In 1985 I wrote a long feature story titled “The Venerable Linotype” for The Evening Review about the end of the hot-lead era of typesetting in the East Liverpool area. (The “Evening” was dropped when it became a morning newspaper.)
It was an interesting article and you would enjoy it if you are of an historical bent. (My wife Honey will stop reading about here because history puts her to sleep.)
There was, however, a big hole in my Linotype story: it had nary a mention of the bitter, year-long printer strike of 1976 against the newspaper and its then-owner, Thomson Newspapers.
Thomson at the time was a giant publishing company which owned many newspapers, from The London Times to small-city American papers like ours.
In 1985 the strike was still a very touchy and seldom discussed subject at The Review. I don’t recall being warned off it but I could read the tea leaves. I focused my story on the Linotype, an unbelievably complex typesetting machine which for 100 years dominated and enabled the printing industry. The Review alone had 12 Linotypes.
By the time I wrote the piece, the few surviving Linotypes in this area were two-ton relics in small print shops, used for jobs like invitations and raffle tickets. The pottery union used one to set The Potters Herald newspaper until it folded (Ha! Newspaper joke) in 1982. The horseracing track at Newell, called Waterford Park then, set type for the day’s racing card on a Linotype.
WHY WRITE ABOUT the strike now?
Sorting through my old newspaper clippings in the basement (a good job for a rainy winter’s day) I ran across notes of an interview I did with Charles “Chick” Brookes for the Linotype feature, including unused information about the strike. I telephoned Chick, sharp and funny as ever at age 92, and resumed the interview after a 36-year break.
Chick apprenticed as a Linotype printer after serving four years with the Air Force during the Korean War as a radio mechanic. He worked 29 years at The Review as Linotype machinist and occasional foreman.
“It was a great job until the computer came in,” Chick said.
In the postwar years, downtown East Liverpool was the area’s retail hub, with stores open late on Saturday nights and sidewalks packed with shoppers. It took 26 union printers to put out The Evening Review. Chick recalls massive 70-page Thanksgiving editions.
Union printers had to be able to set type on all the machines, including Intertype machines, a competitor to Linotype, and specialized Ludlow and Elron printers. Some were dedicated to set classified ads in six-point type, others were set up for display advertising. Local news stories were typed in by hand. Wire news came in by teletype, and were printed out as well as punched in code on endless ribbons of paper tape. A wire editor pulled the tapes of stories to be used that day and sent them to the backshop, where four Linotypes were automated to read the tapes and could produce 20 lines of metal type per minute.
“We ran a couple of machines daily that were built in 1912,” said Chick. “The Linotypes were a machine that really didn’t wear out.”
OVER THE YEARS Linotypes ran faster and with more automation, but couldn’t adapt enough to survive a superior technology. In the end, many printers and their union couldn’t adapt enough either.
The union tried, paying for members to take phototypesetting classes in Youngstown, as well as night classes to learn typing on a standard QWERTY keyboard. After a working lifetime of typing on an ETAOIN SHRDLU keyboard, it was just too much for many of them.
(Those keys were lined up vertically on the left of a Linotype keyboard because they are the most commonly used letters in the English alphabet. Linotypes had two keyboards, one for lower case and one for capital letters.)
Negotiations for a new contract in 1976 for the 13 working printers was the company’s opportunity to bust the union and transition to cold type, a process which was happening throughout the industry.
The printers tried go-slow tactics. The company stationed armed guards in the backshop. One guard, Chick recalls, “pulled out his gun and threatened us.”
Printers went on strike and set up a picket line. “We walked the line for well over a year. Two of the typists, Annie Volino and Daisy Vucinich, were put to work on the phones, asking people to cancel their subscriptions. A lot did,” Chick said. Federal mediation failed.
Eventually the company “offered the printers $1,500 to go away. One by one each printer got a job, most up at the power plant across from Midland. We ended with two on the picket line, me and Jim Carson.”
Chick went to work at Birch Supply, a home and hardware store in the East End, making kitchen countertops.
Two or three Linotypes were sold. For the rest, the company “had a crew from Chicago come in here and break them up for junk.” The more recent ones had cost $25,000 new.
Chick said one of the union printers, Dale Kidd, bought a newer one for Keystone Printing, the Kidd family business, where it was a fixture for many years.
“He paid me to set it up and keep it running,” Chick said. “After some years he asked me if I’d like to buy it. I said, ‘Dale, what would I do with a Linotype? I’m building countertops.'”
(Google “Farewell ETAOIN SHRDLU 1978” to watch a brief documentary to see how Linotypes worked, made the last day hot lead was used to print The New York Times.)
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