Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to you. Cool people did cool stuff
Speaker 1: the podcast. I gave up trying to come up with
Speaker 1: clever ways to introduce Like months ago, I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kildroy. Every week I tell you about rebels and
Speaker 1: weirdos and all the folks in history that I think
Speaker 1: are cool or at least interesting, like Caitlin Durante, who
Speaker 1: isn't in history? Is more like in the room right now,
Speaker 1: virtual room the present. Yeah. And I am a president, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I am a presidents Wow. What am I saying?
Speaker 1: I'm tired? No? Yeah, probably and soon we'll be president.
Speaker 1: How are you? Caitlin Durante? Who are your president? Caitlin Durante? Um?
Speaker 1: How am I? I'm good? I'm not spitting up blood still,
Speaker 1: so I've done a good job. I am. Did you
Speaker 1: also ask who are you? Yes? Okay, okay, us wanted
Speaker 1: to check you know, I'm a person. I'm just a
Speaker 1: person out here living in the world. Great, just the person.
Speaker 1: And we also have our Sophie with us, whose name
Speaker 1: is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, I'm okay, living life excellent. Ian
Speaker 1: as our audio engineer on Woman Rode or three Music.
Speaker 1: This week we're talking about tramp printers, and we're grouchy
Speaker 1: because they're in a union that's racist, even though a
Speaker 1: lot of them are fighting against that racism. And I
Speaker 1: don't know when they won, and someone will tell me,
Speaker 1: and I'll be happy that they tell me. Anyway, go
Speaker 1: listen to part one, both of you, Sophie and Kalin. Okay, bye, okay,
Speaker 1: see you and we are back okay, And now that
Speaker 1: you all listen to part one, we can talk about
Speaker 1: part two. So our apprentice has just become a journeyman
Speaker 1: and joined the International Typographical Union. The word journeyman and
Speaker 1: craft unions and gills and ship is literal. It's like
Speaker 1: wandering journey man, person who goes on journeys. And this
Speaker 1: was seen as an important part of becoming good at
Speaker 1: any given trade. How can you be the master of
Speaker 1: a trade if you haven't been in a ton of
Speaker 1: different shops in different places that do things differently, right,
Speaker 1: M And I find that really interesting, And it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I spent my twenties wandering. Of course I find this interesting.
Speaker 1: So printers were expected to travel. Some caught the bug
Speaker 1: and stayed traveling and became tramps. Some learned some skills
Speaker 1: and then settled down and joined the Home Guard, choosing
Speaker 1: a pension and stability over flexibility and freedom. What would
Speaker 1: you all pick? WHOA I would? I would probably journey
Speaker 1: for a while. Actually, I would probably just do what
Speaker 1: I do now, which is like journey some of the time,
Speaker 1: and then have a home base that I return to
Speaker 1: and stay. Yeah, you know, fair majority of the time.
