Today I am thinking about my grandfather. Here’s a picture of him as I remember him. He tended to dress this way even to work in his yard, keeping two hats, one old and one new, for each season, and two pairs of Edwin Clapp shoes, one old and one new. He seemed an old-fashioned gentleman to me as a child. I thought it quaint that he called my grandmother love and that he always paid his bills in person. I adored him.

I don’t know how often grandaddy replaced the items of clothing I’ve described (the shoes probably lasted a long time as they were made of kangaroo leather); but when the old items got to a serious point of wear he would replace them and the formerly new items would become old. The old items served him for work around the place after he retired, and I expect before as well, though I didn’t observe him as closely before retirement as I did after. He retired a bit early, after a heart attack, when I was four or five years old.

He was a printer by trade. When I was a small child he was the night foreman and ultimately the plant superintendent at the Abilene Reporter News in Abilene, Texas. I remember that he would take me to the composing room with him once in a while, set me on a bench by the window and let me watch him work. I still have a mental picture of him standing bent over the big stone-topped tables where the page frames were made with a type stick in his hand.

Grandaddy belonged to the International Typographical Union, then the oldest trade union in the country. He retired before lynotype machines changed newspaper production much, and he didn’t like lynotype operators. He claimed they were ignorant, and of course they weren’t craftsmen. He didn’t live to see the ultimate dissolution of his union as photo offset printing made redundant both his craft and the skills of the lynotype operators he disliked.

As the eleventh or twelfth child in a family whose wealth had been dissipated by his father’s impecuniousness, Grandaddy had been unable to attend college as some of his older brothers had done. I don’t know how much formal schooling he had, but his real education had been a progress through the ranks of apprentice and journeyman in the printer’s trade at a small newspaper in Terrell, Texas. He set himself up in a job shop in the big city of Dallas for a while after, then returned to Terrell for some years after his partner absconded with the assets of the business (or that’s family story) and ultimately took his family to West Texas in 1926.

I think he must have been pretty good at his trade, and he must have known at least a bit about the gigantic presses newspapers used in his day as well, because one of the things he did towards the end of his career was technical troubleshooting for the Harte_Hanks newpaper chain that owned the Reporter News. He regarded Bernard Hanks as a friend and mourned his death in 1948.

The union was one of the things that grounded Grandaddy’s life. He was no friend of strikes because they created hardship; though he believed steadfastly in collective bargaining. But the great value of the union for him, as I think back on it, must have been that it was a band of brothers, if I can be forgiven that old-fashioned expression. Inded, in Grandaddy’s day men who worked for newspapers, whether they worked in the plant or in the newsroom, felt a sense of connection with one another. When one of my uncles, who had followed Grandaddy into printing, found hmself out of work because of a strike at his plant in San Antonio, he found work in San Angelo and Abilene through the union. Grandaddy was retired by that time, about 1950 I think.

Some newspaper people were restless in the old days, and moved around a lot. My friend Patrick Bennett documents the career of an itinerant writer named Edward Anderson, who tended to move from paper to paper because he drank a lot and sometimes got fired for being drunk on the job. Anderson eventually found his way to Hollywood where he wrote some movies and a couple of novels, then back to Texas where he became involved with right-wing politics and died in obscurity.^† But for every marginal character like Anderson, whose vagrancy was enabled by the newspaper network, there were countless others who led solid middle-class lives. The union enabled my grandfather to do so, to retire with dignity, and to purchase property in his old age which helped to provide retirement income.

Of course Grandaddy had Social Security as well, and that’s another story. As I remember him today, and the life his working milieu enabled for the extended family of which I am a part, I find that I still adore him. As a child I would follow him around and “help” him do things. When I have tools in my hands I think of him to this day puttering around, fixing things, digging in his flower beds. This afternoon I will do some puttering of my own, and I will think of him. I’m also thinking the modes of social organization that enabled his life were good things: not all of them, certainly not the racial part. But I think of my grandfather’s life as an illustration, not of the naked individual initiative we have mythicized in today’s political culture, but of the nurturing and enabling force of human solidarity.

^†Pat’s book is entitled Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson, College Station, Texas A&M University Press: 1988.