45 years in the business...and counting

By NOREEN HYSLOP

Managing Editor

A few weeks after Marilyn (Shipman) Tucker graduated from Dexter High School in 1968, she heard the local newspaper was looking for a receptionist. She applied for the job and got it. She was positioned at the front of the building at 200 W. Stoddard Street in downtown Dexter. She greeted customers and helped with a variety of duties around the office.

Forty-five years later, Tucker still reports to the paper for work every morning, although she's moved up, or rather back, from where she began at the age of 18.

These days, Tucker heads up the Composition Department of The Daily Statesman, digitally constructing pages, and special editions for Rust Communications' newspapers.

"Over the years, it seems like I've just moved further and further back in the building to different jobs," she laughs. "I'm in the very back these days, so I'm figuring the next step is out the door!"

When she began at the paper office, the office was located on the west end of Stoddard Street where two papers, The Statesman and The Messenger were each published once a week in the late 1960s.

Unlike today, the papers were printed on site. A massive pressroom, run by the late Vernon Gales, churned out the editions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and paperboys waited on their bicycles at the back door with their carrying bags strapped over one shoulder, ready to grab their bundle hot off the press.

It was the days when photographs for the paper were developed in a dark room, which was nothing more than a small closet space that held trays of chemicals to transfer film paper to and from. A clothesline hung overhead to clip dripping photos from after they were removed from the final tray.

Publishing the paper all those years ago was no easy task.

"When I started, some of the ads were still being composed using the old typesetting method," Tucker recalls.

The process involved letter-by-letter composition, using melted lead -- a tedious and labor intensive task that was replaced with the linotype method.

The linotype machine was a cumbersome piece of equipment that involved a 90-character keyboard that assembled molds for letter forms, positioned in a line. There were uppercase letters and there were lower case letters. The shift key did not exist on a linotype machine.

"It was a far cry from how we operate today," Tucker says. "The paper seldom had more than 10 pages. Today we put out a daily paper that has a minimum of 12 pages, but it's all done digitally."

Before the digital age, though, came the photo typesetting method. Tucker witnessed that changeover in the 70s.

"It replaced the linotype method," she explains. "I used to type the stories for the paper on a tape punch machine. There was no display of what you were typing. The machine would make one to six holes in a roll of tape for each letter typed."

That punched tape was then ran through a Compugraphic phototypesetter which read the tape and put the image on photo paper. That paper was then developed in a chemical processing machine and galleys of typed print were produced.

"The next step was to proofread the galleys. Any errors were corrected by the typesetter and new galleys were run containing just the corrections. Any corrected word(s) was then cut off the galley strip with an X-Acto knife and glued into place on the original galley.

Tucker performed a variety of duties after her move from receptionist to the Composition Department. They included using what she affectionately refers to as "the blue monster." The Compugraphic 7200 headline machine was used to formulate headlines and often large words as part of an ad. Again, a knife was used to cut the words out before they were individually placed on a page to comprise an ad.

The galleys were then sent to the the Layout Department, where they were cut using scissors or blades and run through a waxer. Employees then placed the waxed galleys on to a layout page.

"Once the pages full of corrected galleys were deemed to be suitable, it was the job of the pressroom to 'shoot' the pages to make large photo negatives of each one."

The negatives were then made into a mask for plate-making where intense light is used to etch the image of the page onto a metal plate before finally being mounted on the press.

"It was quite an ordeal," Tucker remembers. "Looking back, we've got it really easy today."

Tucker made the physical move with the paper when they relocated from Stoddard Street to Walnut Street, the current location of the paper. She's worked under about half a dozen publishers and has witnessed the change from two weekly papers published to one daily publication.

"I've worked in about every department but news and advertising," she explains.

She is currently design copy editor, heading up the Composition Department at The Daily Statesman and says the most significant change in 45 years on the job has been the shift to digital.

"While it made the work a lot easier, we're not using nearly the staff that we once did, so now there are only two of us who work full-time in the department."

In spite of being a two-time cancer survivor, Marilyn rarely misses a day of work. She rarely sees only an eight-hour day either, staying until every task is completed, and laughs at the fact that her supervisor wasn't even born when Marilyn began working at the paper in 1968.

"I'm working with a bunch of kids," she says.

When Tucker does finally decide to hang up her composition tools, she will take with her a history that few who remain in the newspaper business have experienced.

"It's been a fun ride," she says. "But I'm not quite done. Some day when I'm really old, I might retire."