Saguache
A steady chorus of clanging metal echoes off the walls of the tiny building that has somehow remained standing in this prairie town since 1875 – the same year, as a point of reference, that Harvard played Yale in football for the first time.
Inside, the heavy metal sounds blend with even heavier smells. Ink and kerosene and molten lead and Dean Coombs’ plaid flannel shirt, which seems to contain a bit of all of those things. Perched on a creaky, metal chair that is by any standard ergonomically incorrect, Coombs brings his hands to the keyboard of a 1921 Linotype machine. And then he begins pounding out the words that will be cast in lead for the latest edition of the weekly Saguache Crescent.
It is, he says, the 4,565th consecutive week that someone in his family has done that.
With the exception of four years after high school when he attended Adams State College and then bumped around in California and Texas, Coombs, 53, has worked at the Crescent since he was 12.
If his family tree is any indication, Coombs has a lot more newspapers to create, one line of hot lead at a time. The Crescent is the last remaining such newspaper in Colorado and one of only three or four in the country. His family has owned it since 1917.
“I’m the last member of the Linotype family,” says Coombs, who has no children and has never married. “I have a brother, but he never made it his occupation.”
For several hours each day inside the 20-by-30-foot building on Main Street in this town of about 550 people, Coombs works to produce 550 editions of the four-page Crescent.
The news is gathered by the townsfolk, who simply knock on Coombs’ door and hand him typewritten stories and announcements. A recent edition featured a story about a football game between Saguache’s Mountain Valley High School Indians and the La Veta Redskins. If those school nicknames ruffle any political-correctness feathers in Saguache (and they don’t seem to), the villagers can write a letter to the editor. A really long one. A recent letter about TABOR was a stunning 3,200 words long.
It’s enough to wear the skin off a guy’s fingertips.
Unlike modern newspapers that use computerized pagination systems to create pages, Coombs uses the Linotype system created in 1886 by Ottmar Mergenthaler. The massive Linotype Model 14 that Coombs uses was purchased, new, by his grandfather in 1921. It cost a staggering $6,000.
Keystrokes mechanically retrieve pre-molded letters. Coombs said the Linotype lets him type about 16 words per minute.
The Linotype then pours 600-degree molten lead into the molds, creating 2-inch strips of letters. In reverse, of course, for the printing process. These 2-inch slugs are assembled by hand into columns, placed in cast-iron forms and carried by Coombs to a 1915 printing press. Hand-cranked, it produces about 20 copies per minute.
And when the sun goes down, Coombs goes home. Which is, by the way, about 15 feet behind the newspaper building – the same house where his grandparents and his parents lived.
And unlike most newspapers, the Crescent doesn’t have editorial content meetings or circulation department meetings or, frankly, any meetings at all. Coombs could hold meetings, of course. But he’d be talking to himself.
“I’m it,” he says. “I’m the whole staff.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
