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L
VIEWPOIN
Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com
She Sttnes
gainesvilletimes.com
Sunday, November 25, 2018
JOHNNY VARDEMAN
vardemanl 956@att.net
Old Linotype
was paper s
modern marvel
The Times is presenting a series of pod
casts in observance of Hall County’s 200th
anniversary.
The current podcast is about the history of
The Times newspaper itself.
It was noted that, although there have been
some close calls, the newspaper never has
missed an edition. There was a period between
the newspaper’s founding in 1947 until 1981 that
there was no Saturday edition, but after that the
paper was printed every day of the week.
Only a few months after what was then the
Gainesville Daily Times moved into the Press-
Radio Center on West Spring Street, fire heavily
damaged the production department. However,
other printers in town came to the rescue to get
the paper out.
An 1885 fire destroyed a two-story building
in downtown Gainesville housing the Gaines
ville Eagle, predecessor to The Times, and the
Southron, another weekly paper. In 28-degree
weather with a stiff breeze blowing, firefighters
couldn’t save the two newspapers and three
stores. That spelled the end of the Southron,
which already was in debt, but the Eagle some
how flew on schedule the next week.
In more modern times, when electric power
went off because of an ice storm, the Daily
Times’s newsroom prepared a paper using an
old hand-cranked mimeograph machine. Issues
came off the machine, but it was never deliv
ered because the power came back on, allowing
the press and all the other equipment to run.
Another time when weather interrupted
power, pages of The Times already prepared
were carried to Athens, which had not lost
power, to be printed.
There have been other days or nights when
mechanical problems put the paper’s fate in
doubt for the day, but eventually they were
overcome, and the paper came out, while
it may have been late. Snow days, too, have
caused the paper to be late and perhaps not
delivered at all in some areas.
Another question on the podcast was about
the “old days” when newspapers were printed
using the hot metal process. If any use that
method today, they are a rare breed. Dating
back further than The Times, weekly newspa
pers in the area had to “handset” their type.
That means compositors, those who put the
paper together, had to arrange each letter on
a “stick” to form a letter, a word, a sentence,
finally a paragraph. Obviously this was slow,
cumbersome and mistake prone.
Oldtime editors such as Jim Davidson of the
Cleveland Courier, Uncle Jack Hilton of the
Banks County Journal or W.B. Townsend of
the Dahlonega Nugget were among those who
labored into the wee hours to get all that tedious
work done.
Linotype machines put an end to that chore.
They would set a line of type with a few strokes
of a keyboard. The Linotype was a Rube-Gold-
berg type of machine that was fascinating to
watch, cantankerous to operate, but a marvel
ous melody of moving parts.
Wikipedia on the internet gives a detailed
explanation, with illustrations, of how it worked.
The short version is that when the operator
struck a key on the keyboard, a matrice con
taining a letter or character would start a line of
type. When the line was complete, molten lead
would be squirted against it to form a line. The
matrices then would be returned to a magazine
to be used again.
Nine lines of type a minute was considered
adequate, but in today’s technology that would
be akin to a turtle chasing a race horse.
When all the lines fell into place for a story,
all the stories for a page would be assembled
in a chase, a metal frame the size of a page.
This would be placed on the press to be inked
and “pressed” against the newsprint to pro
duce the newspaper. Later presses required
another step, making a “mat” of the completed
page, and it would be used to make a molten
metal cylindrical plate that would be inked
and pressed into the newsprint. That speeded
up the process, even though the extra step was
required.
Handset type wasn’t entirely a thing of the
past. Larger headlines and some type for adver
tising still had to be set by hand with the letters
formed in a “stick” just like the old days.
When offset printing arrived, it eliminated
the hot metal and a lot of the other clunky
machinery required. Compositors would “paste
up” pages with stories and photographs from
a photographic process. The composing room,
as it was named, eventually disappeared, and
from the newsroom, reporters and editors now
can compose the pages on their computers,
punch a button and make a plate for the press.
It’s even more sophisticated than that, but
today’s newspaper people are a lot more skilled
in technology than those of just a few years ago.
Today’s newsrooms are quiet compared to
those of the past when there were the constant
clatter of manual typewriters and the chatter
of teletype machines spitting out on paper news
from around the world. Those machines would
sound bells when breaking news broke out -
three bells for an urgent story, five for a bulletin
and 10 for a flash, which was heard when Presi
dent Kennedy was assassinated.
Watch for more local history next week.
MICHAEL BR0CHSTEIN I Tribune News Service
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is shown at the J Street National Conference in Washington, D.C., on April 15.
Is Ohio Sen. Sherrod
Brown the Democrats’
best bet for 2020?
Brown is a Democrat
who could make
Trump a one-termer
BY WILLIAM HERSHEY
Tribune News Service
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, fresh from re-election to a
third term, now says he’s considering a run for president
in 2020.
If they want to make Republican Don
ald Trump a one-term president, Demo
crats should urge Brown, 66, to jump into
the race.
They need a candidate who can beat
Trump, who carried Ohio by more than
8 percentage points in 2016, at his own
game — appealing to Americans who
feel economically insecure, ignored and
left behind.
