Country Editor's Boy Read online

  There were two doctors in town, but no dentist and no lawyer. There was a second bank, though you might have to look twice to see it in its modest white frame building across the street from the big brick Farmers State Bank. The Flagler State Bank was usually called the Lavington bank. It was managed and largely owned by the man who started as a storekeeper in a tent, and some said you had to mortgage your life to get a loan there; but nobody denied that it was one of the soundest banks in the state.

  And there were two newspapers, the prosperous-looking Progress on Main Street, and the struggling little News in its dark basement.

  I sensed some of these things, but by no means all, that afternoon, I suppose. But mostly I was aware that Flagler was a new and different town, still raw, still relatively new, still with peeling buffalo horns and bleached skulls in the grass at the edge of town. Men who had hunted those buffalo lived there, and men who came up the trail with the big herds from Texas. The past was right there on the flats, so near you could still hear its echoes on quiet nights if you listened. The old trails were not all grass-grown. But change was under way. A new generation, my father’s generation, who already dreamed of tomorrow, was beginning to take charge. Change was in the air. Father had sensed it, counted on it.

  All I really knew, that afternoon, was that this was going to be home, where I would learn a trade, go to school, grow up as boys inevitably do. It was new, but it had enough links with the past that had already shaped me so that I would feel at home there.

  Father asked no more questions. He distributed the last few handfuls of type, washed up, and we went to the hotel. Mother was there, tired but triumphant. The kitchen wouldn’t have to be painted. Once she got the dirt scrubbed off, the paint wasn’t too bad, she said.

  We went downstairs to supper, and Father said, “Clarence Smith told me today that this is going to be the best wheat year this country ever had. Out north, he said, the wheat may go thirty bushels to the acre.”

  “Mr. Smith,” Mother said, “is a real estate man, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Then Father amended the report somewhat. “Not all the wheat will go that heavy, but he thinks the average will be close to twenty. Just think of it, twenty bushels of two-dollar wheat to the acre! On land those farmers bought for fifteen dollars an acre just a few years ago! That’s prosperity. That’s what makes a boom.”

  “Farmers,” Mother said, “don’t advertise, do they?”

  “The merchants who sell to the farmers do. They have to go after the farmers’ business. Mark my word, when this bumper crop is harvested, this town will really hum.”

  “What if it hails?” Mother asked.

  “Well—” Father hesitated. He didn’t want to think about hail. Nobody did. Hail could wipe you out in the passing of a cloud. “Well, there hasn’t been any hail yet. And in another two weeks they’ll be harvesting.”

  Mother said nothing more. She seemed to be full of her own thoughts. The men across the room, at the long table, were talking crops, loud in their optimism. I saw that Father was listening to them. I listened too, and I could see Father smile deep inside, a glow as though there was a warm, golden dream in there. Finally I heard one man declare, “There won’t be enough boxcars to haul it away. They’ll be piling wheat in the streets!” Then the inner smile lit up Father’s whole face. He turned to Mother, about to say something. But she was still deep in her skeptical, hardheaded thoughts. He glanced at me, took a deep breath, slowly let it out, and reached for another piece of meat. His eyes were shining, but he kept the dream to himself.

  5

  FATHER WAS TOO HOPEFUL about railroad freight schedules. The furniture didn’t arrive for another week and there was plenty of time to scrub the whole house and paint the front room, the only one, Mother decided once the grime had been removed from the walls, that really had to have fresh paint. Then, with curtains up, carpets down, and furniture in place, we began to settle in, as settled as we ever would be in that house. It was a place to eat and sleep, which was all that mattered. Most of our daylight hours were spent at the office.

  I spent that summer learning the printer’s trade.

  I have to say that firmly and flatly because that is the way I remember it. One way. Actually I remember two boys and two summers, and it is almost impossible to think of them as the same boy and the same summer, though I know they were. One of those remembered boys was an apprentice, a printer’s devil, practically indentured, who spent all his waking hours in that dark print shop, learning the printer’s craft the way my father learned it. But the other boy in my memory had afternoons off and even whole days of freedom, to come and go as he pleased, to do whatever he wished, follow his whims and be almost as free as the sunshine and the wind.

