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The photo, sandwiched between color images of smiling employees, corporate bulletins and the announcement of a new baby boy, shows four men in sleeveless black aprons bent over preparing type for a newspaper press of another time, in a town of another era.

Located 61 miles northwest of Harrisburg, Pa., Lewistown was a hub on the once-prosperous Pennsylvania Canal. In 1903, when the town's first and only remaining daily newspaper was founded, the population was 8,166.

The photo is the sole physical reminder of the long history of the press and the town - a history, long-time pressman Walter "Bud" Olson, said "hasn't changed all that much."

Now, there is less danger, less noise and, of course, more color operations, the 40-year Sentinel pressroom veteran said. Despite the changes, he still works through the night to print the daily paper, like he has for the past four decades.

In its early years, The Sentinel was only four to six pages daily, wrote long-time reporter Jim Canfield on the paper's centennial.

"Even that limited printing was time-consuming, considering it was necessary to print on one side of the paper, let it dry, turn the press over and then print on the other side," Caufield wrote.

Olson first workedfor the paper by delivering copies of the early Sentinel. He began working in the pressroom in 1968, laboring on The Sentinel's Goss Rotary Press, a letterpress installed in 1952.

The $210,000 expenditure enabled the pressmen of The Sentinel to print up to 16 pages per press at a time and prompted the paper's front-page declaration that "Lewistown today nudges into a place in the sun in the printing world," according to the Mifflin County Historical Archives.

The letterpress used hot lead to set the type that was raised above the non-printing areas, Olson said. The raised lead then makes a direct impression on the zinc plates, which were assembled into galleys.

When the letterpress arrived, the town's population was 13,017, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

"Down there, a finished page weighed 78 pounds," Olson added. "If one of those things snapped apart, someone could have gotten seriously hurt."

Olson said he doesn't remember any critical injuries from shattering lead, adding that in those days, pressmen started as apprentices and had to work for at least five years before they could be considered journeymen.

Olson said he still boasts "little reminders" of preparing type for the letterpress, pointing to small pink faded burns that mark his hands and forearms.

In 1972, The Sentinel switched to an offset press officially called the Goss Community Press, but privately nicknamed "the Monster," Olson said.

"Don't ask why we called it the monster - I have no idea," he quickly interjected. "It certainly wasn't as scary as that hot lead."

The process of pouring hot lead was then abandoned, and now the inked image is transferred from an aluminum plate that weighs less than a pound to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface.

When "the Monster" was installed, the town's population was 9,009.

Computers were then introduced into The Sentinel's printing process in 1993, according to The Sentinel's archives. The process, called pagination, no longer required that content be waxed or pasted onto newspaper-sized graph paper. Instead, everything was built on a computer and then burned onto the aluminum plate using ultraviolet light.

"One of the first times I was working in the back, burning plates, the light went out and we had to fix it," Olson said. "I kept the thing turned on while I worked on it, and when I woke up the next morning, I couldn't see."

At the emergency room, the doctor kept asking Olson if he worked as a welder or had exposure to ultraviolet letter, he said.

"Then I remembered," he said, smacking his hand on the table, "it was that darn burner. In a few days, I was fixed up just fine."

When computers arrived in the pressroom, the town's population was 9,341.

Color makes an impact

Olson said throughout the years, the new presses and the technology, the biggest change in the production of the paper has been the amount of color printed.

"They'd start putting 'The Sentinel' in color  - that's all just 'The Sentinel' and then we did our first process color job and they said there would never be more than one of those in a day," he said. "Now almost every day we do eight in the daily paper."

Unlike the amount of color, however, the manpower required to run the mammoth press has declined. Five people in matching mechanic-blue jumpsuits, replace weighty rolls of newsprint, re-rack the press' units and continually check the color balance on the papers that roll down the conveyer belt.

"There used to be at least nine or 10 of us," Olson said, describing the men who operated the letterpress until 1972. "Though, there were a few more things to do back then."

Other aspects of Lewistown's printing press have remained constant as the black ink stains on the pressmen's' fingers.

Sentinel employee Jim Thompson started 33 years ago, he said, following the footsteps of his father, Richard, and grandfather, Frank, who both worked in The Sentinel's pressroom for 32 and 47 years, respectively.

"The press for us, I guess, is just a family tradition," he said.

A constant presence

The Sentinel still prints almost the same number of daily papers each night as they did when Olson started in the 1960s - about 16,000 then and 14,000 now, he said.

The long roll of paper that winds through the press can still rip or jam and the whole process has to be stopped and reloaded, Olson added.

"Things still go wrong down here," he said. "Sometimes I think, are we going to be able to get this paper out tonight? But we always seem to manage."

The staff's ability to "manage," he said, has been a result of luck, experience and a good electrician.

Although Olson can never be certain what will go wrong during a night of publication, he's more confident about the future of newspapers.

"There's always some people that will turn to the TV or the computer," he said, "but there are many more who think that daily paper is as important as breakfast."

In small towns, especially, he said, certain services provided by the newspaper are irreplaceable, like local news and the obituaries.

"You can't get the obits on Fox News," he added.

However, even Olson can't deny that change is difficult for some.

"I used to whine and complain every time they told us we had to change this or change that," he said. "Probably the last couple of times that we changed I just made up my mind, look, you'll get used to this, and one day you'll back and say, man why did we complain about it?"

Olson glanced at the old photo on the metal cabinet.

"I used to work in that basement," he said, as his fingers traced the frayed outline. "Those windows were the same, the hanging heating vent, the concrete walls."

Then like the first few copies of an ink-drenched press run, he tosses away the nostalgia and looks back at the press.

"I gotta get back to work," he said.

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