By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

From the time he could first remember, he loved to watch the printing press.

As an adult, he was slightly embarrassed when his father would recall the time when the boy was 4 and told Mr. Hamp Britt that the press was the “most fastest thing he’d ever seen.”

One of his proudest days was when he was one of the three paperboys drafted to help the foul-mouthed pressman. The boys were instructed, loudly and profanely, to stand in specific places and push buttons only when they were told to do so.

The rolling, roaring, press meant the paper, The Dunn Dispatch, was ready. The running press meant it was time for him to fill his arms with papers and make his rounds of the grill, the drug stores and the hardware store where Mr. Howard would try to get a paper for free.

But on April 25, 1978, the press frightened him.

It was silent.

Everything about the day was wrong; his adult friends, Mr. Johnny and Mr. Wade, were gone. Most of the paperboys were delivering the other newspaper. That bothered him, since there were many fistfights between the carriers of the Dispatch and the Record. To go over to the enemy was wrong.

After the first copies of the paper rolled off the press, the boy’s father would go back to his office and start on the next edition. Yellow sheets of paper always stuck out of the worn black typewriter, its rough spackled finish smooth from where he rested his hands while thinking.

But this day, his daddy didn’t write anything.

The walls of the little office were stacked with copies of the Congressional Record, other newspapers, file folders, and old bound copies of the Dispatch.

The boy once sat on a stack of the Congressional Record to write his own column. It was his first real column, one about a lost dog.

The boy was fascinated by the books of old newspapers, fading paper filled with things only heard about in school or from the old men at the barbershop. He loved reading history as current events, things like the world wars and the Depression and news from Washington and Raleigh.

He knew that, more often than not, the good guys won. The good guys were people like his father and the boy’s friend the detective and Charles Lindbergh and General MacArthur and his dad’s friend the senator and Red Lambeth, the local ball player. Most of the time, they came out on top.

But on this day, he wasn’t so sure.

The big machines used to create the newspaper – the Linotypes, the Ludlow (where he learned to read upside down and backwards), the new typesetting machine – were all cold.

For the machines that turned molten lead into words to be cold was like cussing in church. Almost as bad as unplugging the teletype that brought them the news from around the world. It, too, was turned off.

The cave-like newspaper office had always been a haven for him, a second home filled with papers and books and typewriters, lit by glaring tubes or bare bulbs, smelling of cigarettes and coffee and ink and dust. It was never really quiet, but it was only really noisy when the sound of the press rumbled through the building like the trains passing by the front door every day.

But today it was silent.

The phones still rang, but there was none of the usual noise that meant one paper was done, and it was time to start another one.

The boy was frightened, and he didn’t know why.

He saw his mother pull the editorial cartoon from the layout boards and put it in a folder. He never understood why editorial cartoons were called cartoons, since he rarely saw anything funny about them. This one wasn’t funny at all.

Across a sheet of the newspaper’s letterhead, someone had written – 30 –.

The boy knew what a “dash thirty dash” meant. Mr. Wade typed it on the end of the stories he sent from Raleigh. Mr. Johnny wrote it at the end of his sports stories. His daddy wrote it at the end of every column, and his mother put it at the end of every story. The boy even got to write it at the end of his first column.

The symbol meant finished, done, the end.

Staring at the cartoon, the boy heard his father quietly crying in the cubbyhole office.

And he knew that no matter how hard they try, the good guys don’t always win.

Note: For 21 years, my father wrote a column about a newspaper that died.

Sometimes the column was published, sometimes it wasn’t.

On an April afternoon in 2001, the Old Man asked me for a favor. He could no longer sit up long enough to write, so he asked me to carry on the tradition.

I promised I would; he passed away a few days later. I have kept that promise.

That day, I promised to write another column every year, too, but I made that promise to myself. You’ll see it in a few days.