Ask Abby

An emergency guest column

by Abby

production room boss

The Westphalia Periodic News

Our ace reporter is still in a mood, so I’ve been elected by the Westphalia staff to pinch hit for him this week.

My name is Abby. I’m the production department boss here at Westphalia. It’s my job to turn what writers write into books and, more recently, web pages.

I was reluctant, at first. I’m no writer. I’ve never written a newspaper column before.  But the others said they were sure it would be better than nothing at all.

Actually, I think writers are strange people. Sometimes they disappear for days on end and when they get back and you ask them where they’ve been they’ll usually say something like, “You wouldn’t understand.”

I know, I married one.

Well, if the truth be known, they don’t understand a thing or two themselves, like how to get ink on paper bound up as a book that you can hold in your hands when you want to be quiet and there’s no television and you’re being open to different ways of looking at things.

I grew up around the smell of printer’s ink. My father worked at a big printing plant in Cleveland and he brought the smell home with him at night. He got me into the union. I spent the next 50 years working in the production rooms of newspapers scattered around the Midwest, big and small.

When I started out, we still melted lead to make the rollers that went on the press down in the basement. Linotype operators created the trays of moveable type that was pressed into the soft metal.

Lots has changed over the years, but the basic idea has remained the same -- getting the words of the writers in the newsroom onto a press and into the hands of the circulation department.

That was it.

It was only our job to get ink on paper. But there’s been a revolution in the way we did it. Today, instead of big guys (and little me, too, of course) in grimy fire-retardant aprons melting lead ingots in a corner of the back room… today, production people in slacks and stockings move things around with keystrokes.

I like to tell young people stories about the old days. They can’t believe it! They’re able to detect the presence of a Cuban cigar burning in another building a mile away. They can’t believe we worked in a room filled with the toxic fumes from pots of boiling lead, and liked it.

But the basic idea never changed. From the days of Gutenberg to today, it’s in the production rooms where the words of writers get turned into ink on paper, or, like today, images on a computer screen. It was one of those ideas that changed the world forever. People no longer needed a priesthood to tell them what and how to think. They could have their own Bibles and see for themselves what it said.

And now, because our ace reporter is in a “mood,” I even have to do his job.

Actually, I’ve enjoyed this.

Writing a newspaper column is not so hard. Maybe I’ll do it every once in a while, but only if somebody asks a question that I think I might know something about. I might call it “Ask Abby.”