THE LINOTYPE

So you wondered what Hugh Mouse has been spending his time writing lately? Glad you asked! He's not really a mouse, you know. He's Maggie's alter ego. Maggie (me) has been writing memories from the 50s and 60s of the activities in the shop of the Duplin Times, a small town weekly newspaper. This one's about the linotype. If you like it, make a comment about it and I'll throw in another one…………

The linotype was a big metal machine that melted bars of lead and molded them into lines of metal type. Before getting to the linotype, the bars had to be made. The pressmen, Mose and Amos, melted the lead in a concrete and cinder block closet-size room. I avoided that room. Very hot in there! Melted lead didn’t smell so good, either. Then they poured it into bar-shaped molds they had lying around on the concrete floor next to the room. The molds were about two feet long, I guess. I was a kid, and I surely never measured them. The lead solidified into a bar with a hole in the top so that it could be hung from a chain on the Linotype, where it slowly descended and melted and was cast into millions of letters on little lead strips. The strips dropped steadily into a tray that was at just about my eye level. For some reason, watching this was hypnotic. My sister and I, in two different generations, both found this mesmerizing and would watch it for hours.

The linotype operator's hands seemed to wave across the keyboard as he typed – not like my mom’s fingers bouncing on typewriter keys. He could pick up those hot pieces of metal type and toss them out if he made a typing mistake. Then he went on typing, and when the correct piece of metal fell into the tray, he picked it out and put it in the right place. He could read the metal type really fast, which amazed me because it was like reading in a mirror. Then the raised metal type went to the tables and the newpaper printing process was under way. (To be continued. Maybe)