Newsprint

The blog post (posted on my blog here) began like this:

This morning, on Facebook - today's substandard substitute for a morning newspaper on your doorstep - these words appeared on a glowing screen, such a far cry from the crackling newsprint of old.

"Smile on, good friends, smile on in spite of it all, for your smile is a sign to others, a life not beaten down, a hope still resilient, a love at work, your smile speaks all that and more, so smile on, in your courage and conviction, smile today that others may smile tomorrow." -- from the writing of Bishop Steven Charleston

But then, my months of writing practice took me here:

Newsprint - does anyone even know about newsprint anymore?

Newsprint, not quite white, not tan, more on the yellowy side, the color of the wood from whence it came. I wonder if there's a Sherwin Williams color swatch named newsprint?

Newsprint, hefty enough to accept ink on both sides but flimsy too. 

Olfactory like so many memories, it's dry, dusty, absorbing not just the ink but the smokiness of the print shop. Cigarette smoke, the lead pots, and the gritty stuff that sat next to the sink to clean inkstained hands.

Newsprint in heavy rolls arrived in the alley that ran next to rambling old newspaper building on a big truck, likely from Hammermill or International Paper, but all who could remember that are gone now.

Those days the newspaper was printed in house, the huge machine taking up much of that rambling building. When there wasn't enough paper on the roll to handle the press run, the end rolls were pulled off and used for other purposes.

Of course, in a print shop, every scrap of paper was used in some way. It was recycling before it was a thing. Trimmings from printing jobs made into notepads, sold at the counter for a dime. Jobs that were mis-printed still had one good side for copy paper or in-house notepads.

And so it was with the newsprint end rolls, cut into 8 1/2 x 11 size for copy paper, used by the reporters who fed it into trusty Underwood typewriters on their scarred desktops.

Cut to size for the proof press - for those long strips delivered to the proofreader to read and mark up for correction.

End rolls were also offered up for sale, popular with churches for table coverings, and with Scout leaders for paper crafts. Sometimes our bulky Christmas gifts were wrapped in newsprint. 

And the old man who sat at the big rolltop desk wrote copy in his distinctive script with a thick-leaded pencil on newsprint.

Some of those pages, brittle, yellowed, some chewed by silverfish or mice, are with me now. And I've set my computer to the typewriter font  - Courier - as words, his words, glow on the screen.