PUBLISHED AND PERISHED

By Hugh Sidey

Not long ago, we shut down the press at the weekly newspaper my family owned in my Iowa hometown of Greenfield (pop. 2,074). After 108 years, its glorious Wednesday-night baritone was not to be heard. No more would it summon folks to come and read how kids' crepe-paper birthdays rivaled royal cotillions, or how the class dullard shone like a bright star.

True, the newspaper lives on, and I hope it still will be rich with the fragments of life of Greenfield. But the renowned iron patriarch that stamped these small stories into history has been whisked away to oblivion. A couple of muscular men from Kansas City, Mo., came through the print shop of the Adair County Free Press and wrenched out the press, hauling it off to a printing plant in Princeton, Ill. The paper will now be printed on a similar press 20 miles down the road and delivered to Greenfield by van--another change in the constantly shifting economic tides of the prairies. Change so inevitable.

In the office there are only low voices and the twick of computers heralding the new century. The clovelike smell of printer's ink has already been subdued by cleaning solvents and fresh paint. The absence is marked, though, by a great, gaping hole in the back shop, as if a huge molar had been yanked.

The arguments are of cost effectiveness and the inexorable consolidation that comes with our culture. Still, there is melancholy when a friend moves on. A press is, well, guardian and watchdog and historian, the builder of pride and the maker of dignity and meaning in small places. In the little towns in the heart of our country, somebody usually arrived with a press and some typecases even before the churches and schools were built, certainly before a Civil War cannon was installed in front of the courthouse.

Our press had a personality. It wheezed and groaned and squeaked and thumped and sprayed. Actually there were five presses over the century of the Free Press, but in most minds they are all one, each rising out of the one before. My companion and teacher was No. 3, a flatbed machine of such weight and exuberant horsepower that it ultimately cracked the brick walls of the building. On stifling summer nights in the Depression and the war years, with all the windows open, the thudding of that press could be heard up and down the alleys and street. The people would take off their aprons or stuff the day's receipts in the cash registers and hurry to the Free Press office to savor another chapter of their lives, gossip a little and hunt for a typo or two, exclaiming triumphantly when they found one.

Once, there was a wider and more deafening metallic overture in town, one that used to rise with the sun, part of the song that Walt Whitman used to "hear America singing...those of mechanics...blithe and strong." The steam trains came around the bend behind the houses and doubled their strokes up the slope, and the sound shook the windowpanes. But in a blink they were extinct. Our creamery went silent. So did the big diesel electric generators that pumped through the cold winter nights. Maybe it all is good. But the memories are so intimate and gratifying, of things done well and done by people we knew and never done in excess.

On those distant Wednesday nights,when it was the turn of our press to sing, I would climb up on the pressman's platform, and for a moment or two my small perch became Olympus. I would riffle the paper in place on the feedboard and then punch the first power button to stir the dead weight of the steel and lead. The press would groan and move and finally plunge back and forth like a stallion in harness, air cylinders hissing and gasping as they cushioned each surge. I would stand a few seconds absorbing the rumble and relishing the power and the meaning. The evening's drama had begun, and each of the nearly 3,000 sheets of newsprint was tenderly guided into posterity in a marvelous alchemy of paper, ink, type and press. It echoes today.

When the run was over, the small staff would quiet the press and lift off the lead pages in their steel chases and throw the Linotype slugs into scoops to be reused. There would be quiet talk about the stories in the paper. In the drought years, we wondered if rain would ever come again. In the war years, we marveled at how quickly friends had been shipped around the world to distant battlefields, with only bits and pieces of their censored, yearning letters printed each week.

All else done, we would take the fancy headline type back to the wooden cases and carefully drop the letters into their compartments, thunk, thunk, thunk, a contented coda to Whitman's bawdy song. And finally we would turn the lights out and close the shop door, taking a last glance at the press dimly highlighted by the glow from street lamps. We were sure it would be there for us the next week.