Librarians Rock

After seeing "Hearts and Minds" last night I remembered where I was at 33 years ago. I was working as a typesetter, keyliner for the Post, the student newspaper at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. We worked on IBM selectric composers typing onto a thick clay-backed paper that was then pasted down on keyline boards with rubber cement. It was ridiculously tedious work and required a special skill with an Xacto knife. In addition, we were all full-time students working until all hours of the night to get a daily paper out.

When we received Van Es's iconographic photo over the AP wire, we knew we wanted to use it for an editorial. I remember spending hours cutting and pasting individual lines of type to get the story to wrap around the image. This is, of course, incredibly easy to do these days. Back then, I had to output entire columns of type in each of the different line lengths and then cut one from each column size and paste them into place. It was a weird way to be spending the night that meant so much to so many of us.

Around midnight last night, I found that OU student newspapers are archived and available at Alden Library at Ohio University. They have an "ask a librarian" page and I e-mailed. This image arrived in my e-mail tonight. Unbelievable. Thanks are due to Mike, the librarian who said they don't usually do this sort of thing but he decided to make an exception.



Oddly enough, I'm still a typesetter, and the guy who wrote the article, who was the second love of my life, is still writing about television. Here's the blog of John Kiesewetter from the Cincinnati Enquirer.