Speaker 1: But then I'd be like, I'm bored, I need to
Speaker 1: go to Amsterdam and look at graffiti. Good call back,
Speaker 1: thank you. Yeah, you learned about that by going back
Speaker 1: and listening to part one, so I appreciate that. Yes,
Speaker 1: So I don't know if that's an option to just
Speaker 1: be part time journeyman, part time sitting around or I
Speaker 1: bet you could do it. And that is how comedy works, right,
Speaker 1: you finish your apprenticeship? Yes? What time did you start
Speaker 1: your apprenticeship? And how much piss was involved? I was,
Speaker 1: I was the age of twelve as well as this
Speaker 1: standard the comedy god a piss Yeah yeah, they used
Speaker 1: they used to clean the stage. Yeah, clean your mouth
Speaker 1: after bad jokes exactly. Yeah. Some people like here's a bar,
Speaker 1: so clean out your mouth, but comedians do it with
Speaker 1: their own pp and uh yeah, And so I was
Speaker 1: an apprentice for like probably three to four years and
Speaker 1: then um, then I became a Yeah I just want
Speaker 1: to comedy. Yeah it's good. Yeah, thanks, I'll be here
Speaker 1: all night. And where as I came in the side door. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the system has a lot of advantages, right this
Speaker 1: like journeyman system, the tramp system, all of that. If
Speaker 1: workers went on strike in one place, they could go
Speaker 1: find other jobs while they were on strike somewhere, and
Speaker 1: you know, you go wander away. And so strike funds
Speaker 1: don't need to be quite so large as they might
Speaker 1: need to be otherwise because the workers are as reliant
Speaker 1: upon the one individual income. It also meant that itinerant
Speaker 1: workers were always available to support any other labor action
Speaker 1: that needed bodies and it it's stitched together a social
Speaker 1: framework of the union as well, because there are always
Speaker 1: people in your shop, whether they traveled or not, with
Speaker 1: stories and news from elsewhere. Whether you travel or not, right,
Speaker 1: there's always going to be people showing up with news
Speaker 1: and showing up with different stories and different way that
Speaker 1: things that things are being done in different places. It
Speaker 1: also is kind of the main way that the home
Speaker 1: guard would get a chance to take days off because
Speaker 1: nineteenth century not famously good for working conditions. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And I'm very biased about this because I sort of
Speaker 1: spent my early twenties living a tramp activist life where
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of us would go and travel around
Speaker 1: to wherever any given political struggle that like needed support
Speaker 1: needed people show up, and then like would go wander on.
Speaker 1: And I think that inter weaving a traveling culture of
Speaker 1: tramps with folks who stay put and keep things consistent
Speaker 1: is a very good way to build a strong social
Speaker 1: movement as compared to like often it's presented this as
Speaker 1: this dichotomy, right where like, no, everyone must stay put
Speaker 1: and do hard activist work and never go anywhere, or
Speaker 1: all that matters is wandering around freely or whatever you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know I and and just to I like
Speaker 1: it because it's both individualistic and community minded at once, Like,
Speaker 1: because the printers are free spirited roamers, right, and they
Speaker 1: do whatever they want in a community built, community maintained
Speaker 1: system of solidarity that they participate in and uphold um.
Speaker 1: And I feel like we're always presented with this idea
Speaker 1: that like doing what's good for the individuals, like counter
Speaker 1: what's good for the community, and I just think it's
Speaker 1: a shitty dichotomy that we should avoid whenever possible. Um,
Speaker 1: that's my little philosophical aside. I agree, thanks, I can't
Speaker 1: be doing good work when I'm tired and hungry, Yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: and like going off and experiencing your best life and
Speaker 1: seeing the world and all that stuff, like, I mean whatever. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the way that people would see the world in
Speaker 1: this context is that they would tramp. This was not
Speaker 1: a like high class way of travel. Specifically, most of
Speaker 1: them rode the rails, most of them road freight trains
Speaker 1: in classic American hobo form, and but they travel however,
Speaker 1: they could. Some never left the big cities that they
Speaker 1: were in, and they would like tramp by streetcar from
Speaker 1: job to job. Uh. There was a whole crew called
Speaker 1: the Missouri River Pirates who rode rafts around the Missouri River,
Speaker 1: and they would like just catch catfish all day and
Speaker 1: be bobos and then like show up and print for
Speaker 1: a while, get a paycheck, go drink the paycheck, go
Speaker 1: back to catching catfish. Others caught rides on freighters and
Speaker 1: worked literally all over the world, not necessarily directly through
Speaker 1: the union, but operating the same kind of concept just
Speaker 1: showing up and being a printer because it is a
Speaker 1: skilled it is a complicated skilled job that isn't demand
Speaker 1: all over the world because there's one form of technology
Speaker 1: that is now being used all over the world about
Speaker 1: how to print. I started by like hyping out the
Speaker 1: list of places that American and Canadian tramp printers would
Speaker 1: end up. But I stopped because the only continent that
Speaker 1: I didn't include with Antarctica on the list. And they're
Speaker 1: a wild bunch. They sleep in barns, they sleep on
Speaker 1: the floor of the printer's office where they're working. They
Speaker 1: would go drink the pub dry, they'd smuggle booze into work,
Speaker 1: and they'd have like fancy, like weird tricks where they'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, this is my medicine, and they'd like
Speaker 1: have died all of their alcohol, like funny colors and
Speaker 1: ship okay, And they weren't a not all of them
Speaker 1: are the same. Some of them are totally sober, right,
Speaker 1: But they had this reputation that they overall earned of
Speaker 1: being rowdy and drunk and was still really good at
Speaker 1: their jobs. And they also had a reputation for being
Speaker 1: incredibly well read and literate for remembering the most odd
Speaker 1: and arcane texts, and they would like stay up late
Speaker 1: and hang out and swap stories not just of like
Speaker 1: I don't know, drinking and wandering, but also opinions about
Speaker 1: politics and poetry and literature and like all of the
Speaker 1: like fancy stuff that these poor people shouldn't be talking about, right,
Speaker 1: And they a lot of them spoke a ton of
Speaker 1: languages and would quote all kinds of like famous fancy people.
