Press

“Hurricane Elvis” July 23, 2003.

The election of the city’s first black mayor Oct. 4, 1991, and the election of the country’s first black president Nov. 5, 2008.

The dawning of a new millennium Jan. 1, 2000, and the damning of a new age that began Sept. 11, 2001.

The shuttering of the afternoon Press-Scimitar the day after Halloween 1983, and the mothballing of The Commercial Appeal’s Memphis printing presses the day after Easter 2017.

“These presses could run another 50 years, but they can’t get any faster or smaller or more precise,” Rose said. “They’ve reached a point where they are obsolete.”

Pressing ink on paper

The pressroom here is a collection of smaller supply rooms flanked by two cavernous areas three stories high and half-a-block long.

“We basically installed the presses and built the building around it,” said Warren Funk, who has been working for the newspaper in some capacity — from the pressroom to the boardroom — since 1961. “We even left room to add more.” We never needed it. Each concrete block canyon holds two mammoth printing presses that can operate independently or in tandem.

The four combined can print 144 pages at a time, 60,000 full-color newspapers an hour — a capacity that would have stunned Henry Van Pelt.

Van Pelt, a journeyman printer, launched The Appeal in 1841. He published the four-page weekly on single sheets of paper in a wooden shack where he lived on the Wolf River.

Rose, a journeyman printer who lives in Tipton County, crossed the Wolf River on his way to work Sunday.

After he got inside, he pulled up a computer and made a plan to print 55,110 copies of three eight-page sections of the Monday paper.

He loaded three 1,200-pound rolls of 24-pound newsprint onto the C press.

Several press operators — Jean Crawford, Greg James, Roderick Jones, Richard Kolasinski, Charles Kemp and Larry Smith — soon arrived to man the presses.

They cleared and cleaned up the used printing plates, inked rollers and paper scraps left behind by Sunday’s editions.

They threaded new newsprint through a series of cylinders that ink, color, cut, order and fold each paper.

They attached 110 laser-cut aluminum plates, four across, to metal cylinders that will press against rubber blankets that will press against newsprint.

They turned on the ink pumps and started the press, pulling copies to check ink levels and color registers.

They made sure each page and section was coming out right, adjusting knobs and buttons and dials as needed.

When everything looked right, they cranked the press up to full speed and got the paper out.

Getting out the paper

Over the past 176 years, Memphis printers have gotten the paper out come hell, high water or any other calamity, natural or man-made.

During the Civil War, two editors and a printer lugged a one-cylinder press around to half a dozen cities in three states.

For three years, they stayed one step ahead of the Union Army, publishing — sometimes with shoe polish — reports of Confederate victories and defeats.

They reported THE FALL OF MEMPHIS from a hundred miles away in Grenada, Miss., then moved on before Grenada fell.

During the yellow fever epidemic in 1878, only two of the paper’s 75 employees were not stricken. The editor and one printer stayed well and never missed an issue.

They published vivid daily accounts and death rolls, including victims’ names, at times on a single sheet printed on a double-cylinder press.

“Whole families have been swept out of existence — father, mother and children have followed each other in rapid succession to the grave,” the newspaper reported Aug. 28, 1878.

Through the decades, the newspaper has burned down twice. It has been rescued from receivership.

It has been bought and sold, merged and hyphenated, expanded and downsized numerous times.

Press operators kept showing up every day for work, maintaining gears and cylinders and pumps, applying oceans of ink to mountains of newsprint.

They printed news of floods and droughts, ice storms and heat waves, war declarations and woeful assassinations, women gaining the right to vote and men landing on the moon.

They printed stories and editorials that promoted lynchings and condemned the Klan, battled Boss Crump and backed Henry Loeb, scolded striking sanitation workers and striking police officers and firefighters.

They printed special sections that highlighted Memphis in May, Elvis in August, and King in ‘68, Tigers and Grizzlies, Pyramids and Pharoahs, hometown heroes and international icons.

They printed comics and crosswords, Sunday magazines and weekly entertainment guides; Billy Graham and Ann Landers, and thousands and thousands and thousands of obituaries.

Except for those three years of Civil War exile, they printed all of it from Memphis.

Men and machines

The four Memphis presses once run up to 16 hours a day, cranking out 300,000-400,000 copies of two newspapers.

For years they printed six daily editions of the morning paper, three editions of the afternoon paper six days a week.

They have printed separate editions for readers in West Tennessee, East Arkansas and North Mississippi; West Memphis and DeSoto County; and various suburbs and neighborhoods.

Lately, they’ve been sitting idle most of the day, printing fewer than 100,000 copies of one edition.

“It’s like using a semi to transport a couple of 2-by-4s,” said Ehren Lowers, The CA’s director of newspaper production.

“These Memphis presses are so big and old and bulky, it doesn’t make sense anymore to print the paper here. Jackson can do this better.”

The Jackson press, which prints The Jackson Sun, The CA’s sister newspaper, is 25 years younger, leaner, cleaner and more digitally savvy.

“It’s like trading in a 1975 Datsun for a much newer Honda,” Lowers said.

“Jackson’s press is newer, more efficient and more precise. And they’ve got room for us. After we get Monday’s paper out, these presses will never see a newspaper again.”

Van Pelt printed the first edition of this newspaper on April 21, 1841.

A hundred years later, The Commercial Appeal printed a 328-page special edition to mark its 100th birthday.

“Men and machines — and lots of them — make the South’s greatest newspaper,” read one of the headlines.

The number of men (and women) and machines have varied over the decades. Their determination to print a newspaper every day — wherever they are — has not.

Crawford has been operating a printing press at 495 Union Ave. since 1971.

He was here when the shiny new presses made 20,000 copies of the Oct. 13, 1975, edition of the old Memphis Press-Scimitar.

He was here Sunday evening when the ink-stained old presses made 60,000 copies of the April 17, 2017, edition of The Commercial Appeal.

“I’d rather not make a big deal out of it,” Crawford said. “I just want to get the paper out.”