Keeping the passion for a free press
Lots of great give and take at the Minnesota Newspaper Museum
ST. PAUL, Minn. — I received a bit of journalistic inspiration doing some volunteer work at the recently completed Minnesota State Fair.
I took a couple of shifts running a century-old newspaper folder at the Minnesota Newspaper Museum at the fair. You can see a video reel about the museum at the link here . It was prepared from my images by Waterloo friend Joshalyn “Rocki” Hickey Johnson, one half of the Cedar Valley’s “North End Update with Ms. Rocki ‘n’ Chaveevah” Facebook show, along with local artist and my former Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier colleague “Chaveevah” Cheryl Banks Ferguson.
The Minnesota Newspaper Museum was created in 1987 when the newspaper at Maynard, Minn., upgrading to a modern offset press, donated all its old “hot metal” printing equipment, including a Linotype machine, press, job printing equipment and newspaper folder for not just display, but operation.
You can see a couple of videos of the press and Linotype running below.
The equipment still works, and volunteers print a paper every day of the fair. The paper is full of original content — feature stories about the fair and folks in the nonprofit who runs the newspaper museum. It’s a pleasure watching these people at their craft. Fellow Iowa State University journalism grad and longtime Twin Cities print journalist and historian Jane McClure writes and edits a lot of the content and helps explain the process to visitors. She’s just one of a cadre of longtime volunteers who literally keep the press running. You can even learn how to make paper hats out of newspaper pages like the workers in a real newspaper pressroom used to do.
I couldn’t help but join the fun. As one visitor phrased it, it’s a great “side hustle” for me, since I worked 40 years as a full-time journalist, still dabble in the craft and I now work at a museum back in Waterloo.
This year, the Minnesota Newspaper Museum paid tribute to Minnesota’s oldest Black-owned paper and Black-owned business enterprise — the Minnesota Spokesman Recorder, marking its 90th anniversary of operation. Its publisher and CEO is Tracey Williams-Dillard. The paper was founded by her grandfather, Cecil Earle Newman. Legendary Life magazine photojournalist and filmmaker Gordon Parks of “The Learning Tree” and “Shaft” fame worked for the paper early in his career. It was, and is, an important institution in the civil rights movement in the Twin Cities.
In comparison, I joked to some guests about my own former employer’s claim to fame, with a Minnesota connection. A century ago, John C. Hartman, editor and publisher of the Waterloo, Iowa Courier, fired a young journalist from Sauk Center, Minn. named Sinclair Lewis, thereby making a major contribution to world literature. Lewis even recalled Hartman’s dismissal of him when he accepted a Nobel Prize for literature half a century later. He drew on his experience as a young journalist for some of the characters who populated his novels.
A lot of people came into the museum — almost 2,500 one day — and they were all pretty fascinated with the process. Visitors included former printers, college students, parents whose children were contemplating getting into journalism, a pressroom employee of the Minnesota (formerly Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, even a freelance journalist from Australia who was working on a piece on Minnesota governor and then-newly minted Democratic vice presential nominee Tim Walz.
All were fascinated with the mechanical technology and the process; it’s a far cry from modern desktop publishing. But the permanence of having something in print on paper, for all intents and purposes hack proof, left an impression on folks, so to speak. Last year when I worked a shift at the museum one young college-age man said to his buddy, “If everything else goes to hell, I’m comin’ for this!” I told folks how I used to take home the unused ends of big spools of newsprint from the Courier for my kids to draw on when they were little. We also used to tape newsprint over a door frame for my son to bust through to entrance music for our fake pro wrestling matches.
But the one museum guest who left the biggest impression on me had nothing to do with journalism. He was a construction worker, a manufacture of precast concrete walls for industrial buildings in the Twin Cities. He strolled in near the end of my shift, looking around, wide-eyed.
I handed him a paper. He started asking questions about the process. Then he started asking question about me — how and why I got into journalism, how do I do an interview, how do I get people to talk and so forth.
Well, he got me to talk and the more I talked, the more enthusiastic I got about what I do. He was equally enthusiastic when I, as an old business reporter, asked him about his trade in return.
”Wow. It’s great to meet a passionate journalist,” he said.
We shook hands, and as he left, he gave me a fist pump and said, “Keep the passion.”
That was pretty cool.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription .
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Great article