Cold Type. Harvey Araton

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СКАЧАТЬ forget it,” Morris said, waving him off.

      Morris and Jamie didn’t bond any better when young Jamie made the occasional excursion with his father to the Trib on a day off, usually when Morris had quick union business. His chest swelled the first time he led the boy by the hand into the cacophony of the old composing room, pulling him through the labyrinth of clattering linotype machines.

      “What do you think, Jamie—pretty cool?” Morris said.

      Jamie frowned.

      Morris had imagined explaining to his son that reporters and editors may have been the glamorous heroes of Hollywood’s version of the newspaper game, the men about town and taverns. But not until these printers clocked in, brown bags dangling at their side, could there be a tangible production, a creation. If Jamie had ever asked what this awesome collection of sights and sound amounted to, Morris would have told him, “This is where we make the paper, son. They don’t make it without us.”

      Jamie never seemed to get close enough to the men in the hats made of carefully folded newspaper to hear them say, “So this is little Mo?” The rhythmic clacking of the type set on forty-pound blocks and the shouts of “Watch yer back” by thick-armed men rolling the finished pages on the metal carts made Jamie recoil. He would cup his hands over his ears and crouch against the wall.

      “He’s so timid,” Morris complained to Molly. “He has no—you know—oomph.”

      “He’s just a little boy, what do you want from him?” she said. “The machines scare him. Let him be.”

      Morris eventually gave up trying to connect. He had more urgent matters on his mind those days—the increasingly clear fate of the printers.

      It would be years before Jamie stepped into the Trib composing room again. By then, all that had been so intimidating was gone. The energy. The power. The heat. The remains of his father’s once-dominant trade had vanished like some ancient civilization. The need for the human eye and touch to distinguish typeface and size had been replaced by clusters of computers in specialized work areas rendered numbingly docile by the vague hum of climate control.

      For the printers, automation was a man-made earthquake. It condemned them to a long, cancerous decline, sustained by the guarantee of lifetime employment negotiated by their union leader, Jackie Ryan, at the dawn of the 70s. The formerly omnipotent Local 11 of the Typographical Union of America—the Ones, as it was known in New York trade circles—could not stand in the way of the technological parade. Ryan knew it. He signed away the craft and they all set out together on the road to virtual irrelevance.

      The printers were soon pasting up strips of computer-manufactured copy onto grids they called slicks. Morris dismissed the work as child’s play. “Like the Colorforms we bought for the kids,” he told Lou. “It’s embarrassing.”

      “I know, Mo,” Lou said. “But some of the guys like the quiet. And let’s face it, it’s safer.”

      “So was the composing room if you knew what the hell you were doing,” Morris grumped.

      Eventually, all page-makeup could be done by editors at their terminals. By the 90s, printers were left with nothing to print. They identified and directed pages for editions like transit cops waving traffic through busy intersections.

      At the Trib, Morris Kramer remained shop steward and night foreman, but he was no longer concerned with job description—only with the preservation of employment for the men who had earned that much. He’d fought hard for the privilege from the beginning. Having scoffed at his father’s bluster that the goyim who ran the union would always take an Irishman or Italian over a Jew, he feared the old man was right when he tried to break in as a sub and was ignored by the supervisor for nights on end.

      He’d report with the other subs and resented being left standing there, reminded of the hapless dockworkers in his favorite movie, On the Waterfront. He dreaded the subway ride home to the third-floor walkup in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He hated pushing open the door to the first sighting of Molly’s sympathetic face.

      “You hungry?” she’d ask.

      “Just tired,” he’d say.

      Just the same, she would fix him a sandwich or heat up some macaroni and cheese, embellished with a touch of tuna—the way he liked it.

      “It’ll work out,” she would say, with the brand of optimism she would later use on her infertile daughter.

      The foreman eventually learned Morris’ name, a grimly pronounced “Kram-uh.” He went on to a long proud career, mastering all the main operational facets of the newspaper print shop—linotype operator, proofreader and handman. He attended every union meeting he could, volunteering at headquarters and eventually networking his way onto Jackie Ryan’s slate of trustees.

      “My lawyer,” Ryan called him. Morris took it more as praise than an anti-Semitic slur. Morris had, in fact, been in the room two decades earlier—though it seemed like two lifetimes ago—when the automation agreement was reached.

      Ryan promised Morris that not one of the printers would lose his job before they were ready to retire. “You’re owed that much if you’ve risked losing a finger or a foot working one of those damned machines,” he said.

      Now these were Morris’ men. They needed him to make sure that Leland Brady—an outsider with no understanding or sentiment of the sacrifices they’d made—honored Ryan’s pledge.

      “I’m taking a shower and then I’m going down to see the guys,” Morris told Molly.

      “You want me to give Jamie a message when he calls?”

      “If he calls.”

      “Morris, you know I don’t like to hear that,” she said.

      Ninety minutes later, Morris climbed the steps from the subway onto Fulton Street. He headed through the mid-afternoon crowd, down toward the maze of city housing projects that stood like eight-story sentinels guarding the undeveloped waterfront. He couldn’t remember seeing a bigger law enforcement presence at a strike scene. Police cars were everywhere.

      He hurried around to the back of the building and crossed the street into a bar, nodding to the owner Kelly Murphy. He went directly to the back, caught his brother’s eye and settled into the open seat that Tommy Isola pulled away from the table for him.

      “Guys,” Morris said.

      “Mo, this just came for you,” Louie said.

      Lou pushed a white envelope across the table.

      “Brady’s son brought it down and left it with Kelly about an hour ago,” Louie said. “She told him we were back here, but the prick just told her to give it to us.”

      “You kidding?” Red Duggan said. “There’s no way that jerk-off dares come back here.”

      The back room of Kelly’s was the printers’ lair. As a makeshift union hall, it had its charms and benefits. Free rent and an occasional burger were among them. Kelly Murphy, daughter of a one-time Trib printer, made her real money off the buffalo-chicken-wing-eating editorial and advertising staff which stayed in front. She’d decorated that area in the popular sports bar motif. A new TV satellite dish beamed СКАЧАТЬ