In 1956 the Gainesville Florida Sun ran a story headlined, “11-year-old editor and three-man staff publishes newspaper.” The story was accompanied by a picture of me and two of my childhood neighbors. It referred to a more-or-less weekly one-sheet “newspaper,” the Hibiscus Park News, which I published in the Hibiscus Park subdivision of Gainesville. I was in the process of teaching myself to touch type on my parents’ Smith Corona portable typewriter, and I had access to a hectograph that my mother used for work. A hectograph is a method for reproducing a limited number of copies of written material. One prepares a master with special ink, usually by typing on carbon paper with the in on it, puts the master facedown on a pan of special gelatin to which the image is transferred. Then, by repeatedly putting blank pieces of paper on the gelatin, the image is transferred. Press runs are quite limited, no more than 20 or 25 copies before the ink begins to diffuse into the gelatin, making subsequent images fuzzy.
The other staff members didn't do much, and I regularly thought of things that might be interesting to the neighbors, typed them up, printed copies of the paper, and left copies on their doorsteps. When we moved to Alabama, I was eager to continue my newspaper career. I spent lots of time in a local office supply store drooling over its mimeograph and ditto machines. Eventually I was able to save up enough for my allowance to buy a primitive mimeograph machine, although the proprietor was about ready to give me some equipment to satisfy my yearning.
A mimeograph machine distributes ink through a stencil, on which one has typed. Each keystroke displaces wax and reveals the porous base of the stencil. The machine has a handle that rotates a drum to which the stencil is attached, and ink from inside the drum comes through the characters on the stencil onto blank sheets of paper. The mimeograph is far superior to the hectograph. It could produce hundreds of copies. My machine, all I could afford, had to be hand inked and fed one sheet of paper at a time while turning the crank. Thus equipped, I started the Mallard Lake Monitor, which again came out approximately weekly and was mailed to the 15 or so residents of Mallard Lake.
At the same time, I arranged to write a weekly column for the Tuscaloosa News, called “Junior Highlights” on goings-on at Tuscaloosa Junior High School. I remember finalizing my copy each week waling it a few blocks up up to the Tuscaloosa News office, and looking over the shoulder of the managing editor while he marked it up and then put it in a pneumatic tube to go to the linotype machines to be set in the type for the paper.
I also had become very interested in photography. I spent hours haunting the Alabama Bookstore, which had a fairly complete photography department, drooling over cameras and enlargers none of which I could afford. I could, however, afford a Kodak Brownie camera, three trays for chemicals, developer, stop bath, and fixer solution and photosensitive paper, so that I could develop my film and print my own pictures. I spent hours in the University of Alabama Education Library, reading all I could about newspapers, newspaper reporters, and photojournalism, fueling the fantasy that I almost was one already.
Eventually all of my windowshopping was rewarded when I was able to afford a Ricoh twin lens reflex camera that shot 2.25 x 2.25 film images. As I was able to afford it, I bought a flash attachment and made a number of pretty good portraits. I eventually saved up enough money to buy an inexpensive enlarger, which permitted me to make larger size prints, up to 8 by 10 inches, from the 2 1/4 inch negatives the camera produced. The flourescent bulb in the cheap enlarger produced prints that had softer than desirable contrast. I set up the upstairs bathroom in our lake house as a darkroom, and spent many hours there developing film and making prints.
A junior high school friend, Wayne Shaffer, and I persuaded the principal to let us convert an unused storeroom in Tuscaloosa Junior High School into a darkroom for students who wanted to learn about photography.
The highlight of my photojournalism efforts in Tuscaloosa was when Southern Railway derailed a hopper car filled with some kind of white substance. The car had gone down an embankment between the railroad track and the Birmingham Highway, about a third of the way from Mallard Lake into town. I went out took some pictures of the derailed cars spilling its contents, developed the pictures, and my picture ran in on the front page of the Tuscaloosa News.
When thoughts turned to college, then three years off, there was no question in my mind that I would go to the University of Alabama, major in journalism, and become a photojournalist.
When we moved to Birmingham in 1959, my bedroom, with its own bathroom, was in the basement, and I rigged the bathroom up as a darkroom.