  Both memories are true and absolute, and their duality—actually it is multiplicity—is a part of boyhood and youth. Young emotions are intense, and a boy has a remarkable capacity for total absorption. He can in one day live not only two but sometimes half a dozen lives. I know that I lived two sharply defined and complete lives that summer; and I know that I cannot write of both simultaneously. The best I can do is write of them one at a time.

  First, then, the apprentice, the printer’s devil.

  That term, “printer’s devil,” comes from the drudging tasks that are the apprentice’s lot in a print shop, most of which involve printer’s ink. He washes forms of inky type, washes inky presses, cleans and refills the ink fountains on those presses, washes the inky rollers that ink the type, gathers and burns the inky waste paper. At every turn he encounters printer’s ink, thick, sticky and usually black. He may scrub his skin raw, but that black ink persists, in every pore and around every nail. He looks like an imp of hell, a devil indelibly marked.

  My first job each morning was to sweep out the office. I might satisfy Father with a lick-and-promise job, but when Mother arrived about nine o’clock, after she had done her housework, she looked around and said, “Get the broom, son. Sweep out the corners.” So I swept. I carried out the waste paper and burned it in the alley. I ran errands. I folded papers. And I washed the type and presses. Father was as demanding about the way I washed type and presses as Mother was about the way I swept.

  I worked for weeks and months at such drudgery. This statement, of course, is rank exaggeration, but I am dealing now with memory, not fact, and in memory I relived my father’s apprenticeship. He worked for two years as a printer’s devil before he was allowed to start learning the basic skills of the trade. So if my time sense is somewhat askew, that is why. For me those two years were compressed into a few weeks. By the end of that summer I had the basic skills, and over the next few years I became a competent journeyman printer. Eventually I became a linotype operator and repairman. I learned my trade, as my father had planned. But I am remembering now the beginnings, and, as I said, the time sense is all askew.

  I worked for weeks and months at the drudging tasks, then, until the morning when Father said, “I guess you can start learning the case.” He chose a piece of copy, handed me a printer’s stick, and told me to get up on the stool at the type case and start setting type. “You know how to hold a stick and justify a line,” he said. “The rest is just a matter of practice and memory.”

  A printer’s stick is a short, shallow, metal tray that the compositor holds in his left hand. He assembles the type in it, letter by letter, line by line, until he has “a stickful,” about a dozen lines. Then he transfers that type to a long steel tray called a galley and starts over with an empty stick. That part, the actual assembly of the type, the letters, is easy. Your fingers soon learn the necessary motions. But to become a real compositor you have to “learn the case,” as a typist learns the keyboard of a typewriter. Your hand must learn where to reach for each letter.

  The type is in shallow wooden trays, or cases, partitioned into separate boxes for the individual letters. There are two cases, one for the small letters, the other for the capitals. The two cases are set on a ra
ck, the one with the small letters immediately in front of the typesetter, the one with the capitals just beyond and at an angle, uptilted. From those two cases come the names “lower case” for the small letters and “upper case” for the capitals. The upper case, with the capital letters, is easy to learn because the boxes for the letters are arranged alphabetically, left to right and top to bottom. But the lower case, with the small letters, has boxes of various sizes arranged by frequency of use. The bigger boxes, closest to hand, contain the most-used letters, e, t, a, i, s, n, h and r. The rest of the letters, as well as punctuation marks and blanks for spaces between the words, are arranged around those big boxes.

  I had watched Father set type many times. It seemed ridiculously easy. He never seemed to hurry. He would glance at the copy, read a line, and there would be a steady click-click-click as he set the letters in the stick. The lines seemed to fill automatically and properly spaced. He could set type and carry on a conversation at the same time.

