Life at newspaper leaves pressmen with decades of stories

By Angela Carella
Assistant City Editor

Published December 31 2007

STAMFORD - Like many newspaper pressmen, 85-year-old Canio Pace has ink in his blood.

And blood in the press.

Printing newspapers can be dangerous - a slip, a moment of inattention, and a hand is snared in the heavy, rolling cylinders.

"You have to get initiated in the pressroom. How you do that is you get a finger caught in the press," Pace said, showing a middle digit held together by a metal pin.

Mike Smith lost two fingertips to the press when he was a young man. His hand got caught in a folding cylinder.

"There's a knife in there that cuts the paper; it took my fingers," Smith said. "That is my newspaper legacy."

Warren Eaton said keeping fingers is a family tradition. He is a fourth-generation pressman.

"I have all my fingers. My father had all his fingers; my grandfather, too," Eaton said. "Great-grandpa, I don't know about."

John DeSousa has all his fingers - his problem is keeping them clean.

"You get all kinds of ink on you," DeSousa said. "If you're going out to dinner after work, you got to scrub. I use bleach."

Pace, Smith, Eaton, DeSousa and other pressmen at The Advocate and Greenwich Time have spent most of their lives printing newspapers in the noisy pressroom, working nights, weekends and holidays, ink on their skin and uniforms.

They adjust the amounts of ink - black, blue, red and yellow - making sure the plates on the press are lined up one on top of the other, so the colors are where they're supposed to be. As the press rolls, they adjust the colors - not too much red or blue, just the right amounts of yellow and black.

They load the 1,600-pound rolls of newsprint on the press, using dollies on tracks one floor below. They make sure there is enough tension on the paper so it weaves through the press smoothly at high speed, but not so much that the web of paper breaks. They look for holes in the web, which can cause a break.

But now the 15 press operators and two supervisors are out of work. After 178 years with a press in Stamford, The Advocate will be printed at the News-Times in Danbury and Greenwich Time at the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport.

The Advocate, Greenwich Time, News-Times and Post - and six weeklies in Fairfield County - now are owned or operated by MediaNews Group Inc. of Denver.

The Hearst Corp. bought The Advocate and Greenwich Time from Tribune Co. for $62.4 million in a deal that closed Nov. 1. MediaNews has an agreement with Hearst to operate some of its newspapers.

Because Tribune will sell the Tresser Boulevard building in Stamford and the East Elm Street building in Greenwich separately, The Advocate and Greenwich Time no longer have a press.

For Pace, it is the end of a long love affair with the printing press. It began when he was walking home from school at 16, and stopped to look in the window of City News, then a printing plant in Stamford.

"I watched the paper running through the press. It was fantastic," Pace said. "A guy came out and said to me, 'Kid, you want a job?' "

It was 1937. There was no television. Some people didn't have radios. They learned about the world from newspapers.

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Hat Tip Margit Rubens