Among my fondest memories is the discovery of a window close to the ground on a building that housed the printing presses of one of Chicago's daily papers. Many a time I spent, as a teenager, mesmerized before that window, looking in on the presses doing their work, breathing in the effluvium of the printers' ink, wanting to be part of it all, dreaming of being part of it all.
It was one of many related dreams: computers, books, journalism, storytelling. Printing. I played at printing for a while: a 2nd job as a proofreader at some big printing company (its name & details long since forgotten), where I could watch and be envious of the men -- though there may have been a woman or two -- who operated the Linotype machines. Yes, Virginia, I wanted to be one of them. No, Virginia, I never was. After a few weeks, exhausted from working 16-hour days, young hale and hearty though I was, I quit the job ... one small step away from being fired.
And there was the time when, between jobs, I spent a couple of hard months living at home and looking for work, then was offered 3 different jobs within the space of a couple of days, one as secretary to a patent attorney, one as secretary at the school I had graduated from, one as assistant to the circulation manager of the Chicago Sun Times. I knew then and believe to this day that the job I ought to have taken, the one I really wanted, was the one in the newspaper office. I'd have swept floors to be working at a real newspaper. But the practical thing to do was to accept the highest-paying position: secretary to the patent attorney. So that's what I did, for the grand wage of $375/month. I lasted, I think, about three months or so. The fellow was just plain weird, was never satisfied, fired secretaries right and left. He fired me. Later, I heard he was fired himself not long after I left. But the Sun Times job had slipped irretrievably through my hands.
Then I married and then I moved to New York. Again, I obtained a short-lived job at a printer's (probably, come to think of it, a printing broker) on Varick Street in Manhattan. I was a secretary to some fellow who took a decided dislike to me, and I fled after a few months, even though I had my champions there, too, including the company's president -- who offered to teach me the printing business -- and his secretary. There was one person there, a woman, who operated a Varityper machine. I asked her one day to tell me how to learn to operate a Varityper; she brushed me off, refused to answer.
About that time, I looked up the phone number of the Printers' Union in the city, called it, inquired about training programs. For myself? Yes. Laughter. Then a busy signal. Easily cowed, I found, instead, yet another secretarial job.
Later -- I was all of 25 by this time, and just off the heady experience of marching (and helping to organize, in a decidedly small way, but still ...) down Fifth Avenue in the 1970 March in honor of the 50th anniversary of Women's Suffrage -- I spotted an ad in the Village Voice for a fast typist, with the princely salary of $110/week. I answered the ad, and that's how I finally learned typesetting on the Varityper ... and IBM Selectric Composer ... and various computer typesetting modes that have come along since.
But I have never actually operated a printing press.
So when I saw, completely serendipitously, that Cooper Union was offering a summer course in Letterpress operation, I knew that, come heck or high water, I had to sign up. It was just a question of getting $315 together somehow. President Bush answered that problem with an "economic stimulus" check. So the planets have finally aligned, everything has fallen in to place.
The adventure begins.
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