Standing in the pressroom Wednesday, I watched the Star’s veteran pressman, Don Campbell, in action, printing the next-to-last issue of the Whitehorse Star.

Seeing, and hearing, a newspaper press running at full speed is an unforgettable experience and it brought to my mind the first time this press was used at the Star — when I was at the controls.

In April, 1970, my father (Bob Erlam) decided to purchase a real newspaper press. The page count of the Star had been getting bigger and bigger and it had reached a point where it required two printers running our two small MGD “sheet-fed” presses, all day, all week, to keep up.

He’d settled on a two-unit Goss “Community” web press, which printed off large paper rolls. Bob was buying this press new from the Goss company and part of the deal was a week’s hands-on instruction for the Star’s main pressman (me) on the same model. This instruction was to take place off site while the Star’s new press was being assembled. The salesman checked around and found an accommodating print shop, with Goss Community presses, in San Francisco.

Waller Press ran 24-hours a day and to get as much experience as I could I decided to work a shift and a half, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., each day. I was already very familiar with offset printing and the instruction went quickly. The biggest differences were printing from a roll of newsprint rather than a stack of sheets, and the use of a folder, which stands at the front of a web press.

When pressmen finish printing with a sheet-fed press they’re left with several stacks of pages that still need to be collated then folded into the final newspaper. With a web press, all the webs (the paper unrolling through the various press units) are first pulled forward through the units, which prints the various pages on them. The printed webs continue and come together in the folder which cuts them into a tabloid height then folds the collected sheets and “chops” them into tabloid width. The 16-page paper that results is ready for the newsstand.

When I arrived back in Whitehorse, the Star’s new Goss press had been securely cemented onto the printshop floor by “press erector” Roy Wells of Chicago, and White Pass had delivered the first of what would be many shipments of 800-pound rolls of newsprint. Bob was excited to get going and on May 28, 1970, with special guest, Commissioner James Smith, in attendance and bottles of champagne cooling in the beer fridge, I and fellow pressman Horst Berlow, printed the first web-printed issue of the Whitehorse Star. It would prove to be a pivotal point in the newspaper’s history.

The Star’s circulation at the time was about 5,000, twice a week. At a top speed of 14,000 newspapers an hour the new press could print, and fold, an entire 16-page section in just over 20 minutes. It was overkill for sure in 1970, but with the new press, and later add-ons to it, the Whitehorse Star would have the printing ability to easily go to three times a week in 1972, and then daily in the future. This could never have happened with the old sheet-fed presses.

Well, the decades have drifted past and it’s with a mixture of sadness and pride I note that those original two Goss units (plus four more added, in line, over the years) printed the last issue of the Whitehorse Star this afternoon. When it’s all over, the Star can boast 124 years of recording Yukon history, and, down in the pressroom, Star pressman Don Campbell can brag the old Community press was still “pulling paper” at the age of 54. It will be the end, as they say, of a hell of a run!

By PAUL ERLAM