Editorial: Colleague of a rare breed

LYNN ?It?s a bittersweet day at The Item as the company celebrates the career of a man who has toiled behind the scenes to bring the news to Greater Lynn for just a year shy of a half century.At the end of his shift today, Production/Graphic Arts Department foreman Martin “Marty” Dullea Jr. will begin his retirement, and it?s a given that the work he leaves behind will be spread among more than one mere mortal.If the measure of a worker?s value is how fast and deliberate he or she moves about the office, none outpace Marty. The man leaves a trail of smoke when his slender frame zips past.Through the course of our careers we encounter many coworkers; some who leave a lasting impression, for better or worse. Marty is among the rare breed admired by all. He is humble, loyal, dedicated, friendly, not one to gossip but always willing to hear or share a quick joke or spin a yarn about the industry?s “old days.”I asked him earlier this week what he plans to do in retirement, beyond spending time with his wife Carol and their grandchildren.?I don?t know,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I?ve been coming here every day since high school.”And the work, to be sure, was much more labor intensive 50 years ago.When Marty started with The Item in 1963, he worked on the fifth floor with more than 60 others amid the clanking of 35 Linotype machines and the acrid smell of molten lead. He was a typesetter, casting written words in hot-metal lines of backward type, or slugs, on the Linotype. There were a number of steps in the process that also involved asbestos sheets, in the production of lead plates for the press.?We?d melt the excess lead down everyday to use the next day,” he said. “It was hot up there. Whenever it reached 100 (degrees on the floor) we were let home for the day.”He joked this week, “Go figure, I worked with lead and asbestos all that time but I feel healthy.” More astonishingly is that he looks to be a man at least a decade younger than his years.Difficult though the work was in those earlier days, Marty, who?s father also worked in newspaper production at The Item and the former Lynn Telegram, said there was plenty of camaraderie and practical jokes. Item reporters and editors in the 1960s worked on the fourth floor, and pages of edited copy were sent up to typesetters in canisters via a pneumatic-tube system (vacuum tubes similar to those today at some drive-up ATMs).?One day someone sent a dead mouse up in the tube,” Marty recalled.The era of Linotype and similar subsequent machines gave way to partial-digital print in the 1980s, when compositors armed with razor knifes and glue pots would take printouts of digital copy, slice stories with precision and glue stories onto pages per an editor?s design instructions. Pages were then photographed and negatives of each burned onto a metal plate for the press.?I went to school for three weeks to learn the cut-and-paste (method),” Marty said. It was the second of three sea changes in newspaper production, the latter in the 1990s when all-digital production was ushered in.Relics of those earlier days are evident all around The Item today. There?s still a Linotype machine on the fifth floor of 38 Exchange St.; the pneumatic-tube system is still here though not functional; the giant web press that went silent a dozen years ago is still in the basement; and descendants of that mouse are spotted occasionally scattering across a floor of the building.But much of the romance and mystique of newspaper production has given way to technology. Today there?s not much distinguishing various newspaper department offices from those of an insurance company?s; generally quiet with everyone on the phone, pecking away on a computer keyboard, or both.Marty, for the past dozen years or so, has worked as The Item?s traffic and production manager, receiving ads e-mailed to the paper, ensuring ads are correct and on the right pages, building page templates, processing completed pages into portable do