Speaker 1: They would like stay up late talking to the editor.
Speaker 1: They'd stay up late at the bar, or they'd stay
Speaker 1: up late in hobo jungles, which is um I literally
Speaker 1: no idea how common this type of terminology is, Like
Speaker 1: do you know what a hobo jungle is? No, when
Speaker 1: you're writing freight trains, which should just continue to self
Speaker 1: insert as much as possible in order so that everyone
Speaker 1: thinks I'm cool. My granddad wrote freight road freight trains
Speaker 1: in the Great Depression, and then I wrote freight trains
Speaker 1: in the early aughts. I wasn't very good at it.
Speaker 1: I have no idea how good my granddad was, and
Speaker 1: never talked to him about it before he died. But
Speaker 1: so hobo jungles still exist. It is the place where
Speaker 1: everyone sleeps and hangs out while they're waiting to catch
Speaker 1: a freight train. And they're basically like encampments, and they're
Speaker 1: often in little patches of trees next to train tracks,
Speaker 1: near the near the yard, near the train yard. And
Speaker 1: whoever is there. They might cook together. They might share
Speaker 1: food and drink and coffee and cigarettes. Um. They might
Speaker 1: tell terrible jokes. They also like getting people getting a
Speaker 1: fights and stuff too. It's not like perfect in utopian,
Speaker 1: but it's like interesting, right, and a lot of share camaraderie.
Speaker 1: M One historian Paul Fisher, talking about the tramp printers said,
Speaker 1: he said, mr to no man, expected no man to
Speaker 1: accord him the same title. Had he been more democratic,
Speaker 1: he would have been an anarchist because it wasn't necessarily
Speaker 1: a political position that they were like this. You know.
Speaker 1: John Edward Hicks, who was a tramp printer himself, said
Speaker 1: that a tramp printer didn't own anything, never expected to,
Speaker 1: and wouldn't have known what to do with it if
Speaker 1: he had. Like there's one story I read about a
Speaker 1: tramp printer like wins a bar in a card game
Speaker 1: against the bar owner, and so then he just makes
Speaker 1: all them drinks free for everyone all night, and then
Speaker 1: he gives the bar back to the bar owner because
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, I don't want to bar fucking tramp,
Speaker 1: I want to travel. UM. I like that story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the only tools they traveled with was a Union card,
Speaker 1: the card the travelers card that said I'm in good
Speaker 1: standing with the Union, I pay my dues, I know
Speaker 1: how to print UM, a makeup rule, which is like
Speaker 1: a tiny little metal ruler that they used to separate
Speaker 1: lines of type and line gauges of various lengths. These
Speaker 1: were like the personal tools that they carried. Everything else
Speaker 1: is supplied at the job. They also brought with them quadrats,
Speaker 1: which are little squared pieces of type that are used
Speaker 1: for spacing, and each one had a mark called a
Speaker 1: nick on one side, and they would basically gamble. Is
Speaker 1: just it's basically hot dice like hobos today and by
Speaker 1: today I mean twenty years go. And I was hanging
Speaker 1: out moral folks who did this. I would play a
Speaker 1: game called hot dice all the time. We just have
Speaker 1: six sided dice and you play this nonsensical game. And
Speaker 1: so the tramp printers would roll their quads, and whoever
Speaker 1: had most of their quads land nick side up would win.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they'd win like who's buying the beer later? You know?
