WOW:
What memories you brought back. My parents were both journalists, one a reporter and the other an editor. My mother was a police and courts reporter for the Alexandria, Virginia Gazette, which boasted that it was the oldest continuous daily newspaper in the US. Now defunct, of course, much to my dismay.
I still have my line of type with my name on it that I received on a visit to the press room not quite 50 years ago. And I definitely remember the strange keyboards and the even stranger men who worked at them. They all smoked unfiltered Camels which they lit by touching the tip to the bucket of hot lead which fed the machine its raw materials.
In fact, they still set some type by hand for display ads when I first started hanging around. I too wish I had known now much the cases would be worth, because there were stacks of them, many still containing their fonts, gathering dust in a shed behind the building.
Those were glorious times, and I suspect the world is poorer for the changes that have come to the newspaper world.
