Passage II

A Family Craft

The printshops where my father worked, whether in a publishing house in Vermont or in a small-town newspaper office in Idaho, always presented the same vivid experience. The tap dance of Linotype keys the pungent scents of printing ink and cleaning chemicals, and the slapping sound of the rollers dripping with ink—every job has its hazards.

It was a special occasion for which I could visit my father at work. However, he was a Linotype operator and, the Linotype machine seemed formidable. My father's hands flew across an enormous keyboard that was unlike any I saw in other places. As he typed, the machine melted chunks of metal and then formed the molten mass into lines of metal type, bright and burning hot, these lines of type—headlines, sentences, phrases—slid out of the machine. Once cooled, these slugs (as the lines of type are called) were taken to a table where the typesetter fit them together by hand into a wooden frame the size of a newspaper page. The frame was set into the printing press, inked, and used to print pages. Afterward, the type was cleaned in various chemicals and were put back into the Linotype to be re-created as tomorrow's headlines and stories.

In the early seventies, the Linotype process was phased out, and my father went to work in the business office. His company had switched to offset printing, a method that relies on photographic images rather than metal type. Since then, computers have further revolutionized the printing industry. When I process text at my computer, in my job, I remember my father at his Linotype machine. When comparing his workplace to mine, it is quiet and clean. The air smells of coffee, not tea. Instead of stained and scuffed wooden tables, I'm surrounded by sleek vinyl office furniture. But in essence, my father's work and mine are the most alike. From him, I inherited faithfulness to the written word and care in sending it out into the world.