As a 13-year-old, Ralph Goodson helped print The Malibu Times during its first year of operation in 1946. He now lives in Austin, Texas, but still has fond memories of the newspaper and its earliest days.
By Ralph Goodson / Special to The Malibu Times
Reeves and Eileen Templeman, the original publishers of The Malibu Times, had set up an old flatbed printing press and Linotype machine in an old garage on Las Flores Canyon Road behind the beautiful brick building that was the Sheriff’s Station and Judge Webster’s Court.
The Linotype-the essential robotic marvel of its day-produced “one line of type” set in a cast made from little brass matrices molded for each separate letter. Hot lead was poured into those robotically concocted molds and out came the hot type, one blistering-hot line at a time. Now we know how the phrase “hot story” got started.
Reeves would be hard at work, sitting at the one-man machine, and reading either typed copy or notes from which he could create the final copy right on the machine. A new line was created about every 20 seconds. The Linotype made a musical sound as the brass matrices tumbled down a channel into the setting for the mold. The faster he pressed the keys, the faster the tempo.
Eileen-always wearing one of her colorful blouses, a bandana over her flowing red hair and inky gloves and fingers-would be setting up the trucks, which were the big pans that held all the lines of type tightly in place. There was a truck for each page and a double-truck for the two-page sets.
First we got the lines of type all stacked the way she wanted, and then she figured out how much space there was for a headline. I would pull the headline type from boxes of fonts and push them over to Eileen, who would find a way to make them fit, changing words in the headlines to get them to fit the column width and height available.
It was truly a task of creative fitting and filling. The page layout was performed right at the press. Sometimes, we would have to change a font size to make a headline fit or move an entire story and start the creative task all over again. It was constant trial and error. At first, there were a lot more trials before everything came out just right. But after about two weeks it was all becoming second nature.
While Eileen was doing all this, she would be proofing one line at a time. Every now and then she would hand a line to Reeves to redo. Mind you, all this had to be done reading the type upside down and inverted.
The great thing about lines of type was that you could break the story off at any line and move the stack over to another column in the truck or to another truck. Lead is heavy and when you had more than 20 or 30 lines of hot lead in your hand, you were in a hurry to put it down.
Eileen was laying out the entire paper as she worked. The weekly columns and pre-printed stuff was in the body, the middle pages. The late-breaking stories from meetings they had attended the night before were set up on the front pages and continued over to pages two, three and four.
When she got it all just right, we would lock up the truck. Reeves might come over from the Linotype to help crank down the keys that fit into gears that cranked down really hard on the stacks to hold everything together. The truck really got slammed around on the printing press from the extremely rough back-and-forth slides it took as is went for an ink pass and then for a pass of newsprint.
The trucks were loaded on the flat bed of the printing press as paper came running off one big feeder spool, through the press and into an automatic folder and cutter for the final stage of the tabloid size newspaper. The whole operation could not have used up more than 1,500 square feet of space. It was naturally without air conditioning, a rarity in those early Malibu days.
One job of mine was to keep the pot of molten lead filled with old lines of type, probably from last week’s issue, so the pot that cooked the approximately 500-degree lead was always ready to flow when Reeves finished a one-line mold. Another job-one that you should not have to do because it is supposed to happen automatically-was to be sure the matrices get back to their magazines. They traveled along a channel that was supposed to tell them when to drop into the appropriate magazine, but once in a while they would get fouled up and I had to figure out how to get them in the correct magazines. This really meant I had to let Reeves know, as he was the master of this machine. As I recall, we would work about five or six hours on a press run. Of course, between going to every meeting in Malibu and talking to everyone who had a thought, Reeves and Eileen would have a good part of the type already set when we started the final run. They had a good idea what the final layout would look like. But the paper could not be “put to bed” until the last line of type was ready and the headlines had been set.
The first edition came out in early May and I do not believe it had any original pictures except promotional shots from advertisers and publicity people that came in thick cardboard that could be used as a mold to cast the engraving. Soon, Reeves found a service and if we could get a photo there by Thursday evening, we would have the engraving for Saturday morning’s press run.
The use of photo engravings created a new challenge in precision and attention to detail. To print just right, the trucks had to be put together better, absolutely level, achieved by running somewhat soft blocks of wood across the truck and hitting it with a hammer so everything was set at just the perfect height. The pressures on the press, between the paper and the bed, had to be perfect to reproduce different shades of black and gray. This was the most sensitive part of the art form. So as the press got set up to run photographs, the quality of the entire newspaper was improved.
At the end of a press run, we would take a quick breather, clean up a bit so we didn’t get the ink that was all over us on the freshly printed papers and then tackle the task of distribution.
The Malibu Times is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. Look for a special anniversary issue in the fall. If you have any pictures or memories you would like to share, contact Jonathan Friedman at 456.5507 ext. 105.