B-Sides: With giant’s retirement, a chapter closes in Terre Haute newspaper history

By Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE April 09, 2008 10:40 pm

— A handful of Jim Fisher’s co-workers smile as they study a photograph of him.
In it, he’s busy building that day’s newspaper, grinning as he looks over his shoulder.
“That’s ‘Fish,’” says Cathy Sumansky.
Funny, the picture, from the mid-1960s, is older than Sumansky. Everything else in that snapshot disappeared decades ago, from the Linotype machine he’s operating to the publication itself, the old Terre Haute Star. Somehow, Fish stayed Fish. Never gave up on his Indiana Hoosiers. Always carried a lunch bucket to work. A pack of smokes in the front pocket of his plaid shirt. A wacky story on the tip of his tongue. Old school, and proud of it.
“I’m the last of the old farts, I guess,” he says, looking out the window of the Clay County home he shares with his wife of 47 years, Lois.
Indeed, a chapter of Terre Haute newspaper history comes to an end this month, when Fish officially retires from the Tribune-Star composing room. He’s the last printer from the “hot type” era still on the job.
His job title, printer, hasn’t changed since the newspaper hired Fish on May 4, 1964. Everything else has changed.
Forty-four years ago, Terre Haute had two newspapers — the morning Star and the afternoon Tribune — operated by the same company from the same building on Wabash Avenue. Fish was one of 195 printers, who set news stories and headlines into hot lead with Linotype machines. They followed the rules of the International Typographical Union, the first labor group to organize a local in Terre Haute in the late 1800s.
The foreman blew a whistle to signal the start of work, every break and quitting time.
“You didn’t start before they blew the whistle,” Fish recalls. “If you did, they’d fine you 25 bucks.”
As he recounts the story, Lois retrieves, from a box of mementos, that same whistle, now dormant and tarnished.
Those days are gone. The emergence of computers in the 1970s changed the printers’ craft. Editors and page designers in the newsroom can now build entire pages on their computer screens. These days, instead of typesetting, Fish’s responsibilities included preparing and accounting for advertisements, and checking each page for color, reproduction and content problems before they’re transmitted to the Tribune-Star press facility on Margaret Avenue.
His departure leaves nine composing room employees. His union, the ITU, still functions, but is an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America. And his livelihood, printing, is “a brand new ball game.”
As his contemporaries retired one by one, Fish surprised his younger co-workers by adapting — hesitantly — to a computerized world. He nicknamed his computer “Speedy” despite it being, as fellow printer Toney Hallett puts it, “the slowest computer in the building.”
Only Fish, though, has walked every step of the newspaper’s technological path from 1964 to 2008. His memories of hot metal type are still vivid.
Those Linotype machines featured a 90-character keyboard, with separate keys for upper- and lower-case letters and punctuation marks and varying fonts. Operators like Fish took a news story and retyped it, punching each letter and symbol into molten lead.
“If something went wrong, something got cocked or something, that lead would come out right back at you,” Fish says, raising an eyebrow for emphasis. “And it was hot.”
To be exact, 535 degrees.
Linotype operators were expected to produce at least a galley of type — a 211⁄2-inch column — per hour. Proofreaders expected no more than four errors from Fish and his cohorts. Each galley had to be properly spaced, with no more than three hyphenated words.
“If you had more than three, they’d send it back,” he says.
Strict and hot as it sounds, the work wasn’t drudgery to Fish. The printers played euchre on their lunch breaks, and downed a few beers at T’s Lounge across Wabash Avenue once the press began rolling. That sound was music to his ears. “What I really liked was hearing that darned old press start — Rrrrrr! Rrrrrr! Rrrrrr!” he says.
Fish sifts through a box of certificates from printer training, early-era color photo separations, and pictures of the guys from the hot type days. Fish rattles off their names, and Lois helps when he draws a blank. He recalls the strike that started in the fall of ’64 and didn’t end until the next year. He and the printers walked the picket line all winter and spring. “We had a bunch of healthy printers that year,” Fish says, laughing.
Then there was that first color photo ever to appear in a Terre Haute paper. A poinsettia. Fish worked on the color breaks all evening, until finally everyone liked it, except editor Lawrence Sawyer. “He said, ‘Looks like tomato soup to me,’ and I thought I’d die laughing,” Fish remembers.
Laughing was a steady component of Fish’s ever-changing role at the Tribune-Star. Newcomers quickly learned that beneath his old-school exterior, “he’s a big teddy bear,” says David Bonham, the current composing room foreman. Printer Debbie Sons calls Fish’s chocolate cake with peanut butter icing “legendary.” Kids could count on him for treats at Halloween, and he occasionally donned a Santa outfit at Christmastime.
On the job, “as far as somebody that’s dependable and would make sure to do whatever we needed, you couldn’t ask for a better guy,” Bonham says.
Technology never affected that quality in him. And that’s why Fish continued working from the 1950s, when his career began in Illinois, to the ’60s and through the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and into the 21st century. Along the way, to borrow an Alan Jackson line, Fish’s job was “changed, disassembled, rearranged.” Yet he kept at it.
He’ll turn 70 this November. “Everybody says, ‘Why don’t you retire?’ Well, if that’s all you’ve ever done, it’s like eating,” Fish says.
Even in retirement, he may still do a shift or two occasionally for extra money. Fish is a printer, after all.
“Printing’s been good to me, I think,” he says, quieter than usual. “It gave me a living all my life. I never got rich, but it gave me all I wanted. I guess that’s all a guy can ask for.”
That’s Fish.

Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

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