Tom Kollings interview about journalism career, Des Moines, Iowa, June 19, 1999

Section 1: Q: We're talking to Tom Kollings. Can you give me the date, your name and the address as to where we're conducting this interview? A: Tom Kollings, and I don't know the date. Q: June 19, 1999. A: June 19, 1999. In Des Moines, Iowa, at my home. 2804 43rd Street in Des Moines, Iowa. Q: Okay Tom, I know that we talked a little bit about before we started the tape here, about the fact that you got into stereotype department of the Des Moines Register based on the work that your father was doing. That he helped get you there. A: That's correct. Q: Maybe you could tell that story, what was it? A: Well, I graduated from high school, Des Moines Roosevelt in 1950. Dad wanted me to go into the trade and it sounded like a pretty good thing, so he got me in the stereotype department and that's where I started in 1950. Now he'd been in the stereotype department since 1928. He passed away in 1958 so I worked as an apprentice. And an apprentice at that time was six years. So I got two years off when I went into the service in 1950-1951. Spent 21 months. I think 15 months down in Orlando, Florida, and the other in Macon, Georgia. I started, I came back and went right back into the trade and the Register and the union granted me the time that I spent in the service toward my apprenticeship. A six-year apprenticeship. Q: This was nearly 50 years ago. What is it that someone in the stereotype department would do? A: Well the stereotype department essentially made the plates that went on the press. And the press at that time was a letterpress type of operation, which means it takes, the paper goes through and over these plates and the plates are indented so that only the printed surface is the raised surface. Then you just put on those plates. Q: The plates are cylindrical. A: They are cylindrical and when they made a page, what they did was the composing room set it up in a linotype operation, set each, all the lines into what they called a chase, which held everything together on page size. They wheeled it into us and we made a reproduction of it, I think which is probably what stereotype means, reproduction. Made a reproduction on a matrix, a moist matrix, took that matrix and dried it out, trimmed it to size, put it in the machine that had about three tons of molten lead and poured it on top of that. And the machine turned the plate around, cut off the excess. We picked the plate up and put it on another machine where it went through and cooled it off and shaved off the underside. You need two plates for each page because one goes on top of the cylinder and one goes under the cylinder. So as it revolves, you get an impression. And at that time the presses would run, they could run, they were programmed to run about 60,000 pages, or papers, an hour. In the good old days, in the 1950s and 1940s, we had a circulation of about 500,000, I think it was at that time. Now the circulation has dropped down to about 260,000 or 280,000. But since we had such a large circulation, they would run up on Saturday night for the Sunday paper, we would have to make eight of those plates because we would run four presses. Two for each press, and when you're looking at four presses, you're looking at 60,000 an hour for each press, you're looking at, what, 4,000 page, papers, a minute. So the deadline was essential because if you were five minutes behind, you were 20,000 papers behind in the pressroom. Q: So ...labor intensive work... A: The essential part of it was that in the newspaper business, it wasn't like a can factory. It would start out on a slow basis and build up to a point to where everybody was really, really pushing it to get it in on time and then it would drop off again and start up for the next edition. So it was kind of an up and down work program. Q: How many people were working all at once at that time? A: In our department? Q: Yes. A: Well see, our department wasn't that large. We had day side and night side, and I suppose we have fifteen or twenty on each side. And of course there was more involved than just making those plates, but essentially that's what it amounted to. Q: What were the different duties that people had? Were they different? A: Well there would be two people that would mold the page. You'd have one person that would reinforce the depths on the matrix after it was semi-dried. Then we would dry it out again. Then you would have four people on each machine. We had essentially two machines, two or three machines that cast this. And that was the major part of that. And then we had what we called a "job room" where we would make the foundation for zinc cuts. The pictures were made into zinc that were about .065 thick and they would have to be put on lead base and we would make the lead base for all the art that went on a page. The page itself, everything was at a .002-.003 tolerance when you molded it. So the page itself, all the lead type was .918 high. Q: The number again? A: .918. So you would make type-pie that was .918 and everything that was molded had to be exact within .002-.003 of that. Otherwise it wouldn't print. And so then we would make the plates and send them down to the pressroom. We had a, not at first, but later on we had a master pot with about 20 tons of metal. Each machine had about 2 or 3 tons of molten metal in it for these plates to come out of. And then it would be reclaimed down in the basement and this would be pumped up to these machines from the basement. We were on the third floor so you are pumping all the way from the basement to the third floor with this molten lead. Q: Reclaimed meaning they were being melted down again? A: When you get done with them, you throw it back into the pot and re-melt it. So there wasn't any waste. When I started, when they eliminated the stereotype department, they eliminated all the linotype machines and they eliminated the hot metal department. They went to a plate that was called a dialitho plate that was made in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was a tin plate, like tin, flexible tin, and you snapped it on the presses downstairs instead of locking them on like those big plates. They had saddles on these presses so that you locked them right on the saddles and they would print from that. The images were photographed onto this plate through the chemical solutions they had. Only the ink would stick to the areas that you wanted printed. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: What was the pay? A: The pay back in 1950 for a journeyman was $100 a week. In 1950, that was really good pay. Q: That was good. A: And I tell you that when my dad started, he said, "Tom, what we have, it's all union." Stereotype, pressroom, all the production department was strong union, but they were not militant union. They were just good strong union members that believed in what they did and my dad always told me, "You do a day's work for a day's pay." A good day's work for a good day's pay. No more, no less. Q: And what do you mean by a strong union but not militant? A: A strong union is when we negotiated something, we expected the company to stand up to their contracts. And we expected, when we negotiated something, and it was in the contract, we stood up for what they wanted. We had no strikes. Everything was negotiated. And the negotiations in the earlier days when I was negotiating for the union, it was on maybe a half a dozen pages, maybe fifteen-twenty pages or less, the whole contract for the period. And what you would have is you would have a production manager, a lawyer on their team and business manager, that's three, and we would have four or five from the union. And we'd sit down and our side, I always figured we were always at a big disadvantage because we didn't deal in figures and all they had to do was pull a file out and say what the cost of living raise was. So everything was up there. The only thing we dealt on was sincerity. And I remember one time when we were negotiating a contract and we were arguing over a penny. We progressed to a point where we in a penny and they kept saying, "You know, the well is dry. There's nothing more." And I said, "Listen, I know you are making a lot of money. I don't know how much money, but you are showing a lot of profit. And all we want is a part of that profit." And I remember distinctly the business manager saying, "We're making money, but you know, you wouldn't want to work for a company that was in the red." And you know what do you come back with that. You know, the idea is all we want is our fair share. And another time when I got fairly excited, you know, the lawyer said, "Tom, what you do if you don't make a point, you get loud. If you don't have a point solid, then you start yelling." And that calmed me down. But it was all very fair, even and it wasn't like it is today. Q: As for the issue about the penny, it sounds to me like you wanted this but they weren't willing to give it up. Did you feel that you were treated fairly? A: What they wanted to know is if we really knew what we needed and what was fair. And I'm sure they had it all set out in their minds what they'd given us before the negotiation. Even start at how much they were going to give us, but it was up to us to get to that point. Q: What did the union need more of back then as far as you're concerned to get what you needed, to get what you wanted? A: A lot of it had to do too with the operation between and jurisdiction things. In other words, ours would start in one spot and the printers would start in another spot. And nobody crossed over in the jurisdictional end of it. And we had such things as on a holiday we would only work; if we had to work a holiday, it was time and a half plus a day's pay. And you only worked, it was for the hours actually worked. And we would only work, according to our contract, what we wanted was that we would only work on work that was essential for that edition. In other words, the four-color that was going somewhere down the line we would not go in and do that. And that was, I remember that came up as an issue and to tell you about exactly how the operation was, we had a four-color, a Pepsi four-color. And this was way back; it's funny how you can remember this. But the foreman came over, I was a shop steward, and he said, "I want somebody to work on that four-color." And I said, "You can't do that because that isn't part of the edition. This is a holiday." And he said, "I can do what I want. I'm the foreman." I said, "Call our business manager at home and ask him because it's in the contract that we don't do that." And he called and from what I understand he said, "Yes, I remember that. Don't have those guys work on it." And it wasn't anything about looking it up; he remembered it and he took it from there. I was very impressed. And this was everything on a handshake. I mean, there wasn't any going to war over anything. People trusted one another back then. Now you look at the contracts in the later years. You would fight over a meaning of a word and the contracts would be 30-40 pages long. Of course, as things progressed in automation, why there was a loss of people and the union, of course, went down. Actually, during our time, you could almost say you didn't need a union because the people that ran the Register were so extremely fair. And I have to say this, the people at the Register, whether I was in production or the newsroom, treated me like a million dollars and they treated the people in the older days like a million dollars. And everybody had a lot of respect and we had a lot of pride in our work as craftsman. As you went back, in the older days, we had people in our department who were 80 years old. I mean if they didn't want to retire, they didn't have to. They weren't pushed out and they just went on. It was extremely a trustworthy place to work. But we were owned by a family then. We weren't owned by a corporation like you have now. And back then, if you remember, television didn't start until 1950. And when television came in and then you had another market that cut into our circulation and we had to fight and scrap for it. We were the only paper in the state of Iowa, really, but when television came in...so it would be fair for me to say that the competition really cut into our circulation starting in the late 50s. Q: Competition with other media. A: From other media. Exactly. Q: Do you remember the name of the business manager who you dealt with, Tom? A: Harry Prugh. Q: Harry Prugh. A: Harry Prugh. That was the business manager and Bill Doriss was the mechanical superintendent and Hedo Zacherle was the lawyer. Vincent Starzinger was the lawyer before Zacherle was. Those lawyers were extremely fair to people. Q: The Register ones. A: I mean they talked at our level; they didn't talk down to us. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: You talked about the difference between a corporation and a family. Actually Cowles was a corporation. A: Yes, but it was kind of a family. I mean, my dad negotiated with Gardner Cowles when he was on the negotiating team with the union. I negotiated with his kin. Charles Edward came in later on. Of course, we went through the business manager, but the Cowles people owned it and they ran it. And they ran it like a family operation. I understand, Brian, I could be wrong on this, but I understand that when Gannett took over and later, that they expected a 29% profit. This is a rumor that I heard and back then I heard and understood that the Cowles were satisfied with a 9% profit. So where do you make it up? You know, you make it up in personnel. Q: What do you think about that, the fact that they were cutting personnel? A: Well, I think it was rotten. You're losing the best, the foundation of the newsroom - the good reporters and people that they retired. Early retirement. What is early retirement? That is to kind of release the people, the older people that have built up and maintained the salary over and above what they had to pay maybe for two or three interns. And so they lost those people and the ones that didn't retire eventually wished they did. And they were kind of...the pressure was there that they didn't want to work there anymore after a year or two when they didn't retire. And I think, oh I can't think of the man that used to be in the editorial department, that stuck around. And he quit at 65 and went up to Ames [IA] and works for Michael Gartner up there. I can't think of his name now. Q: Oh, it's not Flansburg, is it? A: Yes, James Flansburg. He didn't take early retirement, but when he hit 65 he took it. He got fed up. Q: You make a point about it being rotten that they cut all these personnel, but if you look at it from a businessman's point of view, they got to please the shareholders. A: Yes, that's right. And that's the whole difference right there. I'm not saying it's... well, back in the old days, nobody got fired. And when I worked in the stereotype department, you got to remember now, this is a whole different operation and I'll tell you the difference. A lot of difference is between...the departments ran themselves an awful lot. Back in the old days, journalists from the newsroom, down in the advertising department through the pressroom, were all heavy drinkers. I mean they had bottles in the drawers up in the newsroom. We had heavy drinkers, a couple of them alcoholics, and in the stereotype department they had bottles stashed away. Everybody smoked back in those days. You go up in the newsroom in the early days, well, even when I went up in the newsroom, there was smoking. The room was full of smoke. Everybody had a cigarette and an ashtray. There was burns all over the desk. And the desks upstairs were in a circular area where you had key man who would either be the telegraph editor and what we called when I went up there was the slot person. He would have all the copy from the editors around him. There would be spikes the copy was stuck on top of. And you had ashtrays around, everybody was smoking. And the thing about it is, whether it was in our department, a person, you had people down there that could work better and do more work drunk than a lot of them could sober. And the same thing in the newsroom. The persons in the newsroom, Brian, and I still think they got quality people, they impressed me when I went up there as just outstanding as far as intelligence was concerned, just outstanding. I mean there wasn't anybody up there...I mean we had people that had been teachers in high school. Master's degrees. They could make twice the money on the outside but they had this in their blood. And back in the old days, by the way, when we had all this molten metal and ink, you had a particular smell in the whole plant. You could smell the newsprint. You could smell the ink. It smelled like a newspaper. Now it smells like can factory. (laughs) I hate to say that. But you are right. You are looking at taking care of shareholders and what they have to satisfy. Newsprint has gone up. The cost of paper has gone up and the cost of operations has gone up. They've taken a harder line on employees. When I went up in the newsroom as a make-up editor, we didn't have any, what do you call it, we didn't have to fill out any forms or anything for salary reviews. There were no salary reviews back then. The editors knew what you were doing and the managing editor would take care of that. Now they have the salary reviews. You have to write out something and then they write something back and you go in and negotiate and they tell you what you are going to get. And even in the production, I think they do that now. The unions are nothing anymore. I guess I wanted to say back then that people were treated so fair. Everybody was union except the newsroom and they couldn't get a union in the newsroom because there was no real need for a militant organization. I mean they were treated fair enough they didn't need a union. And if a company doesn't really need, the people don't need a union to protect them; it's pretty hard to sell to individuals that they need to be a part of the union. Like Schaefer Pen. Schaefer Pen could never get a union in because they treated their people so well there was no need for a union. