Voices of the Sun Journal press

Jun. 20—It was the summer of 1979 and there was lots to be discussed.

In politics, Sen. Ted Kennedy had announced that he would challenge President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination.

Michael Jackson had just released a new album called "Off the Wall," while a jaunty pop song called "My Sharona" was tearing up the charts.

CBS had just debuted a sitcom called "The Dukes of Hazzard" while in theaters, the war film "Apocalypse Now" was raking it in at the box office.

Locally, residents of the Lewiston-Auburn area were starting to get excited about the new shopping mall being built in Auburn.

Among the advertisements running in the Lewiston Daily Sun, which cost 15 cents, was an ad for Marco's Restaurant, where two stuffed or boiled lobsters could be had for $7.95.

The Barefoot Trader on Lisbon Street was advertising Wrangler Jeans for $7.99 while at Food Town, a pound of beef would set you back $1.58.

On the first of August that year, tucked in around stories of local car wrecks and national gas rationing, the Daily Sun also ran a story announcing big changes at the newspaper.

"Starting today," began the front page story, "the look of the Lewiston Sun will be different, clearer, brighter and easier to read.

"With today's editions," the news story continued, "the Central Maine and northern New Hampshire newspaper will be printed on a brand now $1 million Goss Urbanite offset press — a gleaming, 70-foot long machine that employs the latest technology to print a crisper, dramatically cleaner newspaper."

If reporter Steve MacIntyre seemed to be gushing about the new press, you could hardly blame him. For a newspaper man, the Goss was hot stuff. The Sun Journal had been printing papers in Lewiston since the late 1800s, but the Goss was something new: a marvel of technology.

The introduction of the machine was considered a giant leap forward; one that would not only enhance the look of the paper, but which would increase the speed at which it could be printed.

James R. Costello, vice president and general manager of the paper at the time, likewise raved about the capabilities of the Goss, which would enable editors and ad creators to bulk up the size of each edition.

"It will provide an additional 16-page print out," Costello told one of his reporters, "from 48 to 64 pages."

At full tilt, the new Goss could crank out 52,000 copies of The Sun per hour where the previous press could only manage 40,000 in that span.

It got better — the Goss would make it much easier for printers to add color to the pages and it would capture much greater detail in photographs — super sharp, color photographs on the pages of a newspaper that had been universally black and white for decades.

The improvement, Costello explained, was made possible by the technology of offset printing, in which print is applied to a "blanket," a rolling rubber drum, which in turn would transfer images onto the pages.

By October 1983, The Lewiston Daily Sun, Inc,. produced its first edition of Sunday, the first paper in the state to break the mold of the traditional black-and-white news pages with its extensive use of full color photography. The daily papers would follow.

The change was good for the press crew, as well. The new machine, described as "a silent giant," was said to be virtually vibration free.

"Some old hands may miss the thunder and clatter of the old behemoth," MacIntyre wrote. "But a lot more will appreciate the quiet of the new."

As changes went, this was a big one.

The new Goss had predecessors from 1898 to 1904, from 1904 to 1918, from 1918 to 1926 and from 1926 to 1962. As excited as they were about their new machine, nobody at The Daily Sun could say for sure how long the Goss would serve the needs of the paper. It was an era known as the electric age in newspaper printing, after all, and new technologies were coming along fast.

The publishers took a chance that the Goss, 13-feet high and consisting of eight units, would carry them into the future.

The very installation of the new press, during which the concrete floor had to be dug up and reinforced, proved weirdly auspicious.

"I remember that we struck oil when they dug to reinforce the floor," recalls Bill McCarthy, who was with the paper more than 50 years. "We found that the service station behind the DeWitt Hotel buried the waste oil tank instead of removing it."

The Goss would serve the newspaper and the people who read it for a long time — longer, in fact, than most had predicted. It first first began chugging out local news in the summer of 1979 and didn't stop until May of this year. And it was a business decision, not any mechanical failure, that retired the Goss on Park Street in Lewiston.

The Goss Urbanite printed its last pages in the early morning of June 1 after the Sun Media Group, which now operates the Sun Journal, decided to consolidated its print and distribution work to a facility in South Portland.

