Historical April 1995 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
I started working on The Paper shortly after we moved to Skinker-DeBaliviere in July 1974.
I had previously edited the monthly newsletter of the League of Women Voters in Carbondale and decided to attend a “recruiting” meeting for people who might be interested in getting involved with the neighborhood newspaper.
I vaguely recall that the meeting was at Chris Lange’s house, and that Marj Weir and JoAnn Vatcha were both there. Little did I know that my volunteering would last, with only a few brief lapses, for over twenty years.
I do know that the first job I was given when I arrived to help with layout was to apply the zipline tape to make the straight line across the top of the page.
The tape is sort of a 1/16 inch-wide scotch tape.
We sometimes use even thinner “hair-line” tape. It’s also a test, like rolling your tongue, or rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same–you can either do it, or you can’t.
If you can stretch the tape across the page and get it straight, you might wind up doing layout for twenty years. Actually that’s not completely true. Over the course of The Paper’s history, we have had some technological changes, and one of them has been that the line at the top of the page is now done on the computer.
We could do the verticals by PC as well, but usually, since we currently do not do full desktop publishing, we rely on the old standby.
A look through early issues reveals some changes in how the paper was assembled and the ups and downs of our financial situation.
Most of the time, we have used some kind of typesetting and then pasted the columns, headlines, and illustrations to the layout sheets.
For awhile (before my time, I think), someone typed the text into column format.
During another phase, we paid for typesetting but then corrected typos by cutting out words or sometimes tiny letters and repasting them down.
Now we save our copy to diskettes and Marj does magic in the computer to print out each contribution according to our format.
Some things don’t change: in spite of our improved technology, with spellcheckers and multiple proofreadings, I often pick up the final printed copy and immediately discover a typo or something left out. One other change: We have changed our name.
First, it was The Paper, then The Neighborhood Paper, and eventually, The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere.
There have been advocates for each name, and the changes were prompted originally by our difficulty in explaining that The Paper was the name of the paper, not the Post-Dispatch. Whatever, most of the “old-timers” still refer to The Paper rather than to The Times. And regardless of what you call it, The Times has tried to reflect what is important to the neighborhood, its special events, its changes, its issues, and especially its residents and the vicissitudes of life in Skinker-DeBaliviere.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, April 1995.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1995_04.pdf, printed page(s) 4; PDF page(s) 4.