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: You said your people didn't need a union because you were treated so fair. Why was a union in place? A: It was just something that, I guess, came along with the introduction of the newspapers. They were unionized way back before my dad got there. And it was a good thing in a lot of respects. You know, a person could come in, you had a card saying he was a trained stereotyper, he could walk into the right department and they would put him on the next day. And we had a lot of what they call "travelers" come through who would a couple of days and then leave. And there always seemed to be enough work. Also during, talking about being fair, during the days of the depression my dad said that the individuals in the department went on a three-day week voluntarily so there wouldn't be any layoffs. The company wouldn't have to lay off anybody. Can you imagine that happening now, you know? It just doesn't work that way. Am I rattling on too much, Brian? Q: No, this is great. You were also show steward of the union and president of the union. Can you talk about some of the issues, the union demands, during those times? You said they were few and far between but obviously you had them. A: Of course, wages was always one item and working conditions probably was another. And vacations. I think when I first went up there we had a week's vacation and eventually ended up with five week's vacation. Holiday's was another thing. Q: Five weeks per year? A: Yes. That's what it was when I left up there. What would happen is kind of funny. The unions would negotiate and then when we got done negotiating, the editorial, the newsroom would get just a little more than we got because they based their salaries on what the unions got. And so, you know, what did they need a union for? But we went in and negotiated from a couple of paid holidays to eventually seven paid holidays. We negotiated to the point of having a 40-hour week to a 37-1/2 -hour week. Conditions that were of that nature. I don't remember. And the work...what we should do. "Manning" was always another, "manning." We had what they call "manning." You had to have so many people on a machine. And that was based on our bylaws, international. All over the country we had on these automatics that made these plates, we had to four men that had to be on those machines. That was negotiated in. I can't think of anything really outstanding and like I say there was other portions of the contract that dealt with our union as opposed to another union and where our jurisdiction ended and where theirs started. Q: What was the name of the union? A: Stereotypers Local #40. Q: How many in a local? A: There was about 40. About evenly split between days and nights, I believe. Now Brian, it has been 50 years. Q: Were you all on the same page or were there divisions within the group? A: Everybody was paid the same, except for the assistant foreman and the foreman. Q: I mean were there differing opinions about what you should be asking for within the group or were you all pretty much agreed on what you needed to ask? A: They only difference between pay, are you talking about pay...? Q: Well, I'm talking about the membership, were they agreed, was everybody talking about...? A: Oh yes, we would negotiate a contract and take it back to the union and then vote on these issues. In our department there was no breakdown of different duties within the union. Everybody was supposed to be competent at everything so that the foreman could move you around from one spot to the other without any problems. Also the pay was all standard except for differential between the day side and the night side. The night side made just a few bucks more a shift than we did. Q: How about turnover? Was there much turnover there? A: No, it was just unbelievable. Like I said, we had people there that were 80 years old. There was no turnover at all. And there was traditionally a turnover up in the newsroom. I would say back in the olden days, you can probably get this from other editors, that these people, we had such a sound newsroom that those people could leave and go to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal or any place and almost walk on without any problems. It was a tremendous training ground for any young person that wanted to, if they wanted to advance to a larger newspaper, a bigger size, maybe more money. Q: Were people happy in the department? A: Oh sure. I mean there was always, like I said earlier, as far as I'm concerned if I wanted to live my life over, I couldn't have chosen a better field that I was happier with than what I did. And the people in our department, in the stereotype department, they were a happy group. We all worked together. I mean afterwards, after we got off the shift, if somebody was building a garage, we'd go over and help on the garage or move or whatever. We were a pretty tight unit. Q: And pleased with the Register management, I bet. A: Yes, oh sure. Of course you always have your ups and downs, but as a whole we were extremely satisfied. And then as time went on, the human relations department is what they call it now, they started getting people in that...we had one person in there, his name Vijon. He came from a meat packers industry and he almost pulled everybody out on strike because he wanted to cut this and cut that. And we had a real struggle with him. All the unions did until they got rid of him. And then we got another person in that followed him, his name was Rocky Groves and he was real sharp, but he wasn't cutthroat. And I don't know. You have to look at it just like you say. Management has got to make money. Our people in the unions, all the unions, we all kind of worked together when it come contract time. We didn't have a secret. All the unions kind of shared what the management was going to give us so we all worked together to a certain degree. They worked hard and they were happy. Everybody was happy. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: Of course, later on you became a writer. Did you ever think back in the days when you had been on the stereotype department that you would be a writer? A: I'll tell you what. You know, Brian, it's just unreal. This is just unreal that I became a writer. As I came up, it's not unusual to be called up to the newsroom as a make-up editor from the production department. We had two make-up editors up there, one for nights and one for days. And I was called up as a feature make-up editor. Now a make-up editor, I'm not sure if you know what a make-up editor does, it's challenging in a very rewardful type of occupation. What my job was to put the inside of all the pages of that section together. In other words, the editors would give me copy, the length of the stories, and the art and I would have dummies of all the pages with the ads drawn and the rest of it was blank. I would take it and design every page on the inside with the art and with the stories involved. I had to wait for the pages from page one from the news editor. And on Saturday for the Sunday paper, geez, you have the news editor, you had the managing editor would come over, you had sometimes the editor would be there. All three of them, all hovering over his desk. And my desk was right there, right across from him. They would figure out page one, then I would take the jumps from page one and put them in the inside and then build my pages around that. And I also worked very closely with the art director. If we had a story that was 45 inches long on the inside and we had a lot of big art, something had to give. Q: Now this of course is before you became a writer? I would like to talk more about your make-up editor position. You would go back to stereotyping department. You weren't thinking about writing, I guess? A: No. And we had an outdoor writer by the name of Reese Tuttle at that time that was just dynamite and then he retired. So they called me up as make-up editor essentially. And I worked, oh, I suppose, I can't remember how many, I think about three years, I was doing nothing but make-up. Became an expert in the make-up department. And then what happened was that they were getting a lot of letters. Larry Stone was then the outdoor writer and he would write...one week he would write on environmental issues, the next week maybe on hunting and fishing, the hardcore issues. And when he wrote on the hardcore issues, the environmental people weren't happy. When he wrote environmental, the hardcore hunters and fisherman weren't happy. So they had to find a medium and they knew I was really into hunting and fishing. It was my hobby. So they asked me to present them with two or three articles on hunting and do the best I could and see what they looked like. I turned it in to...Dave Witke was the managing editor at that time. So I turned it into Dave and he came back and he said, "Tom, it's all here. And it's pretty rough, but that's what we have editors for. So you write and we'll edit." Q: This is about 1975, isn't it? A: Let me check. It was in 1981. Q: 1981. A: And so, I started writing in '81. I started writing every other Thursday to start with on my own time. And they gave me $20 a column. And then eventually they took me off that and gave me a day off to do my column because I was doing it on my Saturday and Sunday. Eventually it ran, when I quit, I think I was doing it at three days off to do my writing and two days on make-up. I still did the make-up, which was kind of neat. But my wife said, when you asked me about dreaming about this, she said when I first started, "How in the world are you going to get a story every week? Every week?" And I said, "Geez, there is nothing out there that you can't do." You have to look at it, when I got the job I had a lock on it, Brian. I had a lock on this job, not because I was a Pulitzer prize winning writer, but because there were 300,000-400,000 fisherman out there and 260,000 hunters and they all spoke the same language I did. So my creditability was built in and when I first started, of course, you write a couple of hunting and fishing stories. Say you string the fish and you write a couple of fishing stories, but you can't write the same thing so you have to have a different hook. You have to have a different twist in the story. So I would hang out in bait houses. I would hang out in the sporting good stores. I would go fishing and somebody always said, "Geez, you ought to meet this person. He's a dynamite fisherman. And he's quite a character." There it is. So I did the first-person stories, a lot of first-person stories. I would use that first-person as a vehicle to get into a person's character or a situation where...what do you call it when you talk about an individual, it would be more of a human interest story on this...and into conservation. The secret to a first-person story is to put yourself so far in the background that people hardly know you are there, but they do know that you are there which leads to the credibility of the story. So I used to go through and write a story, then go back and go through it and take out all the "I's" and "me's" that I could possibly find. Q: So you wrote first person first. A: You still have to, it's still a first-person story but you take out the "I's." You don't stroke your ego. If you are stroking your ego, you're not writing for the reader. You're writing for yourself. So you don't put in there, "I hit all the birds. I got all the fish." Let the other person do that. And you never put numbers as far as "I caught five fish and he caught six fish or four fish." You say you caught nine fish. We caught nine fish. It was in that direction. But the human interest story. I remember one that I went up on the Mississippi and I was talking to hatchery manager up by Guttenberg and I was doing a story on walleye fishing and I said, "You know, I need a story somewhere down the line. Do you got anybody that's really interesting?" He said, "Yes, my brother-in-law. You ought to do a story on my brother-in-law." And I said, "Why is that?" And he said, "Well, he's a real character." And so I said OK and called him and lined him up and went to meet him and it was a perfect situation. Here was a guy that was what they call a "river rat." He had a big flat bottom boat. We were going after a species of fish that people don't fish for. Big, big drum. Not catfish, not walleye, but drum. And he had this big flat bottom boat, he had a pair of bib overalls on him, he had tobacco stain running down each side of his cheek and all over his bibs and the boat was flooded with tobacco stain where he chewed all the time. We went out to anchor above the lock and dam, and one end he had for an anchor, he had a piece of boiler plate, and the other end he had a piece of a railroad track. He was a typical river rat. My strategy for people when I go out with them is try to read them and make them feel comfortable. So the best way to make this guy comfortable is to come out with some pretty base language. And once I did that he felt, he knew that, you know, I wasn't high-fallutin reporter from the city that didn't know his way around. We got along terrific. Had