It's the end, not just of this one marvel of machinery, but of an era — a printing press has been operating in the Sun Journal's downtown location for the past 125 years, printing thousands of publications, including the Lewiston Evening Journal, the Lewiston Daily Sun and, most recently, the Sun Journal and the newspaper group's six weekly publications circulating in Oxford and Franklin counties.

To the hundreds and possibly thousands of people who worked alongside or directly on the press, the Goss wasn't just a marvelous bit of technology, it was a grand, hulking symbol of the way news was assembled and delivered before advances like the internet came along.

There were tears at the last run on May 31 and nobody is ashamed to admit it.

"It was so quiet in here," said Randy Baril, who has worked most of his nights over the past 35 years in the shadow of the Goss. "For me, it was like my dog just died — a dog I had loved for a long time — and I'm like, what am I going to do now? There wasn't one person here that didn't feel the same."

Baril was once a computer-to-plate operator at the newspaper, meaning his entire career was in service to the Goss. He started on the press in a time before certain improvements came along that automated some of the press processes.

"It was hot work. By the end of your shift, you'd be sweating bullets up there on the top unit," Baril says. "You'd get dirty as heck. You had to do everything manually. You had to adjust all the keys, you had to adjust the tension on the roll — they all run by themselves now. They splice by themselves. We had to stop to change the rolls. You don't have to do any of that now. There have been so many changes."

Now a graphic image coordinator at the paper, Baril remembers with fond clarity the dramatic moments on the press: tragic affairs like 9/11 and glorious moments such as in the fall of 2004 when the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918.

He remembers ongoing dramas like the Ice Storm of 1998 when there was so much evolving news, the Sun Journal produced a bulldog edition — that is, an extra, early edition — to keep its readers informed. It was an all-hands-on-deck scenario with the big Goss at the center of it all.

"I'd go home for a couple hours of sleep and then Jim (Costello) Jr. would come pick me up in his truck and we'd get right back to work," Baril says. "We were producing a bulldog edition, updating the storm conditions and all that. When they were done, they put copies right in my hands and I went out and passed them around in a couple of places."

Then there were the smaller yet still dramatic moments, like in the spring of 2003 when a blown transformer beneath Park Street in Lewiston left the newspaper without electricity for two days and threatened to render the big Goss press completely powerless. The Sun Journal had never failed to get a newspaper on the streets in the morning, and they had no intention of ending that streak.

In the end, Sun Journal crews ran a long, long cable from the basement of their building at 40 Pine St., which still had power, over to their offices at 104 Park St. They snaked the cable down a corridor and through a window to the newsroom. When the news team had completed its work, the cable was then stretched a little further, to the press, which — as it had been doing since 1979 — faithfully performed its duties, cranking out newspapers that were then shuffled off to all those doorsteps across the region.

The day was saved and the streak continued.

The Goss press, lurking for so long in the massive space behind the Sun Journal's newsroom, seemed to have its own gravity — anyone who worked even peripherally with the press felt its influence one way or another.

"This press changed my life," says Heather McCarthy, who was a cub reporter when the press was installed in 1979. "The capability of the Goss Urbanite (and newspaper presses in general) to print color photos well and quickly, on lower quality newsprint, helped drive the need for people who could create news and feature pages with the new capabilities afforded by the use of color. And it added the ability to produce color illustrations with photos and drawings, as well as information graphics that could use color to help make information more easily communicated."

Heather began working part time at the paper in 1974 and joined the Lewiston Daily Sun full-time three years later. The introduction of the Goss Urbanite, and all its associated advances, compelled her to rethink the trajectory of career.

The Goss, in other words, really DID change her life.

"Inspired by the opportunity to pioneer in a new field," Heather says, "I gradually left writing behind in favor of news page and graphic design. I am now retired after 43 years at the newspaper, most of it spent creating news pages and graphics, that I began to explore because of that dusty blue Goss Urbanite press. May it rest in pieces."

