appeared in the next issue in all caps. It read:
“THIS IS
A PRINTING OFFICE
CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION
REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS
AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME
ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH
AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR
INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE
FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD
NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND
NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER’S HAND
BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN TRUTH
FRIEND, YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND
THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE”
Long after Alfred had passed away, I learned that Beatrice L. Warde actually had penned the words on that poster in 1932 as a manifesto to show off the new Perpetua typeface. After graduates of Warde’s apprentice printers class committed her famous broadside to a plaque hanging at the entrance of The United States Government Printing Office, that fact eventually found me in the 21stCentury. But the news never reached the ears of Norris (Slower-Is-Better) Alfred, who passed away in 1995 and believed – as I did then – that those words were anonymous, an unbylined broadside from that Great Printery In The Sky.
* * *
Newsstand at The Turn of 20th Century
Working late night shifts as a student intern at The Herald, I would often visit Frank’s Out-Of-Town Newspapers which was open all night just off Flagler at SW First Avenue in downtown Miami, around the corner from Mary Jane Shoes. It wasn’t located indoors, but along an exterior wall full of racks with a large awning overhanging the sidewalk to keep off the frequent rain. That 24-hour news-vendor had 25 various sports magazines, as well as 93 newspapers from 42 states. After work, I’d visit Frank’s newsstand and check out his Paper Collection.
More than once as I stood there on the street and surveyed that wall full of current events from all across America, an odd thought from the Ohio Valley would sneak up and spank me like a paddlewheel.
“Just think,” I thought, “All that trouble I went to as a kid. All those visits to the Middleport Library. All those letters to circulation departments. All those nickels, All those dimes. It seemed to takeforever to build up my Paper Collection and now, ten years later I’m standing here on a street in Miami looking at a Paper Collection that would outgrow my Middleport closet in a day. Who has time to read all this news?”
For six and a half decades now I’ve been filing away my own news clippings and other printed periodical postings in separate files – another collecting habit I learned in those days before Google, when I discovered that newspapers have “morgues” – organized files of clippings from past pages, cataloging all sorts of local news.
Some of my personal pulp non-fiction was kept in a brim-full bankers box. Seldom did I look inside that box, other than to add more paper or to retrieve an occasional memory. But preparation of this article forced me to dive back into the box again to double-check my notes and nail down a few forgotten details.
But as I retrieved the box and took off its lid, something didn’t smell quite right. I reached into the pile to pull out the papers AND the contents of the entire box – perfectly folded newspapers when they went in – now became a sudden puddle of pulp that crumbled through my fingers. Every page broken into tiny parts of parchment: now mere fractions of my faded newsprint memories. Obviously this is why digital copies are a writer’s best insurance for saving past work.
Thankfully, I’d already photocopied the most important clips under my byline so all was not lost. And my clippings from The Polk Progress were kept in a filing cabinet in a file, not loose in a box, so they’re still holding their shape. For a while …
Meanwhile, YouTube continues to track my video preferences and recently suggested a promotional clip which was impossible to comprehend as it was so jam-full of yahoo jargon that it didn’t connect to anything a common person might ever want to know.
Also, it didn’t help that the video gave itself no introduction whatsoever. It just jumped right into comparing machines, which all looked the same – like outsized video drones.
Actually these strange robots were 21st Century printing presses – or rather as the industry now calls them: “Automatic Printers”. These digital devices can print on textiles, plastic, board or many other flat surfaces besides paper. These machines are meant to print the colorful fluff that can be posted on billboards and busses. Or bundled with some kid’s Sunday paper as wrap-around comics. Assuming any kids now read newspapers and want to produce one themselves …
* * *
FURTHERMORE
https://www.stlmag.com/history/Mississippi-River-History/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie
https://yorknewstimes.com/news/polk-progress-editor-norris-alfred-put-unique-spin-on-hometown-news/article_70326cbd-1655-5c62-a6ee-27678bfe24d5.html
https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028291/02564/6j
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottmar_Mergenthaler
https://ohio-river-sternwheel-festival.myshopify.com
https://designmanifestos.org/beatrice-warde-this-is-a-printing-office/
https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/35425/uc-press-at-125-years-this-is-a-printing-office/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetua_(typeface)
http://brownmfg.net/p/103/electraprint-junior-automatic-textile-printer#
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2010/03/pulp-diction-complete-serial_5990.html