a terrific time. And we caught drum. There's other situations, like I say, there were cases too where I wrote a straight conservation piece. The best type you could write for the paper would be a controversial piece when you present both sides. Q: Did some research? A: Go through research and a lot of phone work. But there are a lot of stories out there. You know, now I struggle a little bit now that I've been out of the swing of things. I only write a couple times a month and I write for several different magazines on a freelance basis. But I'm wondering myself how I did it. I would be fishing anyhow, Brian. Fishing or hunting anyhow. So I was just out there picking up a job. The thing, the other thing you have to do is get different people. You can't do the same person all the time. And the more interesting the person, the better the hook. The same thing on a situation. The best situation is where you are in trouble. I mean you get in the boat and it's raining and the rain is freezing and washing over and it turns into an adventure piece rather than just "I'm catching fish and he's catching fish." Q: Had you had any background in journalistic writing anytime? A: No. I had Business/English in college. And some English, the basic English courses. And some public speaking courses too, but no. They termed me as a "walk-on" when I first started. What I did was I wrote my stories and I first had a very good friend that was an editor up there, a copy editor and I ran my stories through him for a couple of years. He would edit them and bring them back and show me what I did wrong, what I didn't do wrong. He said, "You're writing your sentence backwards. You're starting with 'from here on out I had a good time' instead of 'I had a good time from here on out." I was writing sentences backward to a certain degree. Fortunately they were pretty well in order. And he edited and showed me. And then it was on-the-job training, to the point where I eventually ended up winning several awards as a matter of fact. And you know, I told you the earlier writer was Reese Tuttle. He was also president of the National Isaac Walton League. He was a very well thought of individual And they started giving out Reese Tuttle awards and I got one of those, which kind of capped off a career. Q: Who was the copy editor that you were bouncing this stuff off? A: Charlie Nettles. And I think that you may have an appointment lined up for him or at least he got a letter for an interview. Q: Well, we got a long list of people... A: I imagine. (laughs) -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: I want to take you back a little bit to the days that you were working the stereotype department. Things were changing the mid-70s with technology, new techniques and such. But that meant your status at the Register had to change or you had to leave. A: That's correct. That was in 1976 and what happened is that they went from what they call "hot type" to "cold type." Which meant that all the plates that were being made were out; all the linotype was out. The type that came down to the composing room would come down through a computer and out. And as a make-up editor then, I would take this and the printers would, instead of using their hands and setting type, they were scissors and pasting it up. And of course that eliminated a lot of the composing room, knocked it down. They didn't fire anybody. They moved the stereotypers. They took early retirement, like I said there was a lot of old stereotypers. They retired or they took early retirement or they put them in different portions of the building. Four of us went to the pressroom. Some went to the mailing room. Some went to engraving or plate making. And some went to mail room. They did the same thing to the composing room. The people, the linotype operators, they shopped them around so nobody was laid off. It was really neat. Q: Was there ever a concern for security in your job? A: Everybody was scared to death. Just really scared to death. And I will never forget the time when the mechanical superintendent came up, I was working days at the time, and he said, "I'd like you to call a chapter meeting," and we called a chapter meeting and got everybody upstairs during a slack period. And he said, "What we got, we got this cold type coming in." And he said, "Some of you people don't believe this. Believe it. My job is to eliminate you." And, you know, that just sends the fear of God through you. Some of the people had gone out and tried working on the outside and they came back. It was too tough. (laughs) We had it really pretty good. There was terrible apprehension. I went down to the pressroom with four other guys. They sent us down to Oklahoma City [OK] for three weeks, four or five of us, to a non-union training facility to be a pressman. And we already knew what was going on down there. We were in with people from management from all over the country that were training to be strikebreakers. And we were in the situation, it was really kind of funny, they were all scared of us. They thought we were this hardcore Teamster-type union people, you know. We were just like they were. And it was a three-week vacation. And when we came back, that was the condition. That we could go down to the pressroom if we went to this school. So we went down there and took it and came back and went down to the pressroom. The idea was to bring this along as a pressman in a years time and you know, you got to feel that you know that in the pressroom, they had four or five years as a flyboy. Six years as an apprentice before they get their journeyman card, became trained journeymen. And they were bringing us along in a years' time. But our priority wouldn't start in the pressroom before the last flyboy got his journeyman's card. So your priority as far as what goes with priority or seniority with the union didn't start until the last individual that was hired ahead of you, no matter what his status was, got his card as a journeyman. Q: So you're starting out as a flyboy then almost from...? A: Flyboy. I went down there, wiping down the machinery. It was another instance that was kind of tough. I was afraid of heights, always have been. And if you look in the pressroom you see that these presses go way up, the super-structure. When I was a flyboy, my job was to go up and wipe down all this stuff. I mean it was dirt work. Q: That's what a flyboy does? A: He does all the dirty work. Washes out ink fountains and takes plates to where they want them set up on the floor and washes down machinery and when it's slow. Then as you get into your apprentice work, you help journeymen change blankets on the presses and set rollers and all that. