They were the ones who printed and shipped the news that came to your kitchen table every day.
They did it with bowlegs and back-braces for heavy lifting on concrete floors as crises came and were conquered. They worked surrounded by a cloudy smell of ink and deafening noise that shakes your bones but means real type on real newsprint paper.
Go to your family Bible or photo album and find an obituary of somebody you loved. Or a kid's name printed for sports heroics. The paper is turning yellow and brittle with age. But it lasts. They printed it so you could keep it, cherish it, remember it, forever.
They toiled over getting pictures to jump off the page into your memory, over making ads leap off the page so people would buy bananas or bass drums or Buicks. People with names stitched on the front of their shirts, such as Spanky and Jake and Sonny. And a small man in a mailroom on hot days and dark nights named John Lorde, whose dedication to his job, and readers, and his co-workers, could inspire the younger, less-grounded, less heroic people who wrote the stories in the paper -- me -- to try harder.
Sparkle in eyes on all nights, dedication through 2 a.m. blizzards. Christmas Day and every day for all these years and not once, ever, did they not come to work and make the news.
They were the pressroom men and women who printed The Herald, and the mailroom men and women who sorted it, stacked it, inserted those food sale papers and Sunday comics and circulars. After tonight, they do it here at The Herald no more.
After tonight's edition rolls of the old press, the room will go silent. After the mailroom workers stack and sort and ready the paper for the carriers, no more will the sound of controlled chaos turn an idea into magic in The Herald building.
The paper will be printed in Charlotte after tonight.
How many times did they fix broken gears, mend burst ink lines, stack papers when the strapping machine broke? Uncountable.
The time you get your paper depended on their doing their jobs, fast, every single day and night.
I covered the arson of Antioch Baptist Church in Chester County in 2002. The horrible anniversary is coming up this week. The pastor was, and still is, a short, bouncing, inspiring man with machine oil on his fingers -- the Rev. Paul Long. A machinist and pastor. I met him as he cleaned graves in the church cemetery and looked at the ashes of his church. I watched him put on a smoky-smelling robe to tell people not to hate whoever caused that fire. Long told me so many times I did good, and he was proud of me and proud of The Herald for covering that story.
Paul Long was a pressman here at this newspaper for years. He knows the value of this newspaper to people like him, who read it every day. He expects all people to work hard to make that paper because it matters.
One night a couple of years ago, I covered a Republican presidential candidates debate in Columbia. I walked about five miles that afternoon and early evening to find people from York County to interview so you could read about it.
I filed that story around 10:30 p.m. using a laptop computer. In the time it took to walk across a hallway, the words went from Columbia to Rock Hill.
But then somebody else had to print those words.
By the time I got back to Rock Hill, the press was rolling. The people in the mailroom readied to bend, lift, bend, lift, uncountable times.
In that pressroom were three men named Clarence Moore, Robert Barber and Louis Dickinson. I stood and stared. The room throbbed with noise. They checked the papers with my words on them over and over and over. They adjusted, fixed. They did this without ceasing.
To all who did it for so long -- and to those who will continue to do it in Charlotte -- I hope I can speak for all readers, on this one. Thank you.
