J. Mayon Parker wrote on the back of this 1911 photo: W. G. Smith, founder 1909; James S. Vinson, printer's "devil" and later junior partner; J. Roy Parker Sr., part-time pressman, compositor and later junior partner with Vinson; and (Mr.) Chatterton, journeyman printer. Their press was a Ben Franklin model, hand-inked and muscle-powered. Type composition was all by hand.

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IN THE NEWSPAPER 'BACK-SHOP'
By Roy Parker Jr.

My "back-shop" printing career began in the early 1940s, during WWII, when I spent summers at home in Ahoskie after the UNC season was over in Chapel Hill and the Parkers moved back to the big white house on the Harrellsville Road. I was 12-15 years old.

I was a "printer's devil" of the lowest sort, doing odd jobs for everybody.

A major duty was to haul lead from the "makeup stones" to the back room where Rudolph Washington sweated over a closed-hearth lead-melting pot, always smoking and smiling. I loved to watch him dip the molten lead and pour it into the "pig" molds for the Linotype typesetting machines.

And I stood by while print-shop superintendent John Hill cussed and sweated, prepping and coaxing the Goss flatbed newspaper press into action, putting on ever-more-violent displays of his temper when a "web" broke, but never slowing down. He was the most awesome mechanical man I ever hope to see.

I gradually learned how to "set" a little hand type. And one Christmas season ~ I guess in my high school year in 1946-47 ~ for several days and into the nights I fed several thousand little cardboard Planters Peanut boxes into a hand press, printing "Spanish Number One" on each box, a hurry-up job of the sort that Uncle Mayon loved to promise when other printers wouldn’t. I kept one of those cartons for years.

I fancied myself a pretty good "job printer," if it required only letterheads, envelopes and other small stuff. I was also big in the circulation department when the Hertford County Herald came out. "Slip-sheeting" (inserting) was my bag, although I could never match Jesse (Jim) Pearce or Rudolph.

I stood around while Rudolph performed amazing feats of putting mailing addresses on the Herald, using that hand-held job with with the little glue-well. Rudolph could slip-sheet, stamp, pile and wrap all in one motion, it seemed.

For years, I have only thought of Rudolph with great waves of emotion. He was such a hard-working, gentle man. He died of tuberculosis at an early age, probably victim of an incredible lack of concern in those days about breathing molten-lead fumes.

His mother, Era Washington, was a locally famous cook and housekeeper who was always sought by expectant mothers around Ahoskie for her assistance during their "lying-in" period.

Printer Bob Gerry, a native of Vermont, was another of my mentors. I mainly watched while he "made up" newspaper pages and ads, sweating and smoking. He let me have a "makeup rule," the little steel tool that was used to help assemble type into page forms. I thought that if I could ever put pages together like Bob Gerry, I would be content to be a back-shop denizen for good.

Bill Morris, the police chief’s son, was another of the unforgettable ones. He was an organist who had played the famous Austrian-manufactured instrument at the Richard Theater in silent-movie days, as well as for the early talking pictures. He also was a key in the Herald circulation department, and my mentor in early beer-drinking and off-color jokes. Bill was a very gentle, soft-spoken person. I didn’t really know how to handle the news that he had climbed to the top of the town water tank one evening and jumped to his death.

My Uncle Mayon was my "boss," but he left me pretty much alone. I do remember being terribly upset at my first paycheck ~ three bucks for the 15 hours of my summertime weeks. Then or later, Uncle Mayon and I never did agree on compensation. He felt that members of the family were entitled to work for less.

Later on, as a "front-shop" type on the Parker papers, I lorded it over my peers with my alleged knowledge of "back-shop" stuff. Gene Weber, my colleague-boss on the Northampton County News, could actually set type ~ even run a Linotype ~ so he wasn't very impressed.

In 1944 and 1945, when I was 14 and 15, I was a key "back-shop" person in the office of The News of Orange County, in Hillsborough, N.C. It was a country weekly that my father, then professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, bought. It was defunct, consisting only of the name, the post office license, and a card-file full of three-by-five cards with addresses of former subscribers. I worked hours over that list, and I can still remember some of those addresses ~ especially "Efland, Route Five."

The Hillsborough office was equipped with the basics, a Linotype and an open-pot lead-melting operation, a makeup stone, a few cases of headline type, and a proof press that we brought from Ahoskie. Here I was the Rudolph Washington, pouring the Lino ingots and also pouring lead into the type-high mold used to make ads from the "mats" that came in from national advertisers.