Speaker 1: Sometimes it was like who gets the nice or the
Speaker 1: loser buys the beer? And sometimes would be like who
Speaker 1: gets the nice job in the office today and who
Speaker 1: gets the shitty job? I feel like this is like
Speaker 1: kind of their rock paper scissors, right. They were like,
Speaker 1: all right, who has the piss job and who has
Speaker 1: just got a clean with piss today? Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: was the winner because that was the best job. And
Speaker 1: a journalist at the time referred to them as broke
Speaker 1: poets with no coins but scraps of poetry in their pockets,
Speaker 1: which they would get drunk and recite. Franklin M. White,
Speaker 1: a printer, said that they quote sprinkled knowledge and literacy
Speaker 1: as enthusiastically as Johnny spread his apple seed. I have
Speaker 1: met aunt printers who could recite Shakespeare, Wild Chaucer, Gibbon,
Speaker 1: and then et cetera. A bunch of other names I
Speaker 1: actually don't even recognize because I don't know all the
Speaker 1: nineteen century names. And okay, what have you ever played
Speaker 1: dungeons and dragons? I have not Okay, well it sounds
Speaker 1: like something I would do, but I haven't, Sophie. Yes,
Speaker 1: I would say that these are basically they're they're dungeons
Speaker 1: and dragons, bards. There's a class in Paddington to format
Speaker 1: for Caitlin. Okay, so there's a bear in Paddington and
Speaker 1: there's some movies based on him, and probably in the
Speaker 1: first one he's mostly in one place. In the second
Speaker 1: when he travels around, I'm like, surely, I mean there, look,
Speaker 1: so it works with home alone and a bunch of
Speaker 1: others and five third act of Paddington two takes place
Speaker 1: on a steam train. Alright, yeah, traveling circus train if
Speaker 1: you will. And um, there's and and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of hijinks. All right. Is there one character who travels
Speaker 1: all the time and reads poetry? Um? Can we make
Speaker 1: one up? Yes, that would be Paddington's cousin, Jobbo, the hobo.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, Baddington is better and so yeah,
Speaker 1: that's yes. So it's just like Baddington from Paddington too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the best way to for everyone out there to understand.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Some bars they would show up and they'd
Speaker 1: pull out their measuring stick, Okay, they pull out their
Speaker 1: their measuring stick, they put it on the bar, and
Speaker 1: the bar keep would let them a stranger open a
Speaker 1: tab because they were also known for paying their fucking tab.
Speaker 1: They were good for it. And there was like a
Speaker 1: pool hall in Chicago called Jack O'Brien's that let tramps
Speaker 1: sleep on the pool tables. I know, that's funny. Get
Speaker 1: you get the jokes. I don't get. Brian of the
Speaker 1: Daily Zeyegeist, Oh yeah, is that guy's pool table? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: another vampire who Actually I don't know the means of
Speaker 1: Jack's immortality. Vampism is always the first one that comes
Speaker 1: to mind. It works, I get it. He's a vampire. Sure, vampire,
Speaker 1: sure yeah. And let hobos tramp printers sleep on the
Speaker 1: pool tables or under the pool tables if people wanted
Speaker 1: to play um. I like the idea of going into
Speaker 1: the pool hall and like someone's like fine, and it's
Speaker 1: like someone who's better at a job than I'll ever
Speaker 1: be at mine is just sleeping on the pool table,
Speaker 1: and it's like fine, and it just starts sleeping underneath
Speaker 1: the pool table, like playpool. Pretty cool, Like all good tramps, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: They did lots of crime. M yes, now we're talking.
