Fremont and College

Eighteen years old and I am at Midland College in Fremont, Nebraska.

I have a shared space with two other guys in the Men's Hall dormitory which makes me feel real collegiate.

I am a full-time student and land a part-time job with the local daily newspaper--The Fremont Guide and Tribune--but am no longer the editor or even a writer.

I collect the ad layouts from local businesses and bring them to the office and I clean and help maintain the Linotype machine.

What I remember about this, the outdoor walking around the little town ad collecting part of my first real newspaper job, is the bitter Nebraska cold.

It gets cold in Albuquerque too--even snows a few flakes every winter, but I had never experienced the realio trulio boreal blasts until I came to Fremont.

My goodness!

The Linotype machine, in a basement I seem to remember, was a huge, clattering mechanical wonder that was essential to newspaper publication in the old days. It created lead slugs in the form of a "line of type", get it?

All these slugs were bolted together and pressed into a flexible cardboardy matrix that could be wrapped around a steel cylinder so a lead cast could be made to fit into the big printing press that could be inked and printed onto newsprint paper and voila! Your daily newspaper.

Part of my job was to hook silvery ten pound lead ingots onto chains which slowly lowered them into a melting pot that was a part of the Linotype machine.

Linotype Operator was a union job with a good, high salary and the operator I worked for was a nice old guy with both hands and arms completely covered with burn scars to the shoulders because the lead in the pot would often splash up when you were cleaning the melting area and skimming off the impurities from the molten metal.

After a month or two at this journalistic job, I proudly carried a few burn scars on my arms too.

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