Two long-time Miner workers gone

Last of an era passing away

NEWPORT – I knew and worked with Elizabeth Watson and Lee Smith when I first came to The Miner in 1988. Elizabeth passed away March 11 at age 102 and Lee passed away Oct. 10, 2024.

Both had worked for The Miner many years before I arrived, Elizabeth as a typesetter and Lee as printer. Both were as important as any of the writers or editors in a time before computers when newspapers were far more labor intensive.

Elizabeth occasionally put me up at her home when I first started and was living in Spokane and needed to stay in Newport to cover something. Lee, who knew I used to rodeo and was a rodeo fan himself broke the news that legendary bull rider Lane Frost had been killed in the arena at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo. We all were working at the building where Treasures A to Z is currently located on Union Street.

Elizabeth told me at her 100th birthday party that she had always been a typist. Her typesetting at The Miner was important, but equally valuable was her attention to detail.

“I still remember the chilling but welcoming call from Elizabeth to The Miner newsroom,” said Fred Willenbrock, who was owner and publisher until he retired after 30 years. Most of that time she worked for him as a typesetter and proofreader.

“When she called your name, even mine, you knew she had found some ridiculous spelling or grammar error. She would be typing our messy manual typewriter pages into the phototypesetter at amazing speed on a tiny screen that showed only a few words. If she didn’t catch it before it moved off the screen, it came out on special paper. But she caught most of it – pretty amazing.”

Even after she left The Miner at age 75, Watson still paid attention to the paper.

“Even after she retired, she would call me when she received her newspaper and point out the typos,” Willenbrock said. “She did it because she cared about her community and how it was being recorded by her newspaper.”

In addition to typing about every word that went into the paper, Watson also did the popular Down Memory Lane column, in which she would go through back papers for interesting items for the week, 10, 20, 30, and 40 years ago, going back to when the paper started.

It was when she was working at The Miner that she started selling Avon, something she would continue for decades.

She went on to sell Avon for about 25 years as well.

“I met a lot of nice people selling Avon,” she said at her 100th birthday party.

Lee worked as printer in a bygone era before digital printing. He worked at The Miner 43 years, through four different publishers.

Building a newspaper was far different in those days.

Individual letters were cast in metal and arranged in lines. The lines were adjusted for space and then put into a rack that made up the page. The letter-filled rack would weigh as much as 50 pounds. Ink was rolled over the top and the page was printed on newsprint.

“We printed our own paper in those days,” Lee said in a story I wrote about him in 2011 for The Miner’s special publication, “100 years of a Newspaper and Pend Oreille County.” Pages were fed into the printer, one sheet at a time. Then they would turn the page over and print the other side.

“Most of the time we printed eight-page papers,” Lee said. Adding more pages meant quite a bit of work, involving two extra people.

Reporters and correspondents would hand write their stories. They would then go to the typesetter, who would type the stories on a linotype machine.

The linotype machine was 8 feet tall and 5 feet wide. Typists would type on a keyboard that bore little resemblance to today’s keyboard. The top three rows were for lowercase letters, with the next three rows for capitals and another row for dingbats, the ornamental characters that were used for spacing and decoration.

The letters were grouped so that commonly used words could be easily typed, such as the word “the,” which could be typed with one movement.

By the time Elizabeth retired from The Miner in 1997 at age 75 and Lee retired in 2004, production of the newspaper had changed a lot.

A few years after Smith started, reporters started writing with manual typewriters. Each desk had a bottle of rubber cement and reporters would cut and paste their stories together, handing them off to the typesetter, Elizabeth, who typed them again.

Jump forward to the early 1990s, when reporters and editors moved to McIntosh computers. The paper was first laid out electronically, using a page layout program, although in the end the page was pasted onto layout sheets and a negative was shot of the whole page, which was Lee’s job.

While he worked for four different Newport Miner owners, Lee said, really he worked for a bigger cause.

“The Newport Miner belongs to Pend Oreille County,” Lee said.