In an age where print newspapers are dwindling, Roger Hoffmann, the lead pressman of The Ellsworth American retired after a 27 year career bringing the paper into tangible reality. The job is immensely challenging, as the smallest mistake will be replicated tens of thousands of times by the presses, and cost the company valuable ink and paper.
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Before joining the American, Hoffmann worked on a shipboard guided missile system in the Navy, and then as a grocery store manager in Maine. But it was his mechanical aptitude as an expert bicycle repairman that caught the eye of the newspaper’s publisher. Since the American’s is the only press in the county, it prints several other local papers too.
Running the press is no easy task. The ink is guided onto the page by a stencil that is shaped to convey all the week’s news. However, if the plates are not aligned, or if the rolls of paper are too tense, the images, ads and text will be illegible. Lining everything up requires minute adjustments throughout the process.
Hoffmann said it takes a week of vacation to get his hands clean. The pressman’s manager said ads are more challenging to print these days, because young graphic designers who may “have never even held a newspaper,” create complicated images that are tough to execute on a press.
With decades of experience, Hoffmann is something of a press whisperer. Thing is, the taciturn 70-year-old sometimes has trouble passing on his knowledge to the younger pressmen. “That’s all stuff in his head that we have to somehow get out of there,” his manager said. “It’s not something that can be learned in a short amount of time.”