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At the Print Shop
At 4:00 a.m. on a warm summer night in 1960, Wlthy with sweat and black printer's ink, I wandered out the front door of the Suffolk County News in Sayville, Long Island, in search of a place to lie down. There wasn't any. Overhead, the streetlights in front of the stores glowed. A hot wind rustled the leaves of the oak trees. All was quiet.
Where could I lie down? My car was right there, parked in front of the print shop, but I couldn't stretch out fully in that. Behind me, inside the building I had just come out of, were several dark front rooms—an editorial office, a business office, an advertising office, a lobby and counter—but none had a couch or even a comfortable chair. Behind those rooms was the big open space that housed the print shop. Fluorescent lights lit the room at that hour. Men bustled around. No place to lie down there either. I'd have to look elsewhere.
I liked Sayville. It is, and was then, a small town halfway between Manhattan and Montauk quite similar to the one where I had grown up in New Jersey. Record stores and dress shops, a Woolworth's and a men's shop, even three ice cream parlors lined the main street. But at 4:00 a.m. they were all closed. Even the "all-night diner" was closed. There was just nobody around.
I had seen a park in back of Main Street and so I wandered down an alley along the side of the little Suffolk County News building toward it. It was a city block in size, and there were rows and rows of oak trees, bordering a gravel path that meandered down one side of the park and up the other. It was also dimly lit, by just four streetlights at the corners. Perhaps I could find a spot off somewhere in the dark where a tree provided some shadows. Or maybe there was a park bench. I looked for one. But there wasn't one. And so I retreated to a dark patch under a tree, sat down on the ground, noticed I was sitting on acorns that were quite hard, brushed them away with my hand and then lay down on the grass, got myself comfortable, and began to drift off to sleep.
Here is how my little weekly newspaper in Montauk was prepared for printing in 1960: It was almost exactly as Gutenberg printed things some five hundred years earlier. There were iron frames, much like picture frames, that had interior dimensions exactly the size of the newspaper page. You laid these frames on a stone counter, and into them you loosely assembled thousands and thousands of little pieces of lead type, each one a backward letter of the alphabet, or a backward word or series of words. The largest pieces, the headlines, were made of individual blocks of wood, each bearing one raised letter, made of a piece of zinc glued on the top. When the frames got filled up with all these letters in just the order you wanted them, you locked them in place by inserting an iron key into a slot and twisting clockwise a quarter of a turn. The frames ratcheted inward as you turned the key. The letters were thus pressed tightly against one another.
Then you got a piece of steel about the size and shape of a cookie sheet and slid it between the counter and the frame. With this in place to keep the little letters from falling out if they were not in quite as tight as they should be, you'd pick the whole thing up and walk it to the pressroom, where you'd slide it onto a shelf inside a twelve-foot-long flatbed press. Then you'd slide out the cookie sheet, lock the frame onto the press, bring over all the other frames in this manner, put ink into a trough, and press a button to turn the press on.
In the early days of printing, you wouldn't press a button. You'd turn a crank. And the gears and the levers and the rollers of the press would move. In a three-step operation, a rubber roller would slide over a trough with ink in it, get inked, and then roll across the frames, wetting the letters. After that, a piece of paper would slide down gently onto the frames, and the clean rollers would roll the paper hard against the frames, transferring the ink from the letters to the paper. When the operation was over, a lever would peel the paper off the frames and there would be all the words, all black and shiny. You'd set the paper down to dry briefly, a metal folder lever would fold it, and there it would be, one page of a newspaper.
At midnight, Mike the Pressman had loaded fifteen frames onto the press. My newspaper that night was sixteen pages. Now there was just this last frame on the counter. And I saw, even backwards, that there was a wrong letter in a word. We'd have to fix it.
Near the counter were two Linotype machines the size of refrigerators. Men sat at them, facing keyboards, and they'd type a line. Eight feet up, at the top of the Linotype, tiny doors in tiny boxes would open, and with the keyboard controlling which doors would open by means of wheels and cables, little pieces of brass would come sliding noisily down a metal chute and assemble themselves in a row on a stand, miraculously arranging themselves to spell out words. The operator would press another button, and a perfect amount of hot silvery lead, bubbling until that moment in an open pot boiling above a gas flame, would pour into the brass pieces, covering them. When the lead cooled, it would have hardened into a line, one line, a unique sequence of letters and words extending exactly one column width wide. You could pick it up and carry it over to the frame and replace the one with the wrong letter. And your mistake was fixed.
And because of my mistake that is now what had to happen. Bob Sr. typed the line with the correction—the regular Linotype operator had gone home hours earlier when his shift ended—and I gave the line to Mike. Using a flat tool, Mike flicked out the old line with the mistake—it made a pinging sound as it bounced across the floor—and he slipped in the new one.
Once again he locked the frame, but this time he did not go for the cookie sheet. He'd carry the frame over to the press without it.
"What are you doing?" I asked. I stared at him, a worried look on my face. At the press, Bob Jr., Bob Sr.'s son, waiting for the frame, stared at him. At the Linotype machine Bob Sr. looked over to see what Mike was doing. He was about to try defying gravity.
"I do this all the time," he said. But I'd never seen it.
The Bobs and I stood stock-still. "Watch this," Mike said as with one hand under one side of the frame and the other hand under the other side he unsteadily lifted it up. He took three steps toward the press, and then the stuff inside the frame exploded, spraying thousands of bits of type everywhere in the room, onto the walls and the floor, into other pieces of machinery. Nobody moved for a while.
Then Mike said, "We'll have to do this one again."