  That first morning it took me half an hour to set my first stickful, a dozen lines. I hunted all over the case for the letters, fumbled, dropped them, got them in wrong side up. Father, at work at the stone, finally asked, “Having trouble, son?”

  “A little,” I admitted.

  “Maybe this will help.” He got a soft pencil and marked the letters on the partitions of their boxes. “I’ve known apprentices to get fired for marking the boxes,” he said. “But you didn’t do it. I did…. There. See if that doesn’t make it easier.”

  It did. I set the next stickful in twenty minutes. By noon I had set almost half a galley, about six stickfuls. Before we went to dinner Father told me to pull a proof and he would read it as soon as we got back. I felt rather proud of myself until he read it and handed it to me, without a word. He had found at least one error in every line. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at him, and he said, with a smile, “A little dirty. But you’ll do better next time. Make your corrections. Then I want you to wash up the little job press.”

  I got the galley, wet the type with a sponge—water makes type stick together, easier to handle—and started making my corrections. But I had the problem of reading type to see where to make the changes. Type is all backward, the reverse of the printed letters, and if you try to read it right side up the lines are backward too, right to left. So a printer reads type upside down, from left to right but from the bottom up, line by line. The trick of this is learning to recognize the letters upside down and backward. Reading type was another skill I had to learn, and it, too, could be learned only with practice.

  When I finally had made my corrections and pulled another proof Father glanced at it and said, “That’s pretty good. I didn’t mark the logs. We’ll let them go for now.”

  “Logs?” I asked.

  “Logotypes, compound letters. I marked them on the case, but I guess you didn’t see them. There’s an eff-el, an eff-eye, a double-eff-el and a double-eff-eye, each on a single type. They’re in the boxes up there at the top of the lower case.” He picked up an “ffl” logotype and showed it to me. “They save time in composition and they look better in print. You’ll learn them, in time.”

  I did, but it took weeks. Finally Father’s patience with me snapped. He culled a pile of fillers clipped from other newspapers, chose two, and handed them to me. “Set these,” he ordered, and I knew by his tone of voice that something was up. I began to set the first one, about flies and fly screens. I had set almost a stickful of type from it before I saw Father watching me with an almost malicious gleam. Then I saw all those “flies” in the copy, every one of them calling for the “fl” logotype. I made the corrections before I emptied the stick, and watched every line from there on. And the second piece was about offices and officials, full of “ffi’s.” By the time I had finished with those two pieces of copy I knew where the logotype boxes were, and I never forgot. I still remember—they are right up there!

  So I learned to set type, which then was basic to the printer’s trade. It was a skill that then dated back about 450 years, to Johann Gutenberg and his first movable type, the beginning of modern printing. It was a dying craft even when I learned it, already giving way to the machine; and today more complex machines and even computers have taken over. The skill of setting type by hand is now a lost art except for a few special purposes. But I learned it, and in the learning I also learned about grammar, syllabification, punctuation and spelling, probably more than I ever learned in school. Father never finished the eighth grade in school, but he was a remarkably good speller, knew all the basic rules of grammar, was meticulous about punctuation, and was a firm disciplinarian about word division and punctuation. He was one of the few people I ever knew who actually studied the dictionary. An avid and critical reader, he had an uncanny sense of words and a large vocabulary. Yet in his occasional editorials he wrote simple, forceful English that was pared to the bone. He got a basic education at the type case, broadened it with books and magazines, and was both articulate and informed. He gave me the rudiments of strength and clarity as a writer.

  Mother never learned to set type. She suggested it, but Father said no. He must have known she had neither the patience nor the temperament for it. Instead, she learned to use the typewriter and typed the local news she gathered by telephone. In odd moments I too learned to use that old green Oliver which to Father was simply “The Mill.” He also learned to use it, but to the end of its life a few years later he fought with it, hammered it, cursed it, detested it. The only reason he used it was that his own handwriting was almost illegible, even to him.