That’s Brown, who’s capable of both
bashing Trump and casting a vision of
fatter pocketbooks for working Ameri
cans who’ve missed out on the benefits
of a surging stock market.
Such a candidate isn’t likely to emerge
from one of the Democrats’ bicoastal
strongholds: Massachusetts, home of
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, or California,
home of Sen. Kamala Harris, to name two.
Two potential candidates who make the same kind of
connection with disgruntled voters as Brown — former
Vice President Joe Biden, turning 76 on Nov. 20, and Ver
mont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77, are just too old.
Texan Beto O’Rourke is appealing and charismatic, but
running a close second, as he did in his Texas Senate race
against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz, isn’t the same as
winning.
Brown doesn’t have to manufacture outrage at unfair
trade agreements and economic policies that produce
expanding wage gaps between the wealthy and everybody
else. He’s been railing against them for decades.
He may be “progressive,” but he’s also a populist, capa
ble of persuading voters that he feels their pain.
Brown also has won five statewide elections — three
for the Senate and two for Ohio secretary of state — in a
blustery battleground state that still is a microcosm of the
country with factories, unions, corporate leaders, farms
and racial and ethnic diversity.
Brown’s re-election victory this year was more impres
sive because Ohio is losing its purple tint and trending
bright pink, if not red. He was the only Democrat to cap
ture a non-judicial statewide office.
The Republican at the top of the winning ticket as gover
nor-elect was Mike DeWine, the same Mike DeWine whom
Brown knocked out of the U.S. Senate in 2006. It wasn’t a
squeaker. Brown won by more than 12 percentage points.
He can appeal to both independents and even some
Republicans.
Then there are the intangibles. Brown is resilient.
When he was defeated for re-election to a third term as
Ohio secretary of state in 1990, he roared back in 1992 to
win the first of seven terms in the U.S. House.
He’s a risk-taker, as he proved by giving up a safe House
seat to take on and defeat DeWine in the 2006 Senate race.
His rumpled, gravelly voiced charisma suits him for the
retail politics of the primary campaign trail.
Brown’s boyhood dream was to play baseball for the
Cleveland Indians. He can recite statistics on RBIs and
Browns decision to
test the waters shows
hope springs eternal
BY MERRILL MATTHEWS
Tribune News Service
If you thought having 17 Republican presidential can
didates in 2016 was excessive, wait until you see the even
longer list of 2020 Democratic presi
dential hopefuls. You won’t have to wait
long!
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who just
won re-election to a third term in the
Senate, recently responded to a question
from the Cincinnati Enquirer about a
presidential bid, “I’d be lying if I said I
wasn’t considering it.” Yes, he would be.
There’s an old quip that every senator
thinks he or she is eminently qualified
— and perhaps deserves — to sit in the
Oval Office. Voters, on the other hand,
often have a different idea.
Despite numerous sitting U.S. senators
having tried, they almost never win a
presidential race — or even their party’s
nomination.
Barack Obama was the last sitting sen
ator to win a presidential election. Prior to him you have
to go all the way back to... John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Brown faces another major hurdle: No one’s clambering
for him to run.
CNN polled Democrats in October asking who was
their favorite 2020 presidential candidate. Former Vice
President Joe Biden placed first and Sen. Bernie Sanders
second. Brown didn’t even make CNN’s list of 16 possible
contenders.
Of course, the final list could be much longer. The Uni
versity of Virginia’s Dr. Larry Sabato, one of the country’s
most respected election forecasters, has identified some
34 Democrats, including Brown, who have been men
tioned or are considering a presidential bid. That’s twice
the number of Republicans who ran in 2016.
Sabato’s list includes celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey,
Mark Cuban and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
It also includes a number of current senators, includ
ing California’s Kamala Harris, Massachusetts’ Elizabeth
Warren and New Jersey’s Corey Booker, along with some
members of the House of Representatives and a sprinkling
of current and former governors.
And then there are some, let’s say, unconventional
options, such as attorney Michael Avenatti, who was
recently arrested on a domestic violence charge and
whose law practice was evicted from its offices for not
paying the rent.
Oh, and Democrats Mark Penn, a pollster and former
adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Stein
recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Hillary will
run again.”
Recognizing the leftward shift of the Democratic Party,
they proclaim she’s “reinventing herself as a liberal fire
brand.” She’ll need to.
Bernie Sanders has ignited a neo-socialist movement in
the Democratic Party, made up of energized young people
like newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The
2020 quest for the Democratic nomination will be all about
who’s lefter-than-thou.
Virtually every Democratic contender will be calling
for a single-payer, government-run health care system,
William
Hershey is
a former
Washington
correspondent
for the Akron
Beacon
Journal
Merrill
Matthews is
a resident
scholar with
the Institute
for Policy
Innovation
Johnny Vardeman is retired editor of The Times,
whose column appears Sundays. Email him at
vardemanl 956@att.net.
■ Please see HERSHEY, 4D
■ Please see MATTHEWS, 4D
