When Bobby Thompson died last weekend at the age of 83, those who still remembered how he spent the last three decades of his working life at the Commonwealth thought mostly about the pictures he took for this newspaper.
Bobby liked taking pictures, especially at Friday night high school football games, at fires, at car wrecks and at crime scenes. He had a police scanner at home and kept it on. He wouldn’t mind going out, even on a cold winter evening, to shoot a house fire.
He wasn’t an award-winning photographer by technical standards. He was often limited by the modest camera equipment he had to use and the conditions in which he usually found himself. Trying to shoot terrific action shots with a medium-length lens and an underpowered flash in a poorly lit football stadium is about impossible.
But he was an energetic photographer. In his personnel file is an editor’s write-up from the 1990s that commended Bobby for hearing about a Carroll County jail escapee on his scanner one night and getting to the scene in time to get photos of the apprehension for the next day’s front page.
Photography, though, was really just a fraction of Bobby’s job — something which he did partly as hobby and partly to earn a little extra pay.
Bobby’s real job title was “camera man” — one of those back-shop positions that no longer exists and that few people outside of the newspaper much thought about when it did.
Bobby operated a horizontal camera, a monstrosity of glass and metal used for transferring printed material — printed photos, line art, pasted-up pages of news copy — onto film, an intermediate step toward getting the photos and text eventually onto paper.
He also filled in regularly as a darkroom technician and taught many young reporters how to develop black-and-white film and how to make their own prints. (Color film back then had to be sent off for developing, a process that was both expensive and impractical for a daily paper, and the results were usually not very good.) Some reporters never quite got the hang of rolling their film onto metal spools while standing in total darkness and would sweet-talk Bobby into doing it for them.
Bobby came to work at the Commonwealth in 1970, after having worked at weekly newspapers in Lexington and Kosciusko. It was a vastly different era in terms of production.
Our composing room had a handful of people, mostly young women, many of them working their first job out of high school, who set the type and pasted up pages.
They were overseen by Ed Billings, a former linotype operator who transitioned to production manager after “hot type” was replaced by web offset printing.
The prepress department consisted of Bobby and one or two others who operated the horizontal camera, processed the sheets of film it created, stripped in the photos, “burned” the film onto aluminum plates with a burst of light, and punched and bent the plates so they could be mounted on the press.
Automation has eliminated almost all of those jobs.
The composing department disappeared first with the advent of desktop computers that moved typesetting and layout to the news and ad departments.
Digital photography turned our darkroom into a storage closet.
And two automated machines — a platesetter and a plate bender — eliminated most all of the prepress department.
Eight years ago, we finally sold for scrap the horizontal camera, which had been made obsolete by a new generation of equipment, which itself was then soon made obsolete by the next one.
Bobby went part time at the age of 65, then fully retired four years later, about halfway through that burst of labor-saving technological progress.
He spent the last few years of his 34-year career at the Commonwealth trying to get the hang of computers and scanners. He had a good attitude about it, but it wasn’t an easy fit for him.
After he retired, our contact was only episodic and mostly by phone.
If he saw a story on the local TV news that he thought also needed to be in the paper, he would call to be sure I knew about it.
Bobby had a heavy stutter, and I’m sure it frustrated him when I asked him to repeat himself, but he never showed it.
He’d tell me as many times as it took until I understood and could assure him we had the story, too, or that I would check on it.
Automation has allowed the Commonwealth to do more with less. It has significantly improved our print quality and helped us offset declines in advertising with increases in printing business and decreases in labor costs.
But it’s also come with a price.
Bobby was a loyal, hard-working and dedicated employee. Even though he never wrote a story, he was a newsman at heart. He valued the newspaper, and he took pride in his part in producing it.
It is sobering to think that if the same Bobby who had walked through our doors a half-century ago were to show up today, there might not be a place for him.
Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