Anyone who has ever seen any of about a thousand movies about newspapers has at least a loose idea of how the system works. Those people will also know that in newspaper lore, there are three specific words that, when shouted across a crowded press room, serve as an announcement that big changes are afoot in the world — changes so significant and pressing, that the readership needs to hear about it at once.

Few people in the Sun Journal's storied history have had the joy of shouting "Stop the presses!" in the face of big news. Then comes Carol Coultas, writer and editor at the paper from 1986 to 2008, who got to shout those fabled words, not once, but twice. And she remembers every date, every detail and every name associated with those grand moments.

"The first time was June 5, 1989," Coultas recalls, gleefully. "I was a reporter, helping out on the desk that night. Ben Stackhouse was the editor. It was the day of the man stopping the tanks at Tiananmen Square. Ben knew it was an iconic photo and took the entire top of the fold for the photo and a huge headline — I think it was 'Rebellion crushed.'

"After the paper went to bed," Coultas says, "I was checking the AP wires one last time and saw that the Ayatollah Khomeini was dead. He was probably one of the most reviled figures in America because of his involvement with the Iran hostages from the 1970s. Normally it would be a big page one story, but we had already locked in the color positions for the huge Tiananmen Square photo and couldn't change it. I ran to tell Ben who told me to keep running and tell the press guys to stop the run. We had to re-plate. I did, breathlessly shouting 'Stop the presses!' We were only able to get a teaser to an inside story above the flag, but at least we were letting people know about Khomeini's death in some fashion on page one."

It's a once-in-a-career moment for most, but Coultas wasn't done. She eventually gave up her pen and notebook to become an editor at the paper, which placed her more firmly at the midway point between breaking news and the presses.

It was July 27, 1996, a relatively quiet day in news. On the front page of the day's Sun Journal was a story about the heavy rains that had marked the year so far and another about Gov. Angus King's defeat of a forestry referendum.

Things were about to get much livelier.

"I was the managing editor by then and helped put out the Sunday paper," Coultas says. "The paper was in bed and one of my co-workers, Mark Mogensen, had a bag of hand-me-downs in his car he was giving to me for my young son. We were at the side entrance to the building just chatting when the janitor (Phil Topel) wandered by. It must have been after 2 a.m. He told me the phone was ringing off the hook in the newsroom. Puzzled, I went back to the newsroom and glanced up at the TV. There was a huge chyron on CNN — there had been a bombing at Olympic Park in Atlanta.

"I swore, as any veteran journalist would," Coultas says, "then ran into the press room and shouted "Stop the presses!" I knew we had to re-plate the entire front page for the story."

Coultas got to deliver the lines for the second time, but that doesn't mean every other editor missed the big moment. Many of them were at home by that hour, but they were not oblivious to the big, breaking news.

"The ringing phones," Coultas says, "had been other Sun Journal editors who saw the story break on TV and were calling to let me know in case I hadn't seen the report. Within a half an hour, Doug Clausen, a sports editor, came in figuring no one was still in the newsroom and he would re-plate to get the bombing story in for last edition. Together we redesigned page one and got the story and photos in for the third and fourth editions. Pretty exciting times."

Joe Gromelski, recently retired from Stars and Stripes in Washington, D.C., came to the Sun Journal as a sportswriter in 1978. He then went on to work as a sports editor, news editor and finally managing editor for newsroom systems before he left the paper in 1997 to join the Stars and Stripes bureaus in Korea, Bahrain, Japan and other locations.

Gromelski worked nights at the Lewiston paper and so established a relationship with the Goss press early into his career.

"Seeing the paper rolling off the press gave a kind of closure to the day that I really missed when I went to work at a paper that's printed on the other side of the planet," he says. "You couldn't help but marvel at the co-workers who made that complicated process work every night, from the composing room down the line to the people loading the trucks.

"I don't think there was anyone in the newsroom who wasn't hypnotized by the sight of paper threading through those monster machines at high speed and a finished, folded product rolling out at the end," he says. "Being able to take a fresh copy of the paper home and read it while unwinding was a fringe benefit of the job — that is, until you noticed a typo in a head that had slipped past several people, including yourself."

