Twenty-three years ago, I began writing a local history column in the Canton Independent-Sentinel titled “Looking Back” and I had no idea how it would change the course of my life. Today, in addition to my volunteer roll as President of LeRoy Heritage Museum, an organization that preserves the history of the southwestern corner of Bradford County, my full-time career is Manager/Curator at the Bradford County Historical Society in Towanda. This month is the twentieth anniversary of the first meeting of LeRoy Heritage Museum and this milestone has me thinking back to where this all began. I’ve written many times about how I became interested in local history at the age of 10 during a trip to Laquin, but the path of sharing local history with others began when I was 14 and 15 years old.
In 1997 and 98 I shared local history with the public for the first time through a historical display at LeRoy Old Home Day. There were two columns in the newspaper then that made an impression on me. Ruth Kinney McIntire’s “Over the Hill to Pumpkin Center” covered Granville area history and the other was John Shaffer’s “Years Ago” history columns. Each week John pulled short bits of history from the old Canton newspapers and arranged this information under the title, 100 Years Ago, 50 Years Ago, 25 Years Ago, etc. Once in a while we were treated to a history article from Charles Rockwell. I looked forward each week to the information in those columns and they inspired me to write my own column about area history.
On December 30, 1997 I typed a letter to John Shaffer on a typewriter. “Dear Mr. Shaffer,” I wrote. “I would like to write a column in the Canton Independent-Sentinel. This column would talk about the area’s history (mainly of Canton and LeRoy). The name of it would be “Looking Back”. I am an avid local history collector and have found that many people have an interest in what this area was like many years ago. Thank you for your response. Sincerely, Matthew Carl.” The letter was mailed, and I soon received a phone call from John indicating that he would be glad to receive anything I wanted to submit although I’m sure he thought it unusual that a 15-year-old would want to write a history column in his newspaper. The “Looking Back” column continued for five years with the first 137 articles covering local history and the remainder covering the early work of starting the LeRoy Heritage Museum.
In the fall of 2000, three months after graduating from high school, I contacted John and explained that I was interested in getting some experience working for a newspaper. He offered a part-time job in Composition at the Canton Independent-Sentinel office. On the first week of October I began working three days per week in the Sentinel office with John & Lois, Andrea Sutton, Janie Riggs, and Lynda Quinn.
The newspaper business was so different, even twenty years ago. There were two main responsibilities to my job, the first being the retyping of articles that came into the office through the fax machine, the postal service, or items brought in by the public. There was no social media and barely any email being used. The second responsibility was the screening of photos for use in the newspaper. In those days, the newspaper was pasted up each week on boards. The boards had a paper the size of a newspaper page with columns printed on them in light blue ink that would not show up when the pages were processed at the printing facility. The articles that we typed were printed off a laser printer, cut to size with scissors, and run through a waxing machine that would apply a thin coat of wax to the back allowing it to stick to the page templates on the boards. The photos were adhered in a similar manner but had to go through the process of resizing and screening before they could be used.
Each week, John and Andrea would go out and about through Canton, photographing events, people, and life in the community. There was no digital photography being used at that point. John took rolls of 35mm film to Brown’s Pharmacy each week to be processed and he later picked up the prints. The prints were brought back to the office where Andrea would write a number on the back of each photo representing the percentage of reduction or enlargement that had to be done in the darkroom in order for the images to fit the desired column size.
Usually on Tuesday, the day before the paper went to press, I would go into the basement darkroom in the Sentinel office and “shoot” the photos. The darkroom contained a vertical process camera that was used to resize the photos and turn the images into dots. This screening process allowed the photos to reproduce well in the newspaper. The camera dated back to at least the 1970s if not older. On this machine I would place the photo under a glass panel at the bottom. Next, I would turn a wheel to adjust the size of the photo and a knob to adjust the exposure time. The room lights would be switched off, leaving only the red darkroom bulb lighting the space. The vacuum would be turned on, drawing air through a door at the top of the machine. A piece of light-sensitive photographic paper would be placed in the center of the vacuum door, the door closed, a button pushed, and the machine would transfer the image onto the photographic paper. Finally, the paper would run through a machine with developer chemicals and would dry there in the darkroom. Once all of the photos were finished, I brought them back up from the basement to trim to size on a cutting board. Finally, the photos would be ready for paste up, the majority of which, aside from the ads, would be done on Wednesday.
Before I left the Sentinel office for a full-time job at the Daily Review, the darkroom had been retired and a new computer and scanner was installed so the photos could be scanned. They were still pasted up on boards though as digital layout software hadn’t entered the picture yet. Of course, the process before computers was even more complicated but it amazes me how the process has changed in just two decades.
Even though the vertical process camera was replaced at the Canton Independent-Sentinel, on my first day working at the Daily Review in 2002, I found myself learning to operate another process camera at the office on Main Street in Towanda. This was a horizontal model and much larger, one end inside a darkroom and the other end extending through the wall into another room. That one was soon replaced by a large flatbed scanner as well.
The old vertical process camera from the Canton Independent-Sentinel is now at the LeRoy Heritage Museum. A piece of equipment I used in my first job after high school is now an outdated piece of technology in a museum exhibit. That is how much has changed since the last time I wrote a regular newspaper column.
I look forward to sharing bits of local history and updates about the LeRoy Heritage Museum through this column again. If there are topics you would like to hear about, email the museum at info@leroyheritage.org. The LeRoy Heritage Museum publishes a full-color glossy magazine semi-annually (spring and fall) full of newly researched local history stories, photos, lists of recent donations to the museum collection, museum news and much more. To receive the magazine, become a member online or find a membership form at www.leroyheritage.org.