Cowboys weren't the only ones who had to worry about hot lead

By Ron Bender, section editor and columnist, Rapid City (S.D.) Journal

I dont' know what made me want to reminisce about the old lead-type days of newspapering. Maybe it was flipping through old photos in the news library a couple of days ago and finding a really old picture of Al Gossage working in the composing room decades ago. Al was the brother of Rapid City Journal founder Joseph Gossage.

My first brush with the newspaper business was in my East River hometown of Eureka.

Besides clerking and stocking shelves summers and Saturdays in my parents' hardware store from the time I could see over the counter, I was often the plumber's helper to Johnny Bauer and Melroy Job, the men who did heating and plumbing work for my dad.

They taught me a lot of things in my formative years: how to fix a toilet, how to install furnace pipe, how to correctly sip an unsual homemade German-Russian liquer called "one hundred ninety and burnt sugar." (You sip it very, very slowly so as not to get knocked on your can.)

One summer's day when I was in high school, Johnny, Melroy and I were in the basement of the local newspaper, the Northwest Blade, repairing some plumbing problems.

Spotting a freshly inked tray of lead type near the Linotype machine, Johnny, always the joker, grabbed my bare arm and pressed it on the type. When we looked at the results, we could both read on my arm part of a Page 1 story for the next edition of the newspaper.

Cool. So cool that I didn't want to wash it off until my mother insisted I do so that evening.

My next encounter with lead type was after college graduation, at my first job as a sports writer with the Waterloo Daily Courier in Iowa.

After I learned the ropes, I worked into the rotation of running the sports desk, which involved laying out pages, writing headlines and photo captions, and coordinating the photos and sports copy.

After all that was accomplished on paper and manual Royal typewriter in the newsroom, the desk man on duty walked down one floor to the omposing room to oversee the compositor putting together the day's sports pages in metal page frames called chases.

The sports compositor in Waterloo was a friendly man named Ed Fitkin, although he wasn't so genial the first time we worked together.

Not knowing any better, I had picked up a few lines of type to hand to Ed, helping him out, I thought. Imagine my surprise when he smacked me on the knuckles with his slim, metal pica pole.

"What the %$#@! was that for," I asked angrily.

But Ed settled me down and clamly explained that the Courier had a union shop. That translated to: The sports and news people could look at but not touch the type. Compositors did all the work.

That said, Ed and I got along fine, and soon I became adept at reading columns of type backward, which was critical to editing on the fly to make stories fit.

When I joined the Journal staff, I spent several years on the wire desk, as it was called then. Another wire editor and I alteranted at putting the news pages togehter, which also involved looking over the shoulders of the compositors as they built the pages.

One big difference here was that the Journal did not have a union shop, so I could touch all I wanted. I was even encouraged to help out by my composing room buds Jack Naeve, Ken Canfield, Charley Boland, Noel Wilcox and others, especially when we were in danger of busting deadline.

The other major difference was that I stood on the opposite side of the paper chase than I had in Waterloo, which meant I had to read both backwards and upside down. That was quite a trick, but I eventually mastered it.

The days of lead type are long gone, and the way we produce a newspaper today is much faster, more efficient -- and a bit duller. Computers don't have the same exotic smell as boiling pots of lead.

Ed Martley of the Journal copy desk and I were talking about the old days on a recent night. I made the mistake of asking Amy Phillips Bursch, who joined our staff as a copy editor right out of college two years ago, if she had studied lead type at South Dakota State University.

"Yeah," Amy replied. "In history of journalism."

(Ron Bender graduated from EHS in 1961. His parents, Al and Frieda Bender, ran the Eureka Hardware store on Main Street for many years.)