Speaker 1: Some of it was printing related crime, specifically counterfeiting with
Speaker 1: something that I was gonna say like plagiarism or probably
Speaker 1: that too. To be honest, there's a lot of like
Speaker 1: ways that people made money in early printing, just by
Speaker 1: being like, oh, yeah, no, I'm authorized to sell this
Speaker 1: best selling book by Twilight from me Margaret I wrote it,
Speaker 1: or Lord, that's my book for you. It's about vom pors.
Speaker 1: So anyway, okay, So they played plagiarized money m hmm.
Speaker 1: And other times they just did regular crime, like stealing
Speaker 1: stuff to sell it, or pretending they were priests and
Speaker 1: giving speeches and then passing the hat. It was another
Speaker 1: way that they would make money. One tramp printer, actually
Speaker 1: several tramp printers did this, but one tramp printer whose
Speaker 1: name I got did this. When tramp printer was Magnificent
Speaker 1: Maureen of the Flying Trapeeze. Because eventually she quit typeset
Speaker 1: into join the circus. There was a legendary king of
Speaker 1: the tramp printers, Peter bartlet Lee, and legendary in this
Speaker 1: way that like traveling cultures, and I think like lots
Speaker 1: of subcultures do this where someone's like legendary only within
Speaker 1: this circle, right, Like I doubt this was a household
Speaker 1: name to any degree, but at any you know, jungle
Speaker 1: or whatever, you probably knew people who had knew of
Speaker 1: Peter bartlet Lee, who wore a tailcoat and a wide
Speaker 1: brimmed hat. Who would want who wandered the country looking
Speaker 1: for his lost wife because he had served in the
Speaker 1: Union Army and he came home to find no trace
Speaker 1: of his wife. He probably sucked and she just took off,
Speaker 1: but whatever, and he spent the rest of his life
Speaker 1: wandering before he eid in Nebraska, buried under a stone
Speaker 1: that reads and thus we die still searching. Oh that's sad,
Speaker 1: you know. Another tramp printer was the Duke of Wellington.
Speaker 1: He spent the nineteen twenties trampion in Arizona. He was
Speaker 1: like the youngest son of some estate in England, right
Speaker 1: called Wellington's, and he was the youngest son. So imagine
Speaker 1: his surprise when basically like all of his older brothers
Speaker 1: and his dad die and they like call him home
Speaker 1: and like are like, you gotta go be the Duke
Speaker 1: of Wellington now. So it goes home and the estates
Speaker 1: in terrible shape. And so we kind of just like
Speaker 1: Bucks off right back to the US to keep tramp
Speaker 1: printing because he's like this, I like it more. And
Speaker 1: then there were a whole bunch of other like fake
Speaker 1: nobility around as well, like people being like I'm the
Speaker 1: Prince of Wales or whatever, you know, just because they're
Speaker 1: like whatever. Okay, Yeah, that's the Sophie taking a hard
Speaker 1: stance against the Prince of Wales. Yeah, what do you
Speaker 1: have against Wales? Nothing? I have the fact that they
Speaker 1: have to have a prince that isn't actually from Whales,
Speaker 1: that is the Prince of Wales that is now the
Speaker 1: King of England named Um and he's despicable, and I'm done.
Speaker 1: But I got it. It felt good. It felt really good.
Speaker 1: You know who else is lying is advertized, you know
Speaker 1: who has a monetary incentive to lie, but obviously isn't
Speaker 1: lying to you, dear listener. It's the podcast, the products
Speaker 1: and services that support this podcast. And we are back
Speaker 1: and we're talking about how Margaret forgot that the King
Speaker 1: of England was the Prince of Wales. You forgot, but
Speaker 1: I didn't even know in the first place. I don't
Speaker 1: understand and appreciate people are or where they're from. So well,
Speaker 1: do you want to hear about Muskogee Red, Yeah, I do. Well.