As such one evening, I made the ultimate foolish mistake of the stereotyper. I grabbed the darn thing ~ a half-page mass of just-poured hot lead ~ with a bare arm, trying to keep it from collapsing and ruining the mat. I still have the scar, just below my right elbow.

I didn’t work in the Hillsborough back-shop very long. It was back to Ahoskie in 1946. But in that time, I did get to drive the family convertible back and forth, delivering mail bags full of newspapers from Hillsborough to the Chapel Hill post office.

~

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roy Parker Jr. is a legendary North Carolina newspaperman who grew up in Ahoskie in the 1930s and '40s, the son and nephew of two legendary Hertford County newspapermen (J. Roy Parker and J. Mayon Parker). After working at his father's and uncle's "Your Home Newspapers" in the Roanoke-Chowan, he became a reporter for The News and Observer in Raleigh, and later for a long time was that paper's political correspondent in the nation's capital. He capped his career by taking newspaper executive positions in Fayetteville, N.C., and managing successful operations there for many years. Now retired, he writes "some" family history and a weekly military history column for The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer. He has been elected to the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame, at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communications. The foregoing reminiscence is of his early newspapering days in Ahoskie.

The next items, also by Roy Parker Jr., outline some of the history of the old Ahoskie firm, Parker Brothers Inc., printers and publishers of "Your Home Newspapers" ~ The Hertford County Herald, The Gates County Index, The Bertie Ledger-Advance, and the Northampton County News.

~

J. ROY AND J. MAYON PARKER
Written by Roy Parker Jr. in 1998
for a North Carolina Press Association anniversary booklet

The Parker brothers, Joseph Roy (1895-1957) and James Mayon (1901-1977), made Ahoskie a weekly newspaper hub in the 1930s with one of North Carolina's first newspaper chain operations.

In a single printing plant, built just before World War II, they published four weeklies, including their hometown Hertford County Herald, and papers in Bertie, Gates, and Northampton counties.

The older Parker became owner-editor of the Herald just after graduating from Wake Forest College in 1915. He had been a summer printer's devil and pressman while at school. Mayon, who had a similar back-shop beginning, joined him in 1928. When they acquired the Bertie Ledger-Advance in Windsor, Mayon moved there to edit it, and then moved to Ahoskie to take over the firm when Roy Parker became ill in 1934.

In the 1920s, Roy Parker was among the first to acquire a linotype machine for a weekly newspaper, and the Herald twice won the coveted Savory Loving Cup, then the state's most prestigious journalism award for content and design.

In the early 1930s, he and several other editors, especially Victor Meekins of the Coastland Times in Manteo, commissioned a Nags Head beach cottage named "The Fourth Estate" that was planned as a clubhouse and retreat for the North Carolina press.

Roy Parker was president of the North Carolina Press Association (NCPA) in 1933-34, a professor of weekly journalism at the University of North Carolina in the 1940s, and a member of the 1957 General Assembly from Hertford County when he died.

Mayon was equally innovative. He acquired one of the first press cameras owned by a weekly, a Graflex, in 1928 and took thousands of photographs of the region. He called the first meeting of the Eastern North Carolina Press Association.

Mayon's earliest and enduring claim to fame was that as sports editor of the Wake Forest College newspaper in the early 1920s, he coined the team nickname, the "Demon Deacons."

Throughout his career, Mayon Parker used stationery identifying himself simply as "Printer." And it is on his gravestone.

For a quarter-century, the Parker Brothers Inc. weeklies won dozens of NCPA awards for all phases of news and editorial operations. A 1939 historical edition was later expanded into a local history book by Roy Parker, "The Ahoskie Era of Hertford County."

The newspaper firm remained in the family, carried on by Mayon's son Joseph M. Parker, until the 1980s.

~

ITEMS FROM THE HERALD FILES

MARCH, 1928

Changes at the Herald. A new building, and Mayon joins the paper. Mayon, a Wake Forest grad, had worked in Clarkton and Whiteville. (He had been editor of the Wake Forest Campus newspaper in 1923.)

J. Mayon bought out James Vinson's half of The Hertford County Herald. Vinson had been a printer's devil with J. Roy as a teenager in 1911. He was the "back-shop" man for Parker & Vinson.

Addie Mae Cooke is listed as "society editor" for the Herald.

The newspaper had purchased the Powell building, next to the J. T. Parker building around the corner on Main Street.

