Category: Fathers

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Dayton Ohio Fathers Living

Three Machines

A worn IBM Selectric typewriter sitting beside a small offset printing press in a modest Berkeley print shop, late afternoon light through a storefront window, warm and slightly nostalgic, documentary photography style, no text or people visible.

I’m a chapter into Jeff Jarvis’s new book Hot Type. It tells the Linotype’s story from the top down — the tragic inventors, the media moguls, Mark Twain bankrupting himself on a rival machine. Publishers Weekly calls it “colorful and enthralling,” and the part I’ve read is. But reading it, I kept thinking about a story it doesn’t tell: not the story of one machine, but of a man who lived through three.

The first machine

My dad, Carl, was a Linotype operator, and later a foreman, at Dayton Typographic Service in the 1950s. The Linotype histories always start with Ottmar Mergenthaler, the engineer who built the machine in 1886, and they linger on the tycoons who bought fleets of them. That’s the inventor’s history.

The operator’s history starts with a man at a 90-key keyboard — arranged by letter frequency, which is why the most famous typo in newspaper history reads “etaoin shrdlu,” the mark of a finger run down the first two columns to flag a mistake. It continues with molten lead at 550 degrees, the clank and hiss of the caster, a smell that got into your clothes and never quite came out.

The Linotype didn’t deskill typesetting; it reskilled it. The hand compositors it replaced — the Swifts, who once held typesetting races before paying audiences of thousands — saw a centuries-old craft wither. But the machine demanded its own expertise: reading copy and keyboarding at speed, hearing a misaligned mold before it ruined a line, keeping a finicky foundry running through a deadline night. My dad’s generation learned that machine the way a musician learns an instrument.

On Saturday mornings he’d take me along while he caught up on work. I was watching a trade at its peak — I just didn’t know the peak was already behind it.

The second machine

Phototypesetting killed the Linotype the way the Linotype had killed hand-composition. My dad didn’t ride that one out. He left Dayton and, in Berkeley, opened a small offset print shop on Oxford Street, across from the Cal campus. The 90-key keyboard became an IBM Selectric; molten lead became offset plates. It was a real re-skilling, not a small one — a different machine, a different trade, at an age when most people stop learning new ones.

The third machine

The shop found its footing on a strange, narrow market: Berkeley then required graduate theses to be printed, not “Xeroxed,” and there was steady, respectable work in doing properly what a photocopier could only do badly. For a while, that requirement was the business.

It didn’t last. The rule changed, the copier got good enough, and the market my dad had built his second act on simply stopped existing — the same way the compositor’s market had stopped existing, the same way the Linotype operator’s had. Three machines, three trades, one man standing on each shrinking piece of ground in turn.

Whose story is it

Linotype histories, as a genre, get written about the men who owned the machines and the men who built them. Even the operator’s history — when someone bothers to tell it — usually stops at one displacement, as if a man who loses his trade to a machine either finds a permanent new one or doesn’t. My dad found three, in succession, each one narrower than the last, and the history of that — of re-skilling as a way of life rather than a one-time event — doesn’t get written at all. It just gets lived, by somebody’s father, and remembered, if it’s lucky, by somebody’s son.

Categories
Family Fathers Living Sports

The Flashlights He Left Behind

There’s a Wright Thompson piece from 2007 that I keep returning to. It was filed during the Masters, and it’s technically about golf the way the ocean is technically about water.

The setup is simple: Thompson is at Augusta National for work, credentialed sportswriter in the press tent, watching the ceremonial first shots and the azaleas and all of it. His father had dreamed of attending just once. His father is dead. The piece is what happens when Thompson walks the course trying to find him.

I don’t know how to write about it without sounding like I’m describing a dream to someone who wasn’t there. So let me start with the craft.

Thompson opens with chipped beef on toast. He’s on the clubhouse veranda, waiting for Arnold Palmer, and a stranger asks what he ordered. “It was my dad’s favorite meal,” Thompson explains. A silence falls. “Did you ever bring him here?” the stranger asks. “No,” Thompson says, turning away.

That’s the whole wound, opened in three lines of dialogue. No commentary. Just the weight of the unanswered invitation — the trip that never happened — sitting there in a plate of chipped beef. The best sportswriters understand that the specific detail does what abstraction never can. Thompson doesn’t tell you he carries grief. He shows you where it lives.

Then comes the structural move that makes the piece something more than a personal essay. Thompson builds a rhythm — three times, he lands the phrase that is Augusta — each time widening the frame. Nicklaus on 18, glancing at his son, repeating his own father’s last words. Tiger winning in 1997, finding Earl in the gallery, a son’s head on a father’s shoulder. And then, quietly, devastating: This, too, is Augusta: me, needing a daddy more than ever.

By the time the narrator’s grief enters the frame, the reader has already been prepared to receive it. The repetition is a kind of structural kindness. Thompson is telling you: pay attention, something is being built here. When it arrives, it doesn’t feel sudden. It feels inevitable.

The piece has a spine you don’t notice until you’ve read it twice. Thompson asks the same question at two different moments: Daddy, are you out there?

The first time, he’s standing in the rain, alone, by a sapling planted exactly one year after his father’s death. He’d been standing guard over the tree in a downpour, soaked, because he’d been unable to protect his father in life. No answer comes. Just the shattering windows of water falling from the sky.

The second time, he’s in the bleachers at Amen Corner. He whispers it. And from somewhere across the course, a roar rises from the gallery, moving through the pines, fading back to silence.

Thompson is careful here. He writes: Understand that I don’t believe in stuff like this and am certain it is a coincidence. That hedge is the whole story. The man who doesn’t believe in signs is exactly the man who most needs to find one. The moment works precisely because he doesn’t oversell it. He puts it down and lets it be what it is — or what the reader needs it to be.

The passage I keep coming back to is near the end, not at the emotional peaks. Thompson has just watched Jim Gray, the television reporter, carefully lift the rope so his white-haired father can slip beneath it. A small thing. A son holding a rope. And Thompson realizes he’s watching himself in reverse — that the transition he’s been grieving his way through is also a transition toward something.

The piece ends not with closure but with continuation. He buys a tiny green Masters onesie. A small knit golf shirt for a toddler. And the last line the sales clerk offers — meant as a coo over the cute little clothes — lands as the verdict Thompson has been seeking all week: Oh, good daddy.

It’s the right ending because it doesn’t answer the grief. The hole in your chest after losing your daddy never gets filled, Thompson writes, and he means it. What the ending does instead is redirect the inheritance. He’s received everything he needed. He just needs to pass it on.

That’s what the best longform sportswriting can do when it’s working at full power. The Masters is the container. Inside it: a meditation on what fathers give us that we don’t fully inventory until they’re gone, and what we owe the children we haven’t had yet.

Thompson filed this piece for a newspaper. He was 30 years old. That this exists at all feels like its own small miracle — a man sitting down in grief and producing something that will outlast the tournament, and probably him.

Go read it. The link is here. Then come back and sit with it for a while.