Gromelski was there to see the arrival of the Goss Urbanite. Like everyone else, he appreciated the advances that allowed the paper to run full color photos, even if color photos presented their own problems in tense moments.

"Making over pages for the next edition was often a negotiating process with the press crew," he says. "Every new plate they had to create added a few minutes to a process that was already on a tight schedule because of the schedules of the drivers and carriers down the line. When the Sun-Journal started using color photos, it further restricted what you could change on the front page, because the color plates had to be carefully aligned. Once the photos were in place, they were usually going to stay there. The day Iraq invaded Kuwait, around midnight our time, the photo placement left us with a one-column spot for the story. Fortunately, 'Iraq' fits in a one-column head a lot better than 'Afghanistan.'"

Gromelski says it wasn't until near the turn of the new century that he began to sense that the end of the printing era was coming. Internet technology was advancing quickly and most publishers sniffed the winds of change on the air.

"When I went to a newspaper industry trade show in the late 1990s, Goss and the other press companies had working presses set up in the middle of a convention center, producing sample papers for potential clients," Gromelski recalls. "Imagine the expense of that, but people were still buying presses. Within the next few years, the press vendors were gone from those shows, and the booths were populated by technology companies whose products were aimed at automating the process and reducing the labor force.

"A lot of good people lost their jobs as the printing process became more automated," Gromelski says, "and online news replaced print sales, and we really need to thank them for what they did to get the paper out every single night over the years."

"If our retired press had a memory, it might now reflect on the people, places and events from towns and cities across the nation, around the world and in the universe that it put in print for us to read and share and save," says Sun Journal editor Mary Delamater, who started at the paper as a proofreader in 1971. "It did its job well. Shutting down the 42-year-old iron beast that worked day and night for years meant not only part of the family moving, but the loss of pride in having The Lewiston Daily Sun, The Lewiston Evening Journal, the Sun-Journal and the Lewiston Sun-Journal/Sunday printed in our city."

Delamater is likewise wistful about all the men and woman, sucked in by the Goss Urbanite's benevolent gravity, who have come and gone over the years — nobody is willing to take a guess at just how many people have worked to feed the press since it joined the Sun Journal family so long ago. Hundreds, certainly, and probably thousands.

"We miss them," Delamater says, "those dedicated professionals so important to the newsroom managers, reporters, photographers, story editors and page designers. And we've told them so. They took our work to the printing press to get it to readers near and far.

"When you've worked with people for decades they become like family," Delamater says, "and our pressmen leaving Lewiston has left a large void for those of us in the newsroom. There was sadness when we learned they were moving away and we wouldn't see them nightly anymore."

The Goss Urbanite is presently being dismantled. Masthead Maine Publisher and CEO Lisa DeSisto has said that parts of it will be shipped off to South Portland, which is where the company will be locating all of its press services.

In all, 46 people were affected by the decision. The 11 who had been working full-time on the press were offered positions in South Portland. Others were invited to apply for positions there.

Delamater, who began work at the paper when the sound of typewriters and the haze of cigarette smoke still filled the Sun Journal newsroom, isn't sour about the big changes there. Progress cannot be halted, she knows, no matter how many fond memories try to hold it back.

The Goss Urbanite, she reckons, served the community well for more than four decades. It earned its retirement.

"We had to accept the change, because there was no other viable solution," she says. "The large hulking machine that for decades ingested tons and tons and tons of newsprint, gulped down thousands and thousands of barrels of ink and printed off hundreds of thousands if not a million or more copies of Maine dailies and weeklies was nearing the end of its life."

The press is going away, but the newspaper building itself, with its creaky floors, narrow stairways and paneling from long gone eras still remains. That's solace for many who have spent significant chunks of their lives there as part of the news process.

"It makes me sad to hear the presses are going to stop in Lewiston," says Coultas. "It's a great old building. I love that there are still pneumatic tubes above the ceiling tiles in the newsroom hearkening back to the days when typewritten copy was sent by tube from rewrite editors to the typesetters. And that the windows that front Park Street were papered in that day's newspaper during the World Wars so people could be informed even if they couldn't afford a newspaper subscription. I'm glad I had a little part to play in that storied history."