By Elizabeth Widel
Chronicle staff

     In 1450 Johann Gutenberg began work on printing a Bible in a new manner which revolutionized printing, that of moveable type.
     Today, 550 years later, after countless changes in technology, The Chronicle - and all its colleagues in printing - in a manner has returned to a principle of publishing which, though light years removed from that earlier effort, in some ways is the same.
     In Gutenberg's day, if reproduction of reading material was not to be hand written, it had to be carved in blocks, often of a full page. It could be used only for the life of that particular manuscript, a word which itself stems from "hand written."
     Then he developed the technique of single letters which could be combined for a given piece, then disassembled and used in a different gathering for another one.
     With computer-set publishing, we are back to setting type for a page at a time, often a page as large as a tabloid- or full-sized newspaper page. But this is hardly the same as that which Gutenberg eliminated. And he wasn't doing newspapers.
     For centuries after Gutenberg revolutionized printing, his system reigned. Printers, with a large tray of letters before them, picked out the letters one by one and assembled them into words and sentences.
     This tray was known as a "case," and the capital letters were in one case and the small letters in another, hence the terms upper case and lower case.
     In 1886 came the development of the Linotype, a machine which assembled little molds of letters which the machine then cast into a single line of letters on the edge of a piece of metal known as a slug. The process named the machine, and the word slug - though it no longer refers to a bar of metal with letters along one edge - still is used in newspapering as a reference to a story's working name.
     In the early days of the last century, a newspaper which had a Linotype machine set it up in the front of the shop so passing people could look through the window and watch the clanking machine assemble the matrixes (mats), whirl them around to receive the shot of molten metal to make a slug, and then drop it in a tray as the machine distributed the mats back into their places in the magazine, ready for the next line.
     A Linotype at full speed could set up to six two-inch lines a minute.
     When The Chronicle began publishing in 1910, it presumably had its Linotype where people could see. Just where that early office was is hard to say.
     The paper was published by a committee of Omak men, taken over by a man named C.P. Scates, and then by Frank DeVos, who arrived from Oroville (by canoe) to take over publication. He ran it until 1926, when it was bought by Frank Emert, who had been publishing in the Okanogan Highlands.
     Early offices were about where Donaldson's now sits and on the northeast corner of Main and Bartlett.
     In 1929 Emert built the building at 109 N. Main which housed The Chronicle until 10 years ago, when it moved to Okoma Drive.
     From the beginning of Emert's management, there was a staff. The paper was not a one-man operation, though there have been such.
     In addition to the Linotype which ground out the type to be assembled into pages and then put onto the great flat-bed press, there were other machines to be run. Besides printers there was a staff to gather and write the news, an advertising sales staff, and - a term which may have gone out of use now - a shop "devil," who worked around doing work too elementary to take the time of a printer.
     It was the devil who broke up the pages after the press run, threw the slugs into the melting pot to be recast into ingots to feed the Linotypes, sorted the hand type back into its cases, and cleaned up. Then it all began again.
     I joined the staff in 1954. My husband, who was foreman in the shop, had signed on a few years before that. My early assignment was as the "front office girl," dealing with the public coming in to leave stories for the paper, or buy pencils or other office supplies. I phoned for local news (birthday parties, wedding showers, etc.) and read proof, trying to catch and correct typographical errors (typos).
     Some three years later Emert sold the paper and retired, and the partnership of Bruce Wilson and Joe Sinclair took over. This began a parallel tradition that the wife of the publisher would be involved in the paper.
     Edna Emert was a fine Linotype operator. She could keep the machine "hung" (going as fast as it could), and her type was clean (without typos). She also headed up the mailing crew which gathered every Wednesday evening to assemble, fold and address the papers ready to go to the post office.
     Bruce Wilson was the first trained journalist at The Chronicle. His wife, Merilynn, also a trained journalist, wrote for the paper.
     Wilson inherited as a staff member veteran ad salesman Harley Heath, who wrote the column "Seen and Heard in the Okanogan," which always appeared in the lower right-hand column of the front page.
     I can't recall whether his column came in typed or hand written. His ads always were laid out by hand, neatly lettered and spaced.
     But the sparks flew between him and the production staff, which wanted its copy in writing so there was a record of it rather than being given verbally.
     Wilson opened up the editorial page to letters from readers in an expanded volume which continues to this day. This also gave rise to the disclaimer by the paper, "Publication does not imply agreement or endorsement by The Chronicle."
     And some writers have been so enthusiastic that it is necessary to add as policy, "Writers are limited to two letters on the same subject within a six-month period."