Changes, but never a dull moment
THIS week marks a milestone in my life – 40 years since January 1976 when I first started work at The Rep.
In those days, of course, it was the Daily Representative and it came out every day although it was certainly thinner than it is now (like some other things I know!) The business was in a large building in Cathcart Road where Edgars is and everything was done there, including the printing, and we also printed stationery for customers.
In those days there were no computers so reporters banged out their stories on old manual typewriters (or wrote them out in longhand) before handing them in to the sub-editors for checking. Then they went to the linotype operators who worked on huge clanking machines that printed out the stories in reverse from molten lead in ‘slugs’, each one line of print.
Each story’s slugs were then clamped together, ink rolled over it by hand and a proof made so that it could come to me for checking. The men who worked in this department had a really tough time as the pots melting the lead made the room very hot and their windows faced west, so by the afternoons they were sweltering. Many of them worked without shirts but this was hazardous as impurities in the lead sometimes caused it to splash and burn them.
Once the stories had been checked and corrections made, they were all put together into pages and sent downstairs to be printed on the big, lumbering Heidelberg press, ready to hit the streets by the time people went home from work.
Later we got electric typewriters and thought we were really state-of-the-art and even later our first computer arrived and our excitement knew no bounds.
But all that printing machinery was very old and after a few years it was decided that The Rep would be printed on the modern equipment at the Daily Dispatch in East London. Some of the old machines went to museums and, sadly, some to scrap metal dealers. This entailed some Rep staff having to travel to East London for the day every Thursday to check the paper as it was produced.
Now of course, even that wonderful and very costly press is obsolete, we work on computers and all the papers are printed in Port Elizabeth on a press costing mega millions.
Some things have remained the same, though. Reporters still put their stories into the ‘pool’, editors still check, correct, create headlines, correlate with pictures and decide which page it should go on and then forward it to PE at the touch of a button for layout and printing. We still have to check that they have got everything right, but that’s all done via computer.
The staff in those days was much bigger than it is now, probably about 50 whereas there are now 11, but we had huge fun. Those men on the linotype machines were masters at making just one-letter ‘mistakes’ that changed everything such as Mercedes Bend and Mike Frog instead of Froy (plus many others that are unprintable) and then feigning absolute innocence if questions were asked.
I’ve seen many editors - from Sandy Greig, Charles Beningfield, Ted Holliday, Noel Hamlyn, Sonja Raasch and a couple whose tenure was so short that I don’t even remember their names – and each had their own management style, but it has been a wonderful, interesting and exciting journey that I’ve loved and hope to continue for many years to come.