Events occurring at Assassination Time

[Rob Wick]

Eva,

The very first paper I worked for still had a working Linotype machine that we used to make funeral cards (cards that are handed out at a funeral that has the deceased's funeral information.). In the basement was one of the last newspaper pages set that way. It weighed around 100 pounds, because it was nothing but solid lead. Before the development of the Linotype, most papers were four to six pages because each story had to be set by hand. Once the Linotype was invented everything changed. Yet it still wasn't very fast. If you look at newspapers in the major metropolitan areas, they had rooms full of the machines in order to get a paper (or several editions of a paper) out.

You ask about leaving a column open for last-minute news. Even with the Linotype that rarely happened. What you normally found was a small item on the front page announcing a major event and then follow-ups in later editions (either the next day or week for smaller papers and later editions for major metros). Larger papers would add more details in later editions, and sometimes on major news you would have "extras," or extra editions. Adding news to an already finished page rarely happened. Once the page was put together by a compositor based on the editor's dummy sheet and then tightened in a vice-like lock, you didn't want to have to take it apart. That's why you find many more errors in a page that was set that way because it was too much trouble to redo it.

I think one could say that most pre-written obits are for VIPs. The New York Times and other major media outlets have people whose only job is to write obits. At my level I did a little of everything. I estimate (conservatively) that over my 14-year career I probably wrote 15,000 to 20,000 obits, all of them after the person died. The only obit we had pre-written was for the mayor of one of the towns I worked in. That was in 1990. As of this day, he's still alive.

Best
Rob