A Special Sickness — Part I

In the 1960s and early ‘70s, the Los Gatos Times-Observer was published on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Sometimes the headstrong owner/publisher would get a bur under his saddle and try a different set of days to put the paper out, but this three-day schedule always seemed to work best. This was the last locally owned newspaper on the West Coast that was written, edited, published and printed at a single site. The site where this uniqueness occurred was on the one block long Royce Avenue in downtown Los Gatos. The owner and publisher of this newspaper was the irascible George Kane, easily into his 70s when I started working there.

We all called the paper the “T – O”, for it being the “Times – Observer.” The TO was housed in an older commercial building on Royce. The front section of this building, facing the street, was a two-story affair but about thirty feet from the its storefront it became a single story building. George Kane and his wife lived in the upstairs apartment while the entire ground floor of the place was the newspaper. It had a lobby, an advertising sales room, a large open hall housing both the editorial staff and the production people, the two separated by a low partition wall about five feet high. There was a separate lithographic dark room, a typesetting room and in what would usually have been a large commercial garage was the press room housing a worn and wired together “four unit” web press. A web press prints onto continuous rolls of paper, the “web,” rather than individual sheets of paper. George Kane was an incredibly frugal man and baling wire and paper clips were about the extent of his printing press repair budget until the machine just wouldn’t even start up at all. Then he’d have to call in the real, official “factory authorized” repair people.

George interviewed me for the job of Production Manager as he heard I had been working at a “Quality, 4-color” print shop and I was looking to expand my horizons. “Quality, 4-color” meant that I had been working in a print shop that could print full color photographs as well as black and white business cards. George’s chief and only pressman had been acting as production manager for nearly 20 years and was retiring. I had only been working in the printing business for a couple of years and the opportunity to work with this technology that was totally new to me, web printing, was very intriguing. Man, I thought, to work in a newspaper, holy Toledo, I’d be right in the middle of the inner workings of the great metropolis, Los Gatos. Wow!!! I took George’s job but quickly discovered I had to change my work standards. At the quality shop, our work tolerances were measured in angstroms, mili-microns of an inch. In George’s shop, it was OK if you kept things within a quarter of an inch or so of each other. Speed and economy were the watchwords in this new job.

Such an environment wasn’t very comfortable to me at first. I can be a perfectionist, in fact I usually do tend to be a perfectionist and this imposed sloppiness just wasn’t natural to me. But, on the other side of the coin, unlike the quality shop where you might be printing the same job for weeks on end, here the job changed every day. With every edition of the paper, you had an entirely new job nearly every day, with new and interesting challenges all the time. Eventually, my self proclaimed goal was to put out a much higher quality newspaper (in production terms) while hitting our deadline 99% of the time. George got me for a song.

I was working for just a bit more than minimum wage. As well, he hit the jackpot in re-labeling his young high school janitor. The janitor was a young mechanical whiz kid who had recently won the national go-cart championships a couple of years in a row and he did most of the mechanical work himself. While the retiring pressman/production manager had used the whiz kid janitor as an emergency assistant from time to time, George told the whiz kid that now he would be the sole pressman in the paper. George got him for a song as well, a real feat considering the prior pressman was in the printer’s union and held senior journeyman’s status. George was very, very fugal. He got a new pressman and a new production manager for about half of what he was paying the single guy who had previously held both positions. Hell, we were young, ambitious and stupidly without a clue. I was maybe 23 or 24 at this time . . . 

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