Speaker 1: He was legendary in that same hobo way where you're
Speaker 1: like legendary only amongst the tramps. He was. He was
Speaker 1: legendary for just being an old hobo who went everywhere,
Speaker 1: did everything, always drunk spent. People were like, he's worked
Speaker 1: in every printer's office in the West, and he's been
Speaker 1: in every jail in the West. One time, apparently he
Speaker 1: burned down the jail he was in because he didn't
Speaker 1: want to be in it anymore. Oh yeah, And another
Speaker 1: time someone thought they found him dead, and a paper
Speaker 1: he had worked on before wrote a touching obituary about
Speaker 1: how he'd been found dead with half a bottle of
Speaker 1: whiskey because they really liked him, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: poor guy died, we'll write this obituary. Muskogee read shows
Speaker 1: up whole in the copy of the obituary and he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, this is touching, but I'm clearly not dead
Speaker 1: and you should have known it wasn't me because the
Speaker 1: bottle was only half empty. Mm hmmm, because he because
Speaker 1: he drank a lot. I know exactly. Um I love
Speaker 1: that like so many just different like things are, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm a person's legendary because they can consume toxins, so
Speaker 1: many toxins. I've never seen that person without toxins. That's
Speaker 1: the legacy I want to leave behind. Yeah, which toxin
Speaker 1: you know? I'm I'm partial to whiskey myself. Um, I
Speaker 1: like a good tequila as well. Yeah, and don't forget
Speaker 1: about white claws, the most refreshing toxin of them all.
Speaker 1: White glads are unfair and how not like alcohol they are.
Speaker 1: It's actually like, yeah, I know so, m hmm. The
Speaker 1: I t U wasn't the only union with trump workers.
Speaker 1: This whole concept, the journeyman system and also like even
Speaker 1: just like the travelers card where people could go around
Speaker 1: and work in any union shop they wanted, was actually
Speaker 1: like fairly common throughout the nineteenth century. I start reading
Speaker 1: this whole book that's about why that's bad, Um, because
Speaker 1: it's something something Marxism, something, something undermining solidarity in the
Speaker 1: working class, something something, And I was really annoyed buy it,
Speaker 1: so I didn't read it. That doesn't really make me
Speaker 1: sound like a very good, trustworthy source. I read departs
Speaker 1: about it about the international typographer typographical union. Okay, that's important,
Speaker 1: but a lot of different unions would have this kind
Speaker 1: of system. The Cigar Makers Union was another notoriously tramp
Speaker 1: heavy union, and it's also a strong union that a
Speaker 1: lot of union leaders came out of. Which is my
Speaker 1: counter argument of that book that I can't really argue
Speaker 1: against because I didn't finish, is that, yeah, Samuel Gompers
Speaker 1: came out of the Cigar Makers Union, and like, he's
Speaker 1: a union leader guy. But the I t was one
Speaker 1: of the most itinerant work unions in the eighties, something
Speaker 1: like eight thousand printers. Any given year, we're tramping around
Speaker 1: by two more than six of the union took a
Speaker 1: traveling card. So eighteen thousand people that year were like
Speaker 1: tramp printers because there's just so much print work available, Okay,
Speaker 1: And so it's also worth pointing out as far as
Speaker 1: I can tell, and this number would fluctuate constantly, but
Speaker 1: most of the time in the nineteenth century, it seems
Speaker 1: like the I t U was doing about of the
Speaker 1: paid printing in the US. So this wasn't like all
Speaker 1: of the printing, and I think that that even I'm
Speaker 1: sure they wanted to be wider than that. I'm glad
Speaker 1: they didn't get wider than that because they were fucking racist, right.
Speaker 1: And but yeah, so this wasn't like all printers, right,
Speaker 1: this wasn't like the thing that every printer was doing. However,
Speaker 1: it was a specific system, um that should have been
Speaker 1: cooler than it was. So are they going to like
Speaker 1: just work get like a new They tramp for a bit,
Speaker 1: they show up in town, and then what do they do.