NOVEMBER, 1929

Roy Parker relinquishes the position of editor and becomes business manager and publisher. J. Mayon becomes editor.

Roy Parker and V. D. Strickland set up a law office together.

At about this time, both banks in Ahoskie fail.   V. D. Strickland (had been) the long-time cashier at the Farmers-Atlantic Bank.

DECEMBER, 1929

Notes about The Hertford County Herald on its birthday:

(The Herald began in the old) wooden school building, opposite the Manhattan Hotel on Main Street. Later it was moved to the building at the rear of the former post office on Railroad Street. Two years later, the newspaper occupied all of this building and in 1917, purchased it from J. W. Powell.

In 1927, the present building, a 25-by-80-foot two-story brick house, was purchased. The entire building is now used to house the printing equipment and the line of office equipment and supplies handled.

The paper was first printed on a Washington hand press. Later a larger press was bought, and again in 1917 an even more expensive newspaper press was purchased. None of the original equipment is now used. A typesetting machine has been substituted for the hand type, new job presses added, along with many other pieces of machinery used in the printing and binding business.

The working force of the newspaper has increased from two persons in 1915 to six in 1929.

The present force consists of the two owners; Miss Beaulah Johnson, society editor; John J. Hill, composing room foreman and machine operator; Lee Gatling, head of the job-printing department, and Jesse Jenkins, general utility. A seventh employee is added during the rush months of the year.

~~~~~~~~

THE MOVING HAND

~~~

The moving hand writes,
and having writ,
moves on;
not all thy piety nor wit
shall lure it back
to cancel half a line,
nor all thy tears
wash out a word of it.

(Omar Khayyam, early Arabian mathematician and poet)

~~~~~~~~

Mailbox

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TAKING THE FERRY
By Norma Scott, Florida

Thanks for another fine story and for staying on to continue for a while. I look forward to each week's gem ...... I had forgotten how reasonable those ferries were back in the old days (The Poor Town News No. 72). I recall when we lived in Norfolk, before the days of the Tunnel Bridge (in the early '60s), coming down from Route 13 we had to take the Kiptopeke Ferry across. We always looked forward to that because after a long day's drive from Connecticut, it was a nice rest before we got home and had to unpack. Of course, if you missed the last ferry, you had to turn around and go back all the way around ...... I remember the day (the bridge-tunnel) opened ~ two friends and I took a ride across it on our lunch hour, and found out that 19 miles and a turn-around to come back could not be done on a lunch hour.

Editor's note: Norma Scott has been a "Poor Town" fan from the first, and probably has offered more encouragement to us than anybody. Her letter reminds us of a story Becky (Parker Pearce) tells about her father and the Portsmouth-Norfolk ferry during a 1930s trip ...... Gary Parker, of Murfreesboro, N.C., liked to travel, particularly to the towns in Southeast Virginia. On many a weekend day, he'd pile his wife and two small kids into the family car and head that way. Once, when he drove onto the ferry in downtown Portsmouth and positioned his auto in the proper lane, he was in too great a hurry to get out and walk up to the front rail, where he could watch the approaching city skyline ...... He opened his driver's-side door just as another driver passed him on the left headed for his slot ...... Gary's door went with the passing car, leaving the startled Hertford County man to ponder the Fates and to start hunting for an auto body shop.

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PRAISES FROM PIKE'S PEAK
By Ron Lupton, who lives in Colorado at the foot of
a 'beautiful and snow-covered Pike's Peak'

Greetings, my friend ...... I'm sure it is a labor of love to prepare these newsletters and keep up your web site, and I'll bet nobody would blame you if we saw the final one some of these days. However, your link is THE link for me, for "back home" and for so many memories. Closer now than some of my relatives down there who contact me at Christmas, if then, to tell me things are "about the same" ...... Such communications just don't conjure up the scarlet flash of a cardinal in a holly tree, or fill my nose with the smoky aroma of Smithfield ham, or bring to mind my Aunt Ettie and me shopping on King Street in Portsmouth in the 1950 morning, asking the ladies in their little street vendor spaces, "Auntie (always pronounced ain-tee) do you have any fresh sassafras?" ...... I encourage you to keep up the keeping up for as long as you want to. I'll bet I'm not the only far-away-from-home reader you have who larrups up your reminiscences like I used to those Caffee's Bakery pound cakes and cookies. (Of course, THEY'RE all gone now ...... but you're not!)

Editor's note: Ron Lupton has written a number of articles for The Poor Town News. His byline can be found frequently in the Archives index.

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