When visitors look at The Citizen's press, they see the loud, ink-stained machine from the movies.
When Phil Morrison and Al Wilson look at it, they see memories.
As they prepared to print the last daily edition of The Citizen on Friday night, Morrison and Wilson, two of The Citizen's five press operators who have each worked with the big, noisy beast for more than 38 years, they couldn't help but look back with a deep sense of accomplishment.
"We got to work on a piece of machinery in an industry that changed the world, basically," said Wilson. "The printing press was one of the major changes in the world, and I think that's kind of cool."
Now 59, Morrison was just 19 when he joined the Citizen team in 1980, the only non-smoker on a six-man crew that turned the air of the pressroom blue with their cigarette habits. Wilson, Morrison's school friend from Duchess Park, started at the Citizen in 1981 and worked three years in the mailroom before he became a pressman.
They both feel a sentimental attachment to the press that worked so well, knowing that for nearly six decades, it has stimulated the senses of our readers in the community. It's a living and breathing hydraulic machine that hissed and whined as it churned out the daily pages and folded them into a hand-held product that retained the unmistakable smell of ink.
"It's like going in the same car and driving to Vancouver, you're with it for eight hours every day and you maintain it and you become attached to it," said Wilson, 59.
Morrison and Wilson have worked on the same Goss Urbanite offset press for their entire careers, with several additions that brought it up to the current eight units. The press has been printing The Citizen since October 1963, when the paper moved into its new 12,000 square-foot building at 150 Brunswick St., as part of a $300,000 expansion.
The press rarely suffered a breakdown but Morrison and Wilson remember the day, back when the Citizen was still an afternoon paper in the early 1980s, when they had to drive the plates to Williams Lake for printing when an electrical panel blew in the pressroom.
"We left at midnight and got back at noon, so we never missed that edition," said Wilson.
With the move to the new building, that marked an innovative switch to offset printing from letterpress (hot lead) printing, used in the first 47 years of the Citizen's 103-year history. The offset process, in which the ink is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket, replaced Linotype and allowed the pressmen to more accurately print photographs, advertisements and graphics. It gave page designers the option of using three colours, and by the early 1970s, full colour. The pressmen at the time had to be retrained to acquire the mechanical skills required for the new phototypographic system. Pre-press composing staff were sent to Vancouver to learn camera and paste-up techniques.
"We used to have to cut out every photograph and put it in holes that came in the pages," said Morrison. "When I first started we printed full-colour on the front page four times a year, now we do that every day."
In October 1988, the press was given a new home at 145 Brunswick (the former Hudson's Bay Wholesale building) in a $1 million expansion. The four-unit press added a second tier which increased the single press-run capacity from 32 pages to 48 pages. Once it got up to speed, the press was producing the daily Citizen, five weeklies, a biweekly and a monthly tabloid. Running full-bore, the press could produce 30,000 copies in one hour and speed was an asset when on some days the paper was well over 100 pages fat. It took five press runs and 22 thousand-pound rolls of newsprint to produce and it was a tough job for the pressmen to keep up to the pace.
"We're proud about not missing editions in that time, that's a good record and that we've kept that thing maintained and running and we've had no major injuries," said Morrison.
When pressman Ross Baird retired in the early 1990s, Morrison was speaking in front of the crowd at the reception and asked Baird to come up and hold up his hands.
"I counted his fingers and thumbs and said, 'that's how you mark a successful career in the pressroom, you leave with all your digits.' It's a dangerous piece of equipment and we worked with that risk every day. We both just about got eaten by the thing."
Wilson got his hand burnt and crushed in the rollers about 15 years ago when the newsprint web broke and he didn't realize the rollers were still spinning. His hand got sucked in, which left him with a few fingers pointing at odd angles.
Morrison remembers working on a hot day and peeled down his coveralls, tying them around his waist. With the press running full-tilt, one of the sleeves got caught in the delivery belt where the folded papers come out and the press was dragging him into the larger rollers when he finally got close enough to reach up and hit the kill switch.
"They had to cut my coveralls off, and there I am in just my underwear and work boots," said Morrsion. "It was funny and scary."
