Thanks, Guys, And Good Night
They got the paper out. Boston Herald’s Gelzo salutes them as we take another step away from tradition in this brave new world of news. The Herald presses roar for the last time tonight, then we’re out of the printing business.
It is possible to lose an arm or a leg and continue on, though life is never the same.
Tonight, after the final edition of this newspaper leaves the loading dock, the Herald will lose its corps of pressmen to the hard realities of outsourcing and the bottom line. After 50 years, a vibrant roar that rattled the spine of this building at least once every day will be replaced by eerie silence.
And though the paper will continue to land on your doorstep and arrive at the corner store for many mornings and years to come, life for the rest of us here at One Herald Square will never be the same again.
More than four decades ago, Danny Messing and his brother Dennis ventured down into the inky, oil-drenched bowels of a Dickensian building that once churned out the Record American. They were kids attending the now-defunct Boston Trade High School when Danny’s printing instructor at Trade told him about a part-time opening for “plate boys” at the Record in Winthrop Square.
“You had to drag these lead (printing) plates out from engraving to the presses and back,” Danny recalled. “When my teacher told me about the job I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m gonna be a newspaper man.’ So, I run down to the old Record after school and the first thing the boss, Arthur Gates, says to me is, ‘Hey, kid, get a mop and sweep up that (bleep) over there.’ He used to pay me in cash out of his pocket.”
After separate tours in Vietnam interrupted their newspaper careers, both brothers considered becoming cops when they came home, but were talked out of it by an uncle who was a Boston homicide detective.
“Cops weren’t making all that much back then,” Dennis recalled, “and my uncle told me I’d be a fool not to take the apprenticeship that was waiting for me at the paper. After all,” he said with a wry smile, “newspapers were going to be here forever, right?”
Tonight, when they walk out of the pressroom for the last time, after a combined total of more than 80 years experience, they will leave as bosses of their respective crafts: Dennis as assistant production manager for the machine shop and Danny as night operations manager for the pressmen. But Pat Purcell, the publisher of this paper, rightly calls them what they are - magicians.
Dealing with ancient machinery that would often burn, or explode, or blow crucial gaskets, the guys Danny and Dennis worked with and alongside stayed true to a sacred obligation of keeping the presses running . . . even if that meant using ropes, leather straps, weights and spare parts cobbled from adjoining presses.
Danny recalled the old boss who crystallized his job description this way. “ ‘Kid,’ he says to me, ‘even if you don’t know what the hell to do when a press goes down, do something, because that paper’s gotta get out on the street.’ ”
“It was the one, central reality that dominated our entire working lives,” Dennis added. “No matter what happens - fire, flood or some other catastrophe - that paper has to go out. The news can’t wait. The bell rings and that’s it . . . it just has to happen every single night, the paper has to get out there.”
Retirement did not arrive in the way either brother had imagined. And though the emotions among their brother pressman run the gamut, the Messings say they have been lucky to be sustained by a lifetime of great memories and pride in their craft.
“They may print this paper in Chicopee,” Dennis said, “but it will always be my baby. The Herald is family to me. Whenever there was a crisis downstairs, I was the guy they called. The memories will be with me forever.”
“I will remember the guys,” Danny said. “I’ll miss the ribbing, the laughter and the fighting. I’ll miss the building, the smell of it, the sounds, everything. And you know something, I’ll even miss people screaming things at me like, ‘Why the hell can’t you people fold this paper right, or get the color in focus?’
“You see, from now on all that stuff will be done by machines and computers, instead of by the hands of guys like me.”
And this business will never be quite the same.
We’ve seen a lot of good people go out the door in the last few years, as the boss does what he needs to do in a tough environment to keep a good paper alive. It’s different now, a lot of places in the building that used to be humming with activity quiet and dark. If you’ve worked the night side, you’ve walked through the other business end of the building, where the roar of the presses is deafening, the endless rolls of paper is flying through machinery anywhere from two years to 70 years old, and you get ink on your shoes. Some guys like the Messings and my neighbor Jack I know by name, others are just faces you know, guys you nod and say hello to. They owned their piece of it like we owned ours. Our unions had their fights with the boss, but no one ever thought he wasn’t doing his best to keep the place going.
And we’ve survived. One old compositor told me a few years ago, “People said when I came here 40 years ago, ’What are you going to work there for. That place will be dead in two years.’”
People ask how we’re doing at the Herald. I say we’re still doing. A local owner who is committed to keeping this paper open. No debt. Other papers are still trying to figure out how to make do with less. That’s familiar ground for us. We’re used to it. We’ve spent our careers doing more with less.
Knock on wood. If the day ever comes when people are walking out the door because the Herald is no more, Boston will be a lot poorer for it. A salute tonight to a lot of good guys who put the paper out every night and don’t get to do that anymore.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:01 am on Monday, October 6, 2008
3 Responses to “Thanks, Guys, And Good Night”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
October 6th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I used to read the newspaper cover to cover, wherever we happened to be living at the time, before the internet and online news services and blogs came along. So thanks to people like the pressmen and journalists who did such a good job for so long.
October 6th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
The Press
Rudyard Kipling
October 9th, 2008 at 1:10 am
[...] Thanks, Guys, And Good NightAfter separate tours in Vietnam interrupted their newspaper careers, both brothers considered becoming cops when they came home, but were talked out of it by an uncle who was a Boston homicide detective. … [...]