Speaker 1: They go to a newspaper, They go to like a
Speaker 1: publishing house for like terature, like what what kind of
Speaker 1: So I think basically anywhere, but I think in the
Speaker 1: newspapers were like where it was in the most in
Speaker 1: demand because it was like the fastest turnaround. It was
Speaker 1: like every day you're doing a new thing. There actually
Speaker 1: used to be more newspapers per city than there are now. Hm.
Speaker 1: And because it was like so easy to do. And
Speaker 1: what you would do is you have your traveler's card,
Speaker 1: which you actually have to apply for. It's not just
Speaker 1: like once you're in the Union you can just wander
Speaker 1: totally freely. When you're like, hey, I want to travel,
Speaker 1: they're like okay. And I don't know whether they like
Speaker 1: limited per year basically trying to make sure that there's
Speaker 1: enough work for everyone or what. But then you show
Speaker 1: up a town, you go to a print shop, and
Speaker 1: the print shops boss has nothing to do with the
Speaker 1: hiring because it's a closed shop and the union has
Speaker 1: controls it, and they're like, look, as long as we
Speaker 1: get the job done, we control who prints here. And
Speaker 1: it helped that they were all really fucking good at
Speaker 1: what they do it right, and they were like faster
Speaker 1: than most other people and stuff. And so you go
Speaker 1: and then you put it's called a sub board for
Speaker 1: a substitute, and you put your light card in or whatever,
Speaker 1: you put your name down, and then they basically say like, okay,
Speaker 1: we have we have extra work for this many people today,
Speaker 1: or like someone who's in the home guards like sick,
Speaker 1: I would love to take a day off, like I'm
Speaker 1: going home, and tramp printers would work. Um, you were
Speaker 1: allowed to work for up to a month at a
Speaker 1: place without If you wanted to work more than a month,
Speaker 1: I believe you had to apply to be like okay,
Speaker 1: I want to be a regular printer here. Got it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they're just like temping, they're just like freelancing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's yeah, it's kind of like the traveling
Speaker 1: nurse thing that happens in some ways because things that
Speaker 1: people always need health care and printed propaganda or whatever.
Speaker 1: Mass media the main mass media at the time. So
Speaker 1: for a while, about the mid eight hundreds, about half
Speaker 1: the time up centers in the US were women. Out
Speaker 1: West in particular, the old rules didn't apply and more
Speaker 1: women ran papers or edited. More than two hundred papers
Speaker 1: out West in the second half of the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: were run by women. And the book I'm drawing from
Speaker 1: here the most is tramp Printers by Charles Overbeck that
Speaker 1: I mentioned last episode to quote from tramp Printers about
Speaker 1: women editing papers out west. The female editors of the
Speaker 1: West varied from Katherine bag a thirteen year old publisher
Speaker 1: of The Bug Hunter in Tombstone, Arizona, to Renown suffrageteen
Speaker 1: year old. Yeah. Pretty, what was it The Bug Hunter?