Growing up in New Jersey, I had worked on the schoolpaper at Millburn High School. And I had been out to the print shop in Irvington when we put it together and had smelled the hot lead, and heard the chatter of the Linotype and the thump-thump of the flatbed, and savored the pungent smell of black printer's ink. As my journalism teacher had said at the time, I had gotten "ink under my nails."
In my last year of high school, I got a job as a "stringer" covering high school sporting events for the Newark Evening News. A sports editor took all us stringers, about ten in all, on a tour through the dusty, dirty six-story office and printing plant building in that blue-collar city. After the tour, we returned to the city room, where the editor sat us on stools and stood in front of us, pacing around.
"Now here's what we need. Details. The score. Names of high scorers. The highlights. A brief description of the ebb and flow. You are to leave the game when it is over, the football game, the basketball game, or whatever, and you are to go to a pay phone and take out a nickel and call us immediately. We'll take the story right over the phone. "Here is what we don't want. I had this happen once. The phone rang and I picked it up. On the other end, I could hear a crowd of people, cheering. And then this breathless voice. All excited. 'We won! We won! We won!' And then he hung up. That's what we don't want."
At 7:00 a.m., rested, I returned to the print shop. The flatbed press was just finishing churning out my six thousand newspapers at the rate of one a second—the rate of a heartbeat—and the last of them were being bundled up with string, stacked up on handcarts, and pushed out across the sidewalk to my convertible, which was still parked on Main Street. It was dawn. The bundles made a big pile in my car. There were some in the passenger seat, a big mound in the backseat, the rest in the trunk.
I started the car and headed out toward an entrance to Sunrise Highway, heading east into the dawn. I leaned forward and turned on wins, the rock-and-roll station, and with the music thumping at a volume as loud as I could get it, I listened once again to "Shake, Rattle and Roll" as I banged the side of my car with the flat of my hand to keep time.
I glided out onto the highway. My T-shirt was streaked with ink and sweat. Ink was in my eyes and ears. In my hair. Under my nails. And then I passed the Bellport exit of Sunrise Highway and came upon the place where the limbs of the trees arch over the passing lanes of the road. I stood up in my car—a filthy Roman chariot driver—and, keeping one hand on the wheel, stretched the other up toward the foliage trying to touch it, failed, but then whooped with joy.
Two hours later, in the fishing and resort town of Montauk, I would begin to deliver the papers bundle by bundle and handful by handful to the tops of cigarette machines in restaurants, to the counters by cash registers in souvenir stores, to the little tables in motel lobbies by the padded chairs, and so forth and so on until everything was delivered. Then, with the sun lowering toward the horizon, I'd drive to the beach, hot and filled with joy, and I would leap out of my car, run down the sand toward the ocean cheering at the top of my lungs, and dive in. People in town would now be reading what I wrote. I was in love.
Four years earlier, on a Sunday morning in June of 1956, my father had driven our family to the eastern tip of Long Island from Millburn. We were told this would be, like it or not, our new home. I'd never been here before. I was sixteen years old. Out the window of the car, I watched the city and its suburbs fall away behind us to be replaced by miles and miles of potato and duck farms. Finally, as we approached the end of this five-hour trip, we arrived in the Hamptons, where I saw the most beautiful white beaches imaginable, cliffs and forests, harbors and wetlands, wooden windmills and old New England colonial downtowns. We passed through the sleepy little villages of Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, and Amagansett. Every village was quiet as a mouse on that Sunday afternoon. The stores were closed. A few early-afternoon church services were just letting out. And then, past Amagansett, as we drove down a hill to a flat, sandy peninsulac alled Napeague, the temperature abruptly dropped five degrees and there was a sudden, biting smell of salt sea air. Out the window, along both sides of the road, there was now mist and fog, and beyond it, the sea. Ten minutes later, we burst into sunshine in this windy, Wild West motel and fishing village called Montauk. There were people on horseback—Dad told me there were two cattle ranches just outside of town—and in that downtown about twenty brand-new motels, one built in a Hawaiian motif with waterfalls and swimming pools, another in an Indian motif with a totem pole. They bore names such as East Deck, the Ronjo, White Sands, the Oceanside. There were crowds of people on vacation walking around, there were little sailboats on a pond, there were lifeguard stands and fishermen's trucks and souvenir stores. And presiding over it all, ina field, a six-story abandoned office building. I had never seen anything like this.
From downtown Montauk, my father continued on, indicating a drugstore at the far end of town, and then continuing on six miles to the very tip of the peninsula, to a classic lighthouse right on the point. I was in love with this place. Of course, even at sixteen, I knew the reason my father brought us here from a more ordinary and conventional life in suburbia. My father had become unhappy working as a salesman for a national cosmetics company. One day he came home from one of his long trips to tell us he had met a customer at a drugstore in a coastal town in Massachusetts, and the customer, a family man, had taken him deep-sea fishing in his fishing boat. Dad thought, I could do this too. Have a boat by the shore. Go fishing. Own a store. Indeed, he had a degree in pharmacy, which he had gotten years before at the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. So it was possible. But what would he do for money? We were not rich. And where could it be? Perhaps he could find a drugstore—not in New Jersey, but in the state of New York, where he was licensed—that was fors ale, successful, but so remote or unusual that the owner could not find a buyer and would be at a certain level of desperation. Perhaps he'd sell it to Dad for no money down, but half the profits until it was paid off. Dad got a stack oft rade magazines and began to search the classiffieds and after a while found just such a store in Montauk, New York, wherever that was, which was called White's Drug Store, that really only did a decent business during the three summer months of the year. And so that's where we moved, and that's where we stayed. I've lived in Montauk and, later, in the Hamptons just adjacent for fifty years.
