Albert Dickens describing the blue dusty gizmo to the right

Here's one of the first Atex machines. It came out of Massachusetts, I believe. This was the state of the art. It was specifically made for newspapers. And I think a paper in England had an Atex machine, had the same Atex equipment that we had. I hadn't seen that in ages. I thought that was just the greatest thing.

Albert (above):

We are on the second floor right now. This is what they call the mail room. It's not mail meaning "post office," but where they bundle all the papers... Just think: the press used to hang out the window. The gulls would come out and it always looked like the gulls knew exactly when lunch hour was because they would fly right down here.

James:

So when this room was going full tilt, how many people would be here, probably? Like a hundred?

Aubrey Johnson:

It could be somewhere between one hundred and a hundred and fifty.

Albert:

A lot of the people were hearing impaired. They were hired because they could tolerate the noise. They didn't have to yell or shout, they had their sign language. One of them was also a lip reader. Most of them were his hearing impaired brothers and they were working ten or twenty years before I got here. So it wasn't because of the machines, the noise didn't make them deaf. They were hired just because of that. And the ones that could hear had these mufflers. . . . You met your wife here.

Aubrey:

Right. She's a receptionist for editorial.

James:

So you got ink in your blood.

Aubrey:

In my blood, everywhere. (laughter)

Albert:

His son-in-law also worked here.

Aubrey:

He's driving for PACE now. My daughter-in-law, Ethel May, was working here, too. She's over at the Tribune now.

(In the photography darkrooms) James:

Who is Arabinko?

Albert:

He was a magician with the development of films. This is the room where he worked, and ... if someone made a mistake and underexposed, he would try to bring it up... If you got that one time picture and you can't go back and take it again, he could do magic to make it look right.

James:

We just saw the Arabinko lab and now we're at the Gorg room.

Albert:

That's named after Joe Gorg. He was also one of the legendary darkroom men. But he loved to play the horses and he would finish up just in time to get to the fifth race at Arlington. And once he won big for Frank DeSanti. He decided to gamble more and he lost everything that he had won, and he had to pay Frank DeSanti back in installments, and it took him about two years. He was a great guy.

Building Manager, Bill Patterson:

All of our newsprint used to come in from Canada by boat. It would be lifted into the building on this track right into the paper storage. In the late sixties, we started to get paper by rail. This is the area where the train stopped. The paper handlers would work with a fork lift - - right here is the Wabash Avenue bridge - - and store paper right up to that area...where the door is all cemented up. The other side of the wall was IBM property. So when Marshall Field, who owned that property as well as the property we're on, when Marshall Field sold that property, we asked that we get a lease on the lower part of it for paper storage. So we got a hundred year lease. And when paper was cheap, we'd buy a lot and load this place up, including underneath IBM. Just a few years ago, IBM decided they wanted the space back. And they said you know you're not printing the paper here anymore, you should let us have the space. I said I think the lease reads a hundred years and they gave us a million and a half for it.