Back in 1981 I got a job at a small town (but county seat) weekly newspaper in southeastern Oklahoma. My job was production - typesetting, paste-up, which for us pre-Mac-II old-timers, involved waxers and exact-o knives and darkroom halftones and offset plate burners and... well, you get the picture.
I'd begun my not-so illustrious media career in high school, when my best friend's father was the managing editor of the Muskogee Phoenix. And while Muskogee wasn't that big a city either, it did use a web press instead of offsets, and mechanicals that were actually just big wooden frames into which lead type was fitted - backwards - letter by letter and space by space, and the halftones were dot-matrix chunks of used-to-be molten lead as well. No waxers, big pots of molten lead everywhere... there's a reason the adage in the industry back then was that typesetters were mad as hatters.
Anyway, my friend's father had immediately recognized my 'unusual talent' of being able to read and write backwards as easily as forwards, and put me to work when I was 15. It was a daily rag and I could only work after school, so he had me doing the in-rack pre-proofing. IOW, read the articles backwards and correct the setting mistakes as I found them before the proofs were made. That way I just had to work with the solidified alphabets and not have to pour any molten lead myself.
The job lasted until I graduated in '69. From there I'd gone on to mostly writing technical pieces to help pay my way through college, and then to publishing when my husband and I incorporated a publishing house for the purpose of producing a skateboarding magazine out of Maryland in the late '70s.
Life intervened as it is wont to do, and by '81 we and our children were living in the apartment attached to my in-laws' house in Oklahoma while hub went to college on the GI Bill for his computer degree. Because he could. I ended up at the newspaper, which was all of a block and a half down the street, next to the funeral home and across the road from the Courthouse/jail. This was my hands-on introduction to photo-typesetting, with old Merganthaler headliners and a refrigerator size Compugraphic photo unit that took input from a desktop computer via 7" floppy disks and only did one thing (using all numbers-based programming for parameters), and only after I'd entered it from the top from a rickety ladder to physically attach and unattach film strips for the typefaces to a metal wheel that turned at nearly 400 mph. Fun times.
The paper wasn't big and it wasn't really newsy. Mostly it was reports from the nursing homes on who was doing what during arts and crafts, the standard obituaries, wedding and birth announcements, the school lunch menus, pithy reports on the latest city council meetings (my beat as 'reporter' and stringer for the Tulsa World at 5¢ a word), the police records for the week, the court docket, local college announcements, a whole lot of legal notices in 7-point type, a few classifieds, and the weekly 2-page spreads for the 2 local grocery stores. Biggest income, that. Oh, and occasionally some tidbit of press release sent to Publisher Fred over the week from various governmental entities, that used to give me and the pressman and platemaker no end of entertainment on production nights putting joke headlines on the mechanicals just to see if the front office proofreader would catch them. "Thinly Veiled IRS Threats" was one I remember fondly that she didn't catch. And I almost didn't either... but that's another story.
In '82 there was an important state and local election happening, and we did cover that start to finish in a somewhat 'responsible' press/media manner. I'd dutifully typeset all the words for all the articles for the whole of the campaign season, and had also covered some actual news-news coming in from the college (discovery of cyanide poisoning of the local creek from the town's only industry) and Sheriff shenanigans that included murder of a lover's husband we personally had to call the SBI in on (Jimmy Jack, yes that was his name, got 20-life for that little escapade). Anyway, it finally came down to Election Day - which not coincidentally was also production 'day' (meaning we'd be there until the wee hours putting the paper together). And it was my first honest-to-Uncle-Sam small-town election I'd ever paid the least bit of attention to in my life.
Before dinnertime - when we were allowed a couple of hours off - Publisher Fred and the pressman hefted a gigantic blackboard out to the middle of the street, after the local constabulary had blocked off the entire block just for the purpose. There was also a 6-foot step ladder next to it, an eraser on a stick, and a whole box of chalk. The pressman spent the whole of dinner break lining the graph, labeling the races, and listing the candidates. At sunset an hour or so before the polls officially closed, I walked the alley back to work and was entirely amazed.
The entire front and side yards of the funeral home and the entire street up to the end of the courthouse were solidly packed with citizens. More of them than I'd seen since the last summer's Belle Starr Days parade. They came with blankets and folding chairs and grills and ice chests and kids... hundreds of kids, who were completely content to be allowed to play a cutthroat game of Tag amongst the on-display headstones. The atmosphere was electric - there was no sitting home waiting for election results on television, and television didn't cover the most important local races anyway. Closest station being in Tulsa, after all. This was a regular Big Deal for the citizens of this little town ("city" in name only, there were less than 8,000 people). Some had even brought bottle rockets, with which to celebrate if their guy or gal won.
As soon as the polls closed the front-office proofreader/secretary/reporter ran over to the courthouse to pick up the tally's as they came in for the various precincts. They were written down on note paper by the judge, and then she'd run them out to the street and hand them to the pressman on his ladder. He would write the tally into the proper space on the grid, erasing the totals every time votes were added accordingly. And with each change of totals, part of the crowd would cheer and send up a few bottle rockets, while others in the crowd booed. It was great fun!
By about 10:30 pm it was clear how the races were going, and most people - especially those with kids - started breaking camp and heading home. A few die-hards stayed until the last of the results came in and the pressman was called inside to load the plates and print the paper. Which went out in bound bundles to sites in the county well before 6 am when most people began their new day.
This is just a remembrance of days gone by, and a level of voter interest and participation that seems hard to come by in these jaded times. Real Americana, from a time before Americans were so terrified they'd give up their freedoms just to feel safe at night from closet monsters and things that go 'bump'. And when anybody trying in any serious way to disenfranchise them from having a say in their own governance was practically unheard-of (or at least short-lived). Lately I've been a bit melancholy about how easy the Republican Party has had in disenfranchising Americans. It's just that party. With a little help from Democrats.
What happened to that America? What ever happened to the "Home of the Brave?" Why is our political class so determined to keep us from having a say, and why aren't red-blooded Americans of all persuasions marching in the streets to stop it?
Sigh. As my Mama always used to say, "Ya snooze, ya lose." Let's not be snoozing on Tuesday, m'kay?