Vin Crosbie allowed these excellent photographs to be used on Metal Type.
Vin said: “These photographs detail the production of a 10,000-circulation daily newspaper in Connecticut on Friday, March 17, 1961. I found these slides among those of my father, the paper’s general manager. The Chronicle has been owned by my family since 1877. I’m the fifth generation and the sixth is already working there.
The newspaper was located in this building at 24-26 Church Street, Willimantic, Connecticut from 1877 until 1972. The building was demolished in 1976 after the newspaper had moved to the outskirts of town. The old location is now the Arthur W. Crosbie [memorial municipal] parking lot. My father, who died shortly before the parking lot was build, would have chuckled if he’d have known a parking lot was named after him.Rolls of newsprint roll off the freight train. The rolls would then be trucked to an alleyway behind the newspaper, where the press crew would push them into the the newspaper building.Editor Jim Malone and Reporter Walter Snow.One prints the national and international report; the other the state and regional report.A tele-typesetting keyboard.The wire service would provide about 100 stories daily, which would be printed out in English on the teletype machine and also in the form of paperpunch tape encoded in TTS format. Each tape would bear an punched number (in roman numerals) corresponding to the number of a story on the teletype.Intertypes at work.Intertype keyboard.Matrices being assembled in a self-centering Ludlow stick.A Ludlow headline being cast.An Elrod strip-caster.Work on the stone.More work on the stone.Proof reading.A plate coming off the caster.The plate being put on the press.The Goss press in action.Papers coming off the press.An Addressograph gets papers ready to post out to subscribers.Paperboys queue for their papers.The newsroom.
