No Reason to Change

We didn’t have any good reason to change from hand-setting the paper. Now, we had a Linotype [typesetting machine] back in nineteen-and-one that they used about a year. But they had problems with it, and they finally just sent it back. My father wasn’t very mechanical-minded, he didn’t like mechanical things. He said all the women didn’t break down at one time! 

“About 40 odd years ago we got expensive and got a linotype. Didn’t prove satisfactory because we attempted to run it with a steam engine and we attempted to heat the metal with a blue flame burner instead of electricity like they do now. The Pocahontas Times and the Saturday Evening Post are about the only two publications that I know anything about that are still hand-set.”

Setting the Paper

We have a hook to put news or ads on and we just put them on the case. The ladies would start right away at setting type. They always had ladies to set the type. They have a little more patience with picking up type. You’d have to have something written, ready for them to set. 

They’re set letter by letter in a stick until it’s about 2 inches of type. And then they’re put on a galley till you get a column, then you proof it and correct it. Then when you get ready to make up the paper you take all your galleys and assemble them into a page. You set type - a little type’s set the last of the week - then you start in Monday morning and set and work just as hard as you can. When you hand-set, you get through printing on Wednesday evening. You throw your type back in on Thursday morning. You have to start setting again for the next paper, as soon as you get through. 

When you were printing on those presses, it took at least a day for each side. Time you’d make up your paper and get it printed and all, and then tear it down, why, you had to start early. What type you already had set, that’s what you printed for the inside pages. If it came in early, it went on the inside.

What they set on the last of the week, you could use Monday, you see, to print your first side. And then while you’re printing that, they could be setting on stuff that went on the outside pages.
 
 

The Press

“I had a Washington Hand Press, and a mighty good man might run off between a hundred to two hundred papers an hour on it. Then was followed by a Campbell Country Press, and the present press then is known as a Babcock Reliance.”

When we quit printing on this press, we were printing 5,600 to 6,000 papers, and the press runs 1,200 an hour. But you don’t get more than about a thousand an hour, so it took about five hours each side - each two pages. You could do four pages without any trouble, but every two or three weeks you’d have to have an extra page, so you’d print it up on Friday, and then cut it in two and fold it.

The paper was four pages. At election time and all, you’d have a double paper, sometimes you’d print eight pages. But now with the computers you can set up enough type in one night to fill up several pages. Then, you had to think a long time ahead.
 

“Catching Papers”

When you printed, each paper came around this flapper. It would put the paper down, catch another one, take it down, catch another one, take that down - well, somebody had to sit there and straighten the papers out, or else you’d have just a mess of papers. They had to be turned over and printed on the other side.
 

The Mail Run

The papers have always been mailed. We just carried them to the post office. Now, of course, we have about 90-some sacks of mail - we have to divide it up and all. Used to be, you just took it over to the post office and gave it to them. We had an East State sack and a West State sack - east of Deep Water [Fayette County] and west of Deep Water. That was the dividing line for mailing, on the railroad.

You had two trains each way - up and down in the morning and up and down in the afternoon, up until ‘50-some. They didn’t deliver it any other way. 

I was looking through some old cash books here, before the flood of ‘85, and the total postage bill for the whole year was $285 in ‘42. That paid all your mailing and all your sending out your statements and everything. You didn’t pay anything in the county, your county mail was free. Not for letters, but for newspapers - free in-county distribution. The government felt they were important enough to disseminate information, that they didn’t charge, in the county.
 

Stop the Presses!

The last part of ‘74 was when we stopped using our press. We had a problem getting paper. We couldn’t get the cut sheets of paper. Everybody’s printing off of rolls these days. We’d always gotten paper from R. D. Wilson in Clarksburg, and we’d get a ton at a time - that was about all we had storage room for. They said they just couldn’t get the paper any more. Then they said they could get us a whole carload, but that was $35,000 worth of paper.

And it was just about that time that everybody was changing to offset presses. And also about that time [typesetter] Eve Grimes broke her arm, I remember. We had been going to Lewisburg and getting extra sheets printed. So we just started going down there and printing it all. It was lots easier! We still hand-set at least the front page and a lot of the ads. 

Of course we just decided that certain things would still be hand-set type: the front page, your obituaries, your notices and these things, and a lot of the ads, were going to be done by hand-set type. We’d run through a copy on our press, get a good copy, and then it was pasted up and printed offset. 

I guess we stopped hand-setting altogether after the flood in 1985.