My photography hobby pretty much went dormant while I was in college and in Atlanta, but when I moved to Washington, I bought a 35mm Mamiya single lens reflex camera and set up the bathroom in my Riverhouse apartment as a darkroom. Now I could afford a considerably better enlarger, and I also started shooting color and developing my own color film and turning it into slides. While I lived in Washington, I roamed all over the place with my camera on my 10 speed bicycle, taking pictures of track meets, volleyball games on the Mall, and demonstrations against the Nixon Administration. I still have some of the black-and-white enlargements on my walls.
After I moved to Philadelphia, my photography activities diminished somewhat, although I do remember having a halftone plate made of one photograph so I could incorporate it into something that I printed on my printing press.
Digital photography was just becoming practicable when I moved to Chicago. Digital cameras produced good imagery before digital printers produced acceptable quality, compared with chemical processes.
I always took my camera on all the trips to Bosnia, Kosovo, central Europe and Russia and took thousands of photographs.
As I got interested in playwriting and moviemaking in 2007 or so, I learned all I could about the software and hardware used for making digital videos. By then, the quality was very good. And so I bought two digital SLRs, a Canon and Nikon, and got the associated equipment necessary to be able to shoot short movies with the two cameras operating from different angles and recording sound from appropriately placed mics. I used Adobe Premier as a software for editing the results. I learned a lot about lighting and sound on movie sets. I produced a number of pretty good trailers for some of the plays and a video of a television interview incorporated into one of them.
As my flying activities intensified after 2012, I bought a number of GoPro cameras and regularly shot imagery as I was flying helicopters, putting the results up on YouTube and mimeo.
After we moved to Birmingham, I became became much more involved in social activities with my high school buddies and had less time for photography. I did, however, start another newspaper, the
BUS Bulletin, which we reproduced on a ditto machine belonging to the school and ran news about the school. We were unsparing in our skewering of the faculty, which made the newspaper and those of us who publish edit unpopular in some quarters.
I had, during all this time, been fascinated by all kinds of printing technology.
One of my first exposures to printing technology used in producing newspapers was in Gainesville, when I visited the Gainesville Sun and my tour guide showed me the city room, the copy desk, the pneumatic tubes that led to the composing room, the linotype operators at work and turning the copy into hot type, the composing of the lines from the linotype machines into pages, the making of papier-mâché mats from the locked up pages from which stereotype plates were made, the plates then being attached to the rotary represses that actually printed the newspaper.
I continued to visit newspaper printing plants, from time to time, including those of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Bulletin. the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Financial Times, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Chicago Tribune. When my first book, Employee Dismissal Law and Practice came out, in 1985, I arranged with the publisher for a tour of the printing plant – actually two separate facilities, the first of which composed the content of the book in cold type and made negative images of the result, and the second the actual printing plant, where lithograph plates were made from the negatives and pages of the book run off on flatbed presses. I also eagerly toured the West Publishing Company printing facility in St. Paul on a couple of occasions and enjoyed learning about the book production there, also relying on cold type, but on high-speed rotary presses.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, I saw plastic printing plates that had replaced lead stereotype plates, for the last stages of letterpress printing in the industry
My interest in computers and digital communications focused my attention on the use of computer software, Atex, and its PC offspring, Xywrite, to replace the typewriter and the Linotype machine, and on innovations linking the newsroom to the printing plant electronically. The epitome of this was the Financial Times, which was written in England, edited there and had its pages composed there, with page images sent by high-resolution facsimile to a printing plant in a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia.
When we lived in Tuscaloosa, I had sent away for catalogs from the Kelsey company, a leading producer of small hobby presses, up to 6 x 10" in size. There was no way I could afford such a thing, until I was working for Conrail and living in Philadelphia 15 years later. Then, on impulse, I bought a Kelsey press, about a dozen fonts of different kinds of type, California type cases to go with them, and other accessories, such as composing sticks, and chases to lock up the type in the press. I became pretty good at setting type by hand and printed business cards, awards for my employees at Conrail, and Christmas cards. The results actually were not bad, from the standpoint both of design and printing quality.
One of the last things I discarded when I left Illinois was the printing press, the type and, type cases. I had held on to them for my full 23 years in Chicagoland out of nostalgia and the remote fantasy that I might use them again. But their bulk, and the reality that I had not touched them in 20 years, finally prevailed.
