On a miserably hot day last summer, Brother Mike and I went to Dunn to visit my sister Becky. She was visiting for her high school reunion. We drove through the growing town – a city, really – noting what was still there and what wasn’t, remembering someone who lived there or worked there fifty years ago.
We went by the church, through downtown, over to where the park we enjoyed used to be, to the Woman’s Club where Becky’s wedding reception was held, and where I practiced piano. We went past the parking lot that replaced our beloved old house. \There was no question we had to go by Railroad Street and see where the Dunn Dispatch was published for decades; after all, the Dispatch was why Papa moved our family up there, when Becky and Mike were teenagers and I was little more than a problem.
The block has changed a lot since we told it goodbye in 1978; the newspaper office is an event venue called the Chill Place, of all things. The bar next door that once had a fascinating Budweiser light fixture –scale-model Clydesdale horses walking in a circle— is some other kind of business. The same goes for the scruffier tavern at the end of the block, now boarded up. I was forbidden to take my newspapers inside either establishment, but the patrons often came to the door with their dimes in hand, eager for that afternoon’s news.
I had to get a couple pictures of course; we were worse than tourists that day, since ours was a sentimental journey, and the first time a majority of Miss Lois’ children had been together in 20 years.
The railroad tracks in front of the office were still the same, although I honestly think the traffic was heavier, even though it was a Sunday afternoon. The heat shimmered off the rails, waiting for the next roaring symbol of American commerce to blast through. The bells, flashing lights and crossing bar would activate when the train was a few minutes out; sometimes we kids would wait by the glass door to see the train, but if it was late afternoon, we didn’t have time.
We had newspapers to deliver.
Mike ran a paper route for a while, putting thousands of miles on his bicycle. Later I carried papers to stores and businesses near the office, and sold a few on the street. Each afternoon I had a properly counted and turned stacks to run across the tracks to the bus station, Norris Frozen Custard, Mr. Blake’s service station, then the candy store where I bought comic books, the drug store, and Muse’s Supermarket. One of the gentlemen who owned a furniture store always tried to get me to give him a paper for free.
Touching the worn paint of the brick wall of the old office last summer, I remembered running down the sidewalk to get back so Papa and I could run his route; even the editor of a smalltown newspaper had to deliver papers, as did most everyone else on staff. I felt important as I jumped out at each business, running my stack inside, ink on my forearms and more often than not a smudge or two on my face to boot.
Delivering the papers was fun, but watching it being built was like a church service, except for the occasional cussin’ we boys weren’t supposed to hear.
My parents, Miss Louise, Mr. Billy, Mr. Wade and Mr. Johnny (my friend the sports editor) all wrote stories on manual typewriters. Papa then edited their copy and sent it back to the ladies on the typesetting machines. Once in a great while, if the smelly, leaking Compugraphics broke down, the paper shifted back into antique mode. The 1920’s Linotype would be fired back up, each individual word cast and struck in hard lead, then pushed to the side where it clattered down on top of the next line. The Compugraphic required a deft touch or the keyboard would stutter; the Linotype, a massive machine of iron and steel, required that you commit to each letter with a firm finger.
Papa didn’t like the headlines that were made by the modern machine, so he used a Ludlow to manually set most of the front page headlines. I have noted too many times how I improved my skills because I had to read upside down and backwards, standing on a Coke crate between his legs while he dropped the letters and words into place, tightened them down, then carried them to the old print shop across the wall, where the sheet press would change words from backwards metal gibberish to clean black Scotch Bodoni letters on paper.
The paper with the headlines and the strips of copy from the Compugraphics were then waxed, trimmed and laid out on sheets; those sheets were in turn “burned” to create negatives on aluminum plates, which were then affixed to the Goss Community press.
The press was the heart and soul of the paper.
When it ran, you could sometimes even hear and feel it above the vibration of the train. It often ran throughout the day, running print jobs for other newspapers, advertising flyers and the like. On weekends it was still, and when I went to the office with Papa on a Saturday morning I liked to sneak inside the yellow safety line on the floor and touch the cold, powerful metal. There was simply nothing like the smell of ink and oil and grease and paper and heat, all parts of the great beast that kept us all fed.
When the press run was done, and we were scrambling to get our papers out, the press was lovingly and carefully cleaned and adjusted, preparing for the next day’s battle. Short leftover rolls of paper would be removed, and the huge five-foot rolls that could crush a man moved into place and locked in. Ink reservoirs would be topped off, and a thousand tiny adjustments would be made so it could run again the next day. In a room with walls permanently stained by dust and dirt and grime and ink and lead, the press was always clean and ready to go before the end of the day.
But on this particular April day, the crew didn’t bother cleaning it up. I was horrified.
I knew the newspaper was closing, but I was still a little kid, and little kids always look for a miracle, a deaux au machina, a hero. But there wasn’t one. The paper was tired; the owners were tired, and the other newspaper in town was getting stronger by the day.
I had wandered back into the deepest parts of the building hoping to see some of my friends, but they were all gone. The ladies who ran the Compugraphics and laid out the pages, Buzz who ran the press, the other folks who were always there, preparing for the next day: they were gone. There were paper scraps around the Goss, some folded end pieces on the conveyor, and everything was shabby and filthy looking. It looked – dead. It was like Robert Ruark recounting when he gave a merciful coup de grace to a crippled old lion. Nothing could be done, and we knew it, but in those last moments, there was still hope, right until the press stopped.
On top of that, the Associated Press machine was unplugged. Our connection to the outside world, the machine that spat out long rolls of paper that could stop the entire process and force a rebuild, a machine so important that a light had been rigged above it in case you couldn’t hear the alarm over the running press – the machine that wrote words like Nixon and Elvis and Saigon and Moscow and Miami and Washington, D.C. was unplugged and dead, too.
On the layout board was the last editorial cartoon, a piece of Dispatch letterhead with –30–written across it. I knew what that meant. “Putting a 30 on it” was newspaperese that a story was finished, complete. Done.
I knew it couldn’t be the case. I absolutely knew that something was going to happen, that I’d rush to the office with my dog after school the next day and things would be like they had always been. They had to be.
I almost ran to the front where my father’s office was tucked away in a corner that appeared unchanged since World War II. If I could get to my papa, I knew this would all be just a bad dream, or some kind of mistake.
But as I went through the door into the front office, I stopped cold. I heard a sound I had never heard before. It was a sound I would never hear more than once or twice more in my entire life.
It was the sound of my father quietly crying.
At an age when most men were retiring, he was starting over with a wife and a young son, and wasn’t at all sure what to do.
On that hot summer afternoon last year, when I leaned against the peeling white painted bricks of that old building, I remembered how it was to be a little kid, running to beat the train. I was the proudest little boy in the world, because I was able to work alongside my daddy. I remembered the special editions and elections and the late nights and the tobacco markets and the catastrophes and the victories, as well as saying goodbye to that old beast that lay forgotten in the back room, and wondering what we would do.
But even though I was scared, even though my daddy was crying, I knew in my heart he would make it all right. That was one reason I had to go back to that building last summer, even just to lay my hand on the wall and remember when we ran to beat the train, because we had a newspaper to put out.
The Dunn Dispatch ceased publication on April 26, 1978. From that last edition until 2000, my father wrote a column saying goodbye to what he considered one of the finest times in his life. Sometimes that column was published, sometimes it wasn’t.
In 2001, he lay dying in his hospital bed, too weak to write a column about “our” newspaper. He asked me to never let folks forget, and it is a promise I have kept.
I made another promise that day, a promise to myself. You’ll read that one in a few days.
