Editor:
I was once the typesetter for The New Era and I was tickled to read the monthly museum piece about the old Linotype (May 30).
But since I’m a detail type, I feel a couple of maybe unimportant corrections might be made. Bridget (Cooper Montgomery) is invited to correct me.
Dave and Bridget Cooper bought The New Era in early 1971, give or take a few months. The Linotype was still in use, but the Coopers didn’t know how to use it, so they hired former owner Bill Dudley to operate it for them until late 1971 when it was replaced by a Compugraphic typesetter, a transitional photographic device.
I remember the issue of The New Era that was half old Linotype and half new Compugraphic, to show the difference in sharp type. It was quite impressive.
So the old Linotype sat with its smaller cousin – yes, there were two machines – for some years at the rear of The New Era building, which is now the Friends of the Library bookstore at the corner of Long and 12th.
Dave debated whether or not to sell the machines just for scrap metal, but it seemed such a shame to have so ignominious an end. But who would want to buy them? They were obsolete.
I had a friend who was a printer and had a whole garage full of old offset presses. I asked him if he might want a Linotype to add to his collection. Yes! So he hauled his horse trailer here and paid Dave a little for the privilege of dismantling and removing the smaller machine. I visited him later, and he had it up and running.
Meanwhile, the big one sat. Finally, the decision was made to “persuade” the museum to take it away. It was dismantled into movable sections and sat moping in a corner of the museum for many years, because it wasn’t reconstructed right away, and later on nobody knew how to do it.
I was overseas for a few years, so when I returned and toured the museum again, the Linotype was standing upright in its corner. Oh happy discovery!
I was reminded of the woolen mill in Salem, when I was a kid in the ‘40s. Eventually, it was shut down. After many years, someone wanted to reconstruct it as a museum, but all the old employees had died off and nobody knew how to restore it. What a shame! I have heard no more about it. Is the red brick building still there?
I am very proud of our Sweet Home museum, which has a lot of things not seen often elsewhere.
Back at The New Era in the 1970s, there were still drawers of metal letters, and large frames for composing a whole page for the newspaper. One page, completed, required two hefty men to carry it to the press. The Compugraphic, by contrast, produced a paper version, one column wide and as long as the story, since the photographic paper was on a roll, and after paste-up it could be lifted by one pinky. Sometimes Dave acted as tour guide to visitors, demonstrating this old technique versus the new.
For that matter, The New Era still has some samples of all this, old type and set-up page, etc. sitting in the lobby.
Joan Scofield
Sweet Home