Reflecting on printing the news as Providence Journal press closes

PROVIDENCE – Sometimes, when the mighty presses began to roll at The Providence Journal, you could feel our Fountain Street building shudder.

It was a humbling reminder that we writers and editors were just parts of a manufacturing business producing the key source of printed news in Rhode Island since 1829.

I felt even more humbled during the September 1987 opening of our new $60 million production plant on Kinsley Avenue. It was a festive day with crowds celebrating The Journal’s future as a pillar of the "press" – in both meanings of the word.

Except now, after a run of 196 years, the tradition of printing The Providence Journal here in town is coming to an end.

Our paper edition will continue, of course – we’re still committed to that – but the presses will be out of state.

The reason is technical. The Kinsley Avenue plant has been going strong, printing not just The Journal but papers from Hartford and New London, Connecticut; Worcester, Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts; and others. Yet those once-new 1987 presses featured a groundbreaking water-based technology that didn’t catch on.

The sole supplier of its essential plates is about to stop making them. As our parent company, Gannett, explained, it’s an insurmountable supply chain issue.

And so, before the presses fall silent after March 9, I went to Kinsley Avenue to say goodbye to some of the 130-plus folks who’ve been the heart of the physical paper, many of them for decades.

Bob Hamilton – the longtime manager there who is as much a friend to his staff as a boss, because that's the culture – brought me to the humming, high-ceilinged pressroom.

What a place.

It’s like a movie scene with thousands of fresh papers zipping up conveyor belts. Of course, there’s also the smell of ink, no doubt close to what Benjamin Franklin experienced plying this same printer’s trade in nearby Boston around 1720.

Bob, now 63, has been a Journal guy since age 18, and it will be hard for him to say goodbye.

“This is home,” he told me. And also a family legacy – Bob’s dad worked at The Journal for 42 years, and his wife, Phyllis, is a veteran administrator at both the newsroom and the press building. Like many, Bob first spent years as a delivery truck driver, hitting 160 stops each day between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. dropping bundles of papers at stores as well as corners for carriers.

Because of the noise, we retreated to the nearby break room, where I met Norm Dinerman. Now 62, he’s another longtime pressman who started in his teens. When I asked him to join us, he said in a minute – he had to make sure a run of a Hartford Courant section was looking good. You see that priority a lot here – whatever goes out the door has to be top quality. Plus, explained Norm, it’s a complex operation, and you need to stay focused. Things can go sideways pretty quickly.

Norm soon came back, sat down, and talked of growing up in Scituate on a chicken farm with 18,000 laying hens, yet he was ready for a change after finishing school.

The Journal’s production facility was a sought-after job with good pay and benefits, but you had to be ready for the hours. Norm worked nights for 32 years, from 7 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., which is when the presses roll for a morning paper. There were a lot of holiday shifts, too – newspapers don’t take those off. Indeed, The Providence Journal is the country’s oldest continuously published daily, having never missed an edition.

The guys in the pressroom are proud of that, and yes, they are almost all guys, but there’s one long-serving woman.

We’ll get to Sherrie in a minute.

I asked Bob and Norm if either was there the times someone shouted, “Stop the presses.” Both nodded. It happened during the Station nightclub fire, and on some elections.

The digital version of “stopping the presses” happens frequently today, but online – you just push the update button, a bit easier than replating multimillion-dollar presses.

The Kinsley Avenue plant is still going strong producing more than a half dozen papers, but Bob and Norm said it used to be as busy with just The Journal, the presses needing three eight-hour shifts to print all sections of the 300,000 circulation Sunday ProJo.

Norm told me The Journal was so anticipated a source of news that when the presses were on Fountain Street, cops would stop by during the early hours to grab the new day’s first copies. Buddy Cianci often sent his driver over, too, and once, the mayor himself came riding up on a police horse to Fountain Street to get a copy around 2 a.m.

When I asked Bob and Norm what they’ll miss the most, they said the lifetime friendships. It’s the kind of job workers stick with, and both have watched colleagues go from single to married to parents to grandparents.

“When you got this job,” said Norm, “you started here, you finished here.”

Sean O’Connor, 53, is another longtime pressman whose career shows what’s happened to the newspaper business. He worked at out-of-state production facilities that all ended up closing, which is how he came to Providence – as a “pressroom orphan.” A lot of folks at Kinsley have similar stories – having gravitated here from shuttered press operations in Boston, Worcester and Cape Cod.

And now it’s about to happen again.

But Sean has been proud to be part of The Providence Journal. His dad worked here, too, living in the Fountain Street pressroom for a week during the Blizzard of ’78.

