WWCFST? What would Charles F. Scott think? ACS? or EELJR?
Charles F. Scott bought the weekly Iola Register in September of 1882. It was printed from handset type on a press that was fed, a sheet at a time, on a belt-driven press located on the second block of South Washington, just off the square. What would granddad have thought about printing the Register at the Lawrence Journal-World?
He wouldn’t have been surprised, but it’s just as well he didn’t live 72 years longer and been forced to make the decision. Granddad was as forward-looking as anyone. He built the Register building in 1926, convinced that Iola would grow into one of the larger cities in Kansas. He grew the weekly Register into the daily Register. He went from handset type to Linotypes.
But technology wasn’t his long suit. The managers he hired looked into the grubby business of producing a better newspaper and making more money while he practiced politics, studied history, wrote, traveled and fished for trout in Colorado. So WWCFS think about today’s new Register? It is very attractive, he would have said. “I’m glad we can afford it.”
Angelo Campbell Scott, who took over in 1938 and was its publisher until 1965, would have said: “That was a well-thought-out decision, Susan. The pictures are spectacular. It isn’t practical for newspapers our size to have their own four-color presses. You have found a way to give our readers quality printing without charging them an arm and a leg. Good for you.” And then he may have reminisced about the tough times the newspaper endured through the 1930s, when the farm economy slowed to near zero and the business was still paying off the loan made to build the building and install the new press. Light was hard to see at the end of that tunnel.
Emerson Elwood Lynn, jr., generation three, takes no credit for Susan’s decision but agreed with it at every turn. He has had practice changing technologies. He bought the Register, with Jack Hastings as a partner, in 1965. The newspaper still was being printed on the eight-page Cottrell press that his granddad bought in the 1920s. (The great bull gear that ran that press sits on its axel in his patio today, serving as a table.) Linotypes produced the lead type slugs from which the news and advertisements were printed.
The air in the back two-thirds of the ground floor was always heavy with fumes from the molten lead and the sharp, but reassuring smell of printer’s ink. When you walked through the door and that bouquet of odors hit your nostrils, you knew you were home.
It took five men working a full week, or longer, to do the mechanical work involved in printing the daily Register.
Then the changes came faster. By the 1970s, hot metal was yesterday’s technology. Offset printing took its place. The old press went to the junk yard. A new press, a new mortgage, took its place.
Just as printing required a new technology, so did creating the news and advertisments. Gone were the Underwood typewriters and the Asssociated Press teletype machine.
Over a short period of time, at least four generations of typesetters, each better and far less expensive than its predecessor, were purchased and then junked. Today the type is created by computers that cost about 5 percent a Linotype’s cost in 1950 — and do a better job far faster. The news staff took over the newpaper-making that the men in the back shop once did.
Today EELJR thinks that giving Register subscribers four-color pictures, crisper printing on better quality paper, at the same price charged for last week’s black and white edition is the only way to go and congratulates SL for having the gumption to make the move.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