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: You were talking about the work that a flyboy did, your changing jobs. A: In the pressroom is what all the stereotypers went through down there and I'll tell you another situation. And you talk about tension. Pressroom people didn't want us down there. They didn't want somebody to come in and work for a year and get their card when they had to work 12, 14 years to get theirs. And so one of the, over in the bar one night, one of the pressman over there told my buddy, "You go down to this union school and you're going to have to 'whup' me to get back in." And he said, "Well, if that's the case, lets just do it right now." This is the attitude of a lot of the pressman and then finally that they come to the idea, "Gee if I was in their shoes, how would I feel?" So eventually, when we did finally go down there, they accepted us and helped us. And now we got a couple of those stereotypers are running that pressroom. Q: Clearly you would have lost some money by going from the stereotype department... A: No. Q: ...to a flyboy position? No? A: No. They sent us down to wherever we went; they sent us at our same scale. And they kept us there. Like some of the people went to the mail, as a paper handler and their scale was lower than the stereotype scale of pay. The stereotypers kept their scale of pay down there. Now, they didn't get any raises but they were stabilized at that until they reached, until the paper handlers reached that same pay scale. Q: This is because you had the protection of the union? A: No, it was just because, I guess, we really tried to negotiate that but if they didn't want to do it that way, they didn't have to. That was the way that the company operated. They were extremely fair. You do that now and you wouldn't have that. Q: But nothing changed with benefits or vacation or anything? A: No, nothing changed. After it started happening and then it was a matter of going into a strange area and learning something. And I did that two or three different times. I did it when I went down in the stereotype department to start with, and when I went in the pressroom and then when I went into the newsroom, and then went I into writing. And then, in the newsroom we had changes. I learned how to type in high school so I was right on the typing and using the computers upstairs, but I had never used a computer before. But most of the guys hadn't either. They hadn't been on the computer that long. They were using typewriters until they went into cold type. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: But you had been in the stereotype department for 25 years, how did you adjust to the new things that were happening in the pressroom as in the flyboy, the journeyman? A: Well, we just went down as, you know, you accept what goes. I was nervous as the dickens. And I had a philosophy and I still maintain this philosophy that "You work as hard and do as much as you can." And that philosophy went right up into the newsroom and when I was faced with all these people up there with master's degrees and extremely brilliant people, I thought there is only one way to match them and that is work twice as hard as they do. And a lot of these people had the ability, but they never used it. And so I was accepted by everybody up there except for one or two of them. I didn't have a degree, you know, but your make-up people didn't necessarily need degrees. But up there in the newsroom, everybody, it's mandatory that you have a degree. Q: The make-up specialist then, that job description went through several evolutions, too. I mean there was new technology going on there. A: Absolutely. I don't know how you're picking on this; you must already know a little bit about it. But yes, you're right. It went through, when I first started the make-up job was to, the editors would give me the type, I would set it and release it. Then I would go downstairs and make sure the printers put it together like the schematic that I drew, downstairs. That was when I first started. At the end of my make-up career, at the Register in 1996, and today, the editors are doing all the printers work and it's paginated. Instead of releasing copy, they build a page right in the computer and we release the whole page right straight to the composing that sends it into plate making, where they make the plates. So what you did became extremely stressful at the end because, like I had the travel section. I would put together the whole inside of the travel section and I would get the dummies in the morning and I had to have that all built and down with by two o'clock in the afternoon. Q: You were doing it with fewer people, too, at that time. A: You eliminated the printers and you had the same number of people in the newsroom as you had before but you were doing not only the work you did before, but also all the work the composing room, all the printers did. You were doing their job, too. Q: Were you compensated for that? A: No, but you did it and you know, you can only work so hard. You can only do so much. And I figured you can only go so far. They were a little concerned because I didn't do a lot of editing. I would edit some stories, I mean when I say edit, I would trim some stories to fit a hole if it was a wire piece. But if it was local, I would turn it over to another editor and say we need three or four inches out of this story to fit. And that's the difference between back then, too, in your early newspaper. Your early newspaper didn't look like a magazine. I mean the inside of the pages, I'd take a story down as a make-up editor, I would put the story in. It might be two or three inches long, it might be two or three inches short, but I'd end up pretty close. Now when we were short, I'd call up the desk and say, "I need a two-head" if it was six-inch story; I would need a 35 head story. Which is a little