The cut of the Pi is different today
By BILL DUNCAN If you are reading this column – the first one I have written in 2010 – you probably have no idea how far newspapers have come in my 60 years in the profession. The craft in which I began is light years different from the way a newspaper is printed today. When I began we typed stories on typewriters. No longer do I roll a blank sheet of Paper into the mouth of a typewriter platen and begin typing words that eventually become sentences and paragraphs. That was only a first step in a long process that led to my story being set in lead type, locked into a metal chase and sent off to the press in a method called hot type. Today, I wrote the column you are reading on my home computer, e-mailed it to the editor. The words never touched paper until they were printed on the newspaper page you are now reading. Even the terminology is different today. When I hear some of the terms used by this generation of journalists who are far ahead of me in computer knowledge it sounds like they are speaking in foreign tongues. However when I use the language of my era, it is alien to them. Take for example the term Pi. It is one of the oldest terms used in printing. I causally asked a new generation reporter its meaning and was told that Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, 3.14159, a transcendental number. He’d do well on Jeopardy, if it was a math question, but not in answer to a printer’s question. To Pi the type means to have all the type neatly arranged and ready for printing then drop the chase to the floor, spilling the type into a jumbled disaster. It is doubtful one could Pi a page of type today since it is set by a computer and printed directly from that source. To Pi the type is now one of those obsolete terms that went the way of hot type. The word, however, is indelibly imprinted on my brain. In my career, I owned a weekly newspaper in California. We set lines of type on a linotype. My shop foreman was an old German printer named Vic Baldenhouser, who was a master printer. We hired a young apprentice from a local junior college to help in the shop. On press day, the newspaper pages were locked in the steel frame called a chase that was then placed on a flatbed press. Once the chase was on the press, it was locked in securely. It was the apprentice’s job to lock it in place. My foreman asked him several times if he had locked the chases and he assured him he had. The press started. It rolled over the chases to ink them for printing. Suddenly the chases shot out the back of the press, slammed against the brick wall and pied the entire edition. The apprentice ran out the back door and we never saw him again. There was no way we could unscramble the pied type, so we reset the entire paper and after a long night, we made sure the chases were locked tightly in place and produced the edition in time for the mail run. Today’s electronic newspapers may be faster and less labor intensive, but somehow they have lost the flavor of those old hot type days when terms like Pi brought fear to the hearts of editors and printers. The torch has been passed and I gladly hand it over to a new generation, so long as I don’t have to speak their language. (Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 82, Roseburg, OR 97470)
The Elder Statesman