Sean’s one regret is that he was hoping to mark the paper’s 200th anniversary in four years.

“I thought that would be a romantic way of closure,” he said. But they just missed.

Bob and Norm will likely retire, but Sean has to figure out a new career. He smiles and says he’s got twin daughters heading to college next year, so the bills will keep coming.

A lot of folks don’t realize that the pressroom is not the biggest part of a newspaper’s factory. Bob took me down a corridor to show me the larger operation. It’s called the “mail room” but not like what you picture with a clerk slotting envelopes. The one at Kinsley is a massive space, 200 feet long with 85 workers running insert machines and bundling up the papers. There are forklifts and mammoth newsprint rolls the size of VW bugs.

Larry O’Brien, longtime mailroom supervisor, is 67 with 49 years at The Journal. It’s a family business for Larry, too, his dad having worked here for decades.

I asked Larry how he’s doing with the closure.

“Sad in a way,” he said. “I’m a newspaper guy. I bought my house, raised my kids, all on newspapers.” He smiled and added: “Not bad for a kid from Pawtucket.”

He remembers a “stop the presses” moment, too – when President Ronald Reagan was shot.

Larry also has some “Blizzard of ‘78” war stories – after getting stuck behind abandoned cars on his truck route down Smithfield Avenue, he found shelter at the home of one of his carriers, whose dad was a cop.

But if ever there was a time people counted on the paper, he said, it was then. So the next day, Larry trudged to The Journal and was part of a team who made it to North Attleboro to buy a half-dozen snowmobiles to help deliver papers.

He was glad to have found the job.

“You either went to the gas company, the electric company or The Providence Journal,” said Larry. “Those were the major employers.”

And now let’s get to Sherrie Rasmusson-Mann, longtime pressroom supervisor with 38 years at The Journal. She was the only woman in the printing operation until another came aboard a few years ago.

I asked Sherrie what her title is.

“Queen bee,” she told me. But technically, it’s pressman.

Were there other women who came and went before her?

“I was the first and only woman in the pressroom for 30 years,” she said.

For real?

“Oh yes. Dirty job, I guess. If you’re inside a press cleaning it, you’re definitely taking a shower before you get in your vehicle and go home.”

But she loved the job.

“I supported my family with it,” said Sherrie, who for a stretch was a single mom with two kids.

She began here at the bottom, doing cleanup and fetching ink and paper. That job was referred to as “flyboy” but officially called “specialty worker.”

Sherrie then spent three years as an apprentice, quickly breaking through what might be called the ink ceiling, becoming a full-fledged pressman.

She grew up in Woonsocket, daughter of a truck driver dad and factory-worker mom, beginning at The Journal at age 21. Soon enough, she began pushing to get into the pressroom – it was unionized and paid good wages.

But she had to prove herself as a woman.

“It was hard,” she told me. “It was a man’s world. But it didn’t matter what job they threw at me, or if I got dirty. Once they realized I was one of them and willing to do the work, they accepted me.”

Now, as supervisor, she’s known for obsessing over quality.

“I’m a big stickler,” said Sherrie. “My men sometimes got upset at me, but I want the paper to look perfect. It’s pretty much pride.”

She knows the stories she prints often mean a lot to readers.

“Those pictures were someone’s daughter or mother or friend,” Sherrie said, “and they’d want to save it.”

Sherrie and her current husband, Ken Mann Jr., met as Journal colleagues, the two marrying 10 years ago. Ken is now now a machinist at the production facility and will likely take a job at a printing plant in Auburn, Massachusetts, owned by Journal parent Gannett, as will others here.

But Sherrie, at age 60, wants to focus on her granddaughter, who lives with them and is still in high school.

Lately, during the facility’s final homestretch, she’s been working 4 p.m. to 3 a.m. four times a week. But she’s used to it, having done late shifts her entire 38 years.

“That’s the business,” said Sherrie.

It will be nice to have a more normal schedule in retirement, but she’ll miss her Kinsley Avenue family, and being part of The Providence Journal.

The others told me the same, Norm Dinerman saying that pressman is a noble trade that indeed is shared historically with Ben Franklin.

“That’s always resonated with me,” Norm said.

Let me close with a personal message to the production facility folks.

We in the newsroom are well aware you have long played an even bigger role than us in creating the daily printed newspaper – and bringing our words to life.

Thank you for that a thousand times. It was an honor to have you as colleagues.

I hope it’ll mean something, as the Kinsley Avenue presses reach their end, that with this story, you’ll at last be able to put out a paper with you yourselves in it.

I know you’ll make it look good for our readers.

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