filler, a smaller story. These were fillers so when you got done, you opened up the paper and it looked like it was a hot paper. Something was put in on the spur-of-the-moment and you were getting the news, breaking news. Now you open up the page and everything fits right down the line, see. I'm looking at this and saying, "Gee, they must have had this story pretty early to make this work this good." And they got all those shorts now, they got them in a line right straight down. And they realized that those shorts, at one time they wanted to eliminate all those little shorts, and they found out there was a lot of reader interest. When we had those shorts, people would look around and pick up on those shorts. I remember during one period of time when Mount St. Helen's erupted, we used to use almost always an eight-head, an eight-head is the little small head at the bottom. "Mount. St. Helen's is Now Quiet. It's Not Erupting." And somebody would type it up early and get somebody's death that was some king of some area that was on the deathbed and we would have an update on that and would use that as an eight-head. Q: As a story? A: At the end of story to fill it up or if you needed a trimmer, you'd trim the story in. But that's the difference between then and now as far as appearance of the paper. -- <br><br> Section 9: Q: Did that correspond with the change in the ownership too, with Gannett taking over from the Cowles or was it just...? A: Well, it changed a lot with the type, going from hot type to cold type. When I first went up in the newsroom, like I say, I didn't know anything. I worked three weeks with one make-up editor, two weeks with another make-up editor and then they stepped me back and had me do the best I could with help from people around me. But I also went over to Drake University and got three books on make-up. Thick books. And some of them were co-authored by Gardner Cowles as a matter of fact. And I read them because when I went up to make-up, I'd say, you know, "Why are you doing this? Why do you lay this out?" The answer was, "That's the way we've always done it." And I got tired of that answer so I went over and got these books and found out that you put pictures on top in a certain area because that draws the readers eye in, you read counter-clockwise normally. Your eye follows this. You had rules and regulations to follow. One of the things in one of the books I'll never forget. It said, "The problem with cold type as opposed to hot type," the set type, is that you can do so much more with cold type because you got a scissors, you can put things on the slant, you can do this, do that and make it a lot more glitzy. And that could be considered a fault because what you want to do...Brian, it's always been the contention of a good editor is that what you want in a paper is something that's easy to read for the reader. You're doing it for the reader. Now, when they went to cold type that philosophy came true. The artists that got imported into it where you have got...Let me give you an example. This is a business section. This is pretty serious stuff and this is today. Q: Show it to the camera. A: Look at the elements. You don't know where to start reading. This is what they used to call "circus make-up" because you have all these elements on a page. You've got a head here. You've got a drop head here. You've got a little leader in here. You've got different size type, different looking type. You've got some elements that you really can't decide where to start. You're making it tough on the reader. Do you see that? Q: You bet. A: OK, lets go to a front page. Last weeks front page and I'm going to show you what I mean. Now this doesn't look like the Wall Street Journal because the Wall Street Journal is all business and they are probably one of the best newspapers in the country, in the world. What you have here is you've got a headline, you've got all these elements up here, you've got an element here, you got your art, you got a head, a drop head, art here, and you look at that and you think, "Where should I start reading?" As opposed to something they used to do, look at that, look how clean that is. You start reading here and you go around, you don't have to jump over anything. You follow your eye and it goes right straight down and the art is put together like that. And the front page used to look like that. So when you went to cold type, you got to an area where you could take all these things and use a scissors to cut them in. On the slant. And this comes from the art director and this comes from USA Today. And USA Today, I don't know if it is making any money now, but it was always in the red. And USA Today, I don't know if you know it or not, told all its editors, they had a main staff, and what they do is Gannett had pulled their editors in from different newspapers to work for a year so they would cut costs in that direction. So we would "loan" them an editor to go and help them put out their paper. I looked on different newspapers from Gannett and they are all the same. Q: The fact is because USA Today, of course, is a Gannett paper. A: I would say so but I think to be really fair with Gannett, I think that a lot of papers across the country have gone to this type of layout. Except for maybe the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, and some of those that maintain the old tradition and the idea that you are doing it for the reader, not for some art director. And another thing that you might notice. They've eliminated a lot of rules because people aren't trained make-up editors anymore. And you have rules...when I'm talking about making it easier for the reader. A story should go right straight through and when you get down to the jump down here at the bottom, it shouldn't end on a period. You should take a part, a portion of the graph or the sentence into the jump page because when you do that, when you end it on a period, the reader stops. And when the reader stops, he's not going to go to the inside, he's going to down here to another. And this is just last June 13, last Sunday's paper. You got the lead story that ended on a period right here. And so the so reader stops and anytime the reader stops, you're not making it easy for them. He has got to figure out where the hell to go.