Keeping Linotype Alive Kendrick, Idaho, Newspaper Editor Uses All-But-Extinct Method Of Publishing To Produce Weekly Paper

One of the many items of hot holiday news from here is that lutefisk and lefse graced the Christmas Eve menu at Gertrude Sneve’s house.

The espresso special at Phil’s Family Foods - “Big Enough to Serve You - Small Enough to Know You” - includes a short French vanilla nut latte for $1.50.

And for those of you wondering if that was Jim Nelson, Kendrick High Class of ‘55, standing behind a Russian general on CNN recently, it was. Mrs. Henrietta Nelson, his mom, confirms as much and more in a page one dispatch in the current issue of The Kendrick Gazette, circulation 930 and one of America’s last hot lead newspapers.

Big city newspapers long ago went to computer-generated type and more automated presses, but Gazette editor and publisher Bill Roth is still cranking out news the old-fashioned way: one page at a time on an ink-stained letter press, one letter at a time on Linotype machines built in the ‘20s.

“Every letter is a touch of my finger,” he said last week as he scurried to put the most recent issue to bed.

Set in a low-slung brick storefront at the end of Main Street, the Gazette, a weekly, is an institution out of Frank Capra. There’s a single desk with an oak chair, “The Complete Guide to Game Animals” stacked with a recent New Yorker magazine, paper company wall calendars stacked on the wall back to 1982 and a wood floor littered with enough ink and lead shavings to stoke a grizzled city editor’s heart.

And back in the dimly lit recesses, three of the machines that helped make America great: the Linotype. One was built in 1923, “the newer machine” is from ‘26 and a third rig being pirated for parts is from the 1910s.

Invented by German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884, the Linotype revolutionized journalism by letting newspapers set type quickly and cheaply by casting letters from molten lead. Some 90,000 Linotypes were produced until 1971, when the era of photo-chemical processes and computer-generated type pushed them toward obsolescence.

Now, the hot lead newspapers are all but gone.

Corban Goble, a Western Kentucky University journalism professor who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Mergenthaler press, counted fewer than a dozen Linotype-set newspapers a year and a half ago. One in Council, Idaho, has since switched to an offset press, leaving the Sherman County Journal in Moro, Ore., and the Gazette as the only newspapers of their kind in the Pacific Northwest.

Roth, who bought the Gazette in 1968, has considered retooling only long enough to shudder at his already-high paper and postage costs, the cost of computerizing and “the idea of losing control.”

“There’s something to being able to take the story, write it, put it on the press and print it - it’s yours then,” he said. “The computer can’t give it to you.”

This is hands-on newspapering, gathered by unpaid correspondents who comb the ridges that rise dramatically above the Potlatch River and isolate Kendrick and its sister town of Juliaetta from towns like Lewiston and Moscow.

Civic journalism - a recent movement to get newspapers more involved in community affairs - is old news here.

“In a small town, I think a newspaper is part of the community,” said Roth, whose father started apprenticing him to newspapering in McCammon, Idaho, in 1947.

Kendrick learned as much when Roth sold the newspaper 10 years ago, only to see the new owner stop publishing. Roth took it back and rebuilt its subscription base.

“You don’t realize how much you depend on a newspaper to hold a town together,” said Dana Magnuson, a former Latah County commissioner and local insurance broker.

Roth, a soft-spoken man of 64 years and a full head of hair, holds to a simple journalistic philosophy of local news with no political agenda “except the welfare of the community.”

Headline sizes rarely vary from 24-point type - one-third of an inch tall - although Roth used inch-tall, 72-point letters after a windstorm a few years ago.

It was an end-of-the-world-sized headline, but Roth stands by his editorial judgment.

“You ought to have been here,” he said. “It blew down trees and everything else.”

For the most part there are stories about local elections, bond issues and the recent news that Kendrick survived the first cut for a $476,050 community development block grant.

Then there are names - “in spades,” as Roth says. A single column under the headline “Local News Of Juliaetta” contained tidbits about more than 100 local residents and holiday visitors. An out-of-towner might be led to believe visiting is the local growth industry.

“We put in people’s names who might otherwise never be in the newspaper,” Roth said. “As I’ve said, if you’re not interested in what’s happening in Kendrick or Juliaetta, don’t bother with the Gazette.”

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