“This portion of today’s Sunday Oregonian was prepared to mark a place in the long history of this newspaper, where a profound change was made.”
That portentous announcement marked the date in 1975 when The Oregonian moved away from lead-type presses to offset printing.
The newspaper industry is one of constant evolution. I was reminded of that earlier this month when we published the obituary for Carolyn Bennett.
After raising two kids, she took a job working the graveyard shift as a typesetter at The Oregonian. She died March 5 at 104.
Bennett, who worked here from 1959 to 1988, with a few short breaks, would have had a front row seat to major technological changes, from old hot type presses to computers.
Dale McKean, a retired copy editor, remembers Bennett as a crackerjack at the linotype machine. Working long into the evening, she keyed in news articles and the machine spit out lines of lead type for page makeup. “She never complained at all. She did a very good job at her work,” McKean recalled.
As journalism continues to innovate in serving readers, it’s nice to remember what leaps we’ve taken through our 172-year publishing history.
Back in the day, publisher Henry Pittock famously scooped the competition on Civil War news. He used the telegraph, Pony Express and stagecoach to speed delivery of news dispatches from San Francisco to his newspaper near the waterfront in downtown Portland. (Pittock brought a competitiveness to the news business but also left a long shadow of bigotry in our pages, as chronicled last year in “Publishing Prejudice.”)
In 1923, breathless headlines announced the arrival of a new press at the Oregonian headquarters, then situated at Sixth and Alder streets. “Oregonian’s giant Goss press here” blared the front-page headline in capital letters. “179 crates required to carry monster.”
The lead paragraph reflected the rather fanciful writing of the day: “The late Mr. Aladdin, when he rubbed the reliable old lamp, never conjured such a marvel as The Oregonian’s new press.”
Just a few months later, President Warren G. Harding, a onetime publisher himself, arrived for the ceremonial start of the new press, accompanied by then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
The next day’s article said the president “set thumb to the magic button that caused the huge five-decked decuple Goss, bright from the factory, to rumble and roar and whirr smoothly into stride for its first regular run.”
Harding had earlier proved his bona fides to the composing room “boys” by whipping out a “well worn make-up rule” and fixing a line of type that had been purposefully mislaid as a test of his printer’s skills.
And hot type remained the way the newspaper was printed until 1975, when The Oregonian announced its transition to “cold type” printing. “Hot type” referred to the molten metal used to create forms, which then transferred ink to the pages.
“Cold type” became how offset print was known, even as hunks of type were replaced by plates and cylinders.
When we moved out of the old Oregonian Building on Southwest Broadway in 2015, the lead forms for that final hot type front page were still in the basement, gathering dust.
It’s hard to imagine what work was like for Carolyn Bennett in what was predominantly a man’s world in the “back shop.” Our company records show she started part time in February 1959, then left for a few months in 1962, returning a short time later.
Part of her early years coincided with a strike against The Oregonian by stereotype workers, who worked on pages after the linotype process.
“She was pretty proud of the fact she was the first woman journeyman,” her son, Richard Bennett, told me. Her husband, Herold, had gone blind so she would report to work in the evening, as he slept and the newspaper was prepared for the presses.
“It was kind of an uphill fight,” her son recalled, “but she was persistent.”
Bennett retired in 1983, a few months after I started at The Oregonian. She came back the next year for another stint, retiring fully in 1988 from the composing room.
I remember the composing room of those days, full of machines to melt the chunks of wax, which would coat the paper. Gruff compositors carried X-Acto blades to trim stories. One person from the newsroom was assigned each night to oversee page production as “makeup editor.” We wore yellow aprons to keep the wax off our clothes.
Not too many years later, we moved fully to pagination, where editors in the newsroom laid out the pages on computers, making necessary trims with a click of a mouse. Composing room jobs went away and, as was then tradition, the company retrained workers to move to other departments.
Now, reporters can write and publish their stories from an iPhone, seeing their work pop up on OregonLive within moments of hitting the button. We can tell stories with audio, video, interactive maps and so many other tools.
Bennett was an active reader until the end, which came after a fall in early March. “She was pretty stubborn,” her son said, refusing to go in the ambulance unless he rode along. She died the next day of complications from the fall.
As Women’s History Month draws to a close, I salute Bennett and all the women who paved the way in newspapering for future generations.