Speaker 1: I think that basically, it's like when I had a
Speaker 1: zine when I was a teenager, got it okay? You know,
Speaker 1: So so Catherine Bag ran The Bug Hunter, and I
Speaker 1: think it was like, probably like these are the bugs
Speaker 1: I found, you know. I love that. I know, sorry
Speaker 1: to interrupt, No, no, no, I mean I included his
Speaker 1: quote because I like that part so much to renown
Speaker 1: suffragist Abigail Scott Dunaway in Oregon, you know. So it's
Speaker 1: like ran the gamut of um of women printing. There
Speaker 1: was also a couple of women's shops. The Bohemian Women's
Speaker 1: Publishing Company of Chicago is all women. They ran a
Speaker 1: popular weekly and employed fifteen women and girls. And they
Speaker 1: had all women's shops, probably because men were treating them
Speaker 1: like garbage and it's the piss that they were cleaning
Speaker 1: things with. Yeah, but you have to be respectful of
Speaker 1: the piss, you understand anyway. Sorry, Yeah, that was bad analogy. No, No,
Speaker 1: I'm made it worse. But all things surely come to
Speaker 1: an end. Not this episode yet, but the era that
Speaker 1: we're talking about. So you've got the tramp printing thing
Speaker 1: where everyone is sitting type by hand all day and
Speaker 1: drinking and reciting poetry all night and writing freight trains
Speaker 1: and whatever. And they've been working the same machines that
Speaker 1: have been around since Guttenberg and then hot metal type
Speaker 1: setting came around. The most amos and long lasting of
Speaker 1: these machines is the line of line of type machines
Speaker 1: which were invented in eighty four, which does several lines
Speaker 1: of type thus lino type at a time, and the
Speaker 1: operator picks away at a typewriter basically which assembles metal
Speaker 1: forms which are then cast into lines of type. Thus
Speaker 1: hot metal typesighting and line of types are the main
Speaker 1: things that people use until the nineteen seventies had like
Speaker 1: literally in the in the nineteen sixties, some places were
Speaker 1: still using eighty year old machines because once again, this
Speaker 1: technology didn't change too fundamentally. For basically, until computers came
Speaker 1: around and the line of type machine killed a lot
Speaker 1: of jobs, hand type setting was was over, but it
Speaker 1: didn't kill the union or the culture. And I at
Speaker 1: this point the union is not being evil. And the
Speaker 1: reason it didn't kill the the union is because these
Speaker 1: machines are fucking monstrous. The line of type machines have
Speaker 1: se moving parts. As one printer Andrew Steve's put it quote,
Speaker 1: while no one action is particularly complex in isolation, their
Speaker 1: combination and this worrying, chattering, thirty pound hulk of moving
Speaker 1: parts with its pot of molten metal slashing around at
Speaker 1: five fifty degrees fahrenheit, you can be downright intimidating at
Speaker 1: first glance or on second or third m hmm, I'll
Speaker 1: say yeah, yeah, So the union printers learned how to
Speaker 1: use them faster than inexperienced workers were able to. Basically like,
Speaker 1: as soon as these things are showing in the shop,
Speaker 1: the union printers were like, all right, it's ours. And
Speaker 1: more importantly than learning how to use them, they learned
Speaker 1: to fix them, which the bosses definitely did not know
Speaker 1: how to do. And since printing was even more centralized
Speaker 1: that before, the workers came out of it with more
Speaker 1: power than before. So sorry, bosses. Folks who didn't want
Speaker 1: or couldn't learn the new machines often headed west, where
Speaker 1: Linotype took decades to reach. But change was inevitable, and
Speaker 1: a ton of printers just got real salty and we're
Speaker 1: like fun all this and quit printing, joined the circus,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Yeah, totally. Circus is always hiring. Apparently, always
Speaker 1: seem very easy in stories to run away and join
Speaker 1: the circus, but always like as a kid, I was like,
Speaker 1: isn't involved, like being really good at something? Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have to be like an acrobat, yeah or something. I
Speaker 1: was referring to that one specific but Also, yeah, I'm like,
Speaker 1: how can you just like you've got to have skills
Speaker 1: taming lions others. I yeah, I don't know clowning anyway,
Speaker 1: No matter how far the tramp printers went ran out West,
Speaker 1: by the time of the Great Depression, line of type
Speaker 1: machines were ubiquitous, and the first golden age of the
Speaker 1: tramp printer was over. More or less, The new printers,
Speaker 1: even the tramps, were less wild and less driven by
Speaker 1: wander overall, but the line of type machine printer wages
Speaker 1: went up dramatically because profits went up at the shops,
Speaker 1: the machines were stored in less dingy parts of the building,
Speaker 1: and basically the union printer's life got better. Life expectancy
Speaker 1: went up again, which is from forty one too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't have the next number, but like yeah, like, um,