  The Oliver was a strange typewriter. From the front it looked something like a grinning dog with upthrust ears and, grotesquely, three rows of white teeth. The ears were the twin banks of type bars, one bank on each side. The three rows of teeth were the three rows of keys. It had only three rows instead of the conventional typewriter’s four because it was a “dual-shift” machine. When you used one shift key it printed capitals. When you used the other shift key it printed numerals and punctuation marks. In use, it sounded like a miniature threshing machine. I never saw an Oliver with a ribbon that wasn’t red and blue, though there must have been red-and-black ribbons and perhaps all-black ribbons too. Half the copy I set was typed in blue, the other half in red. Mother used the blue part till it wore dim, then shifted to the red part and wore it out before she put on a new ribbon. After all, new ribbons cost 35 cents each.

  When I had learned the case well enough to be of some help, Father taught me to feed press. Today such work is done automatically. There were automatic-feed presses even then, but not in small-town newspaper offices. Again, I learned the old craft, which required that every sheet be put into the press by hand, imprinted, then taken out. This was called press feeding. It wasn’t a complicated job, but it called for coordination, timing and rhythm. A good, fast press feeder was likely to find a job open in any busy print shop.

  Both of Father’s presses were platen presses, machines with big iron jaws that opened and closed with a simple mechanism of cogs and lever arms. A form of type was locked on the back jaw of the press where the soft rollers, gathering ink from the ink fountain at the top, came down and inked the type for each impression. The front jaw, or platen, had movable guides to hold the paper in position as it was inserted, sheet by sheet. When the jaws closed, the sheet was printed. When they opened, the printed sheet was taken out and a fresh sheet inserted. All you had to do, once the type was set and the form locked in the press, was start the press, put the sheets in one at a time with your right hand, take each sheet out a moment later with your left hand, pile them on the shelf immediately in front of you, and do this over and over. A good press feeder could do this unbelievably fast. Thirty impressions a minute were not unusual. I have known my father to print a thousand letterheads in half an hour and seem to loaf while he was doing it.

  He started me on billheads for the office. He set the type, locked it in the chase, put the chase on the pre
ss, set the guide on the platen, and printed a few sheets. Then he turned the job over to me. “Just remember two things. Don’t try to hurry—you’ve got plenty of time. And don’t get your fingers caught. If a sheet looks crooked when you put it in, let it go. Don’t ever reach in after it. Paper’s cheap, but you can’t buy new fingers.”

  I took his place, leaning against the ledge for the finished sheets. I moistened the fingers of my right hand, set the first sheet in place, and let in the clutch. The press closed, opened, and I took out the printed sheet with my left hand. But I forgot to put in a fresh sheet. I reached desperately for the throw-off lever, which would prevent an impression, and missed it in my haste.

  “All right,” Father said, letting out the clutch and slowing the press. “You missed. Get some benzene on a rag and wash the platen. Then try again.”

  I washed the platen, washed my hands, and started over. That time I printed three sheets before I missed, and that time I reached the throw-off lever. I was hurrying, unsure of myself.

  Father shut off the motor and hooked up the treadle on the press. “Try kicking it. You can make it go as slow as you want until you get the hang of it. Now watch.”

  I stepped aside. He started the press very slowly, pushing the treadle with his right foot, and he moved his hands so deliberately that I couldn’t fail to see every motion. His right hand was sliding a fresh sheet into place even as his left hand removed the one just printed. “Rhythm,” he said. “That’s all there is to it. Making your hands work together even though they are doing different things. Now you take it again. But not too slow. That spoils the rhythm.”

  I began to get it. The rhythm came, a rhythm dictated by the press itself. And the amazing thing was that once I had the rhythm it was easier to feed press fast than slow. The hands fell into the rhythm almost automatically.

  Many years later I went into a small-town print shop to buy manuscript paper, and the owner was hand-feeding letter-heads on a job press much like those my father had. I watched for a few minutes and, on impulse, asked, “Do you mind if I see if I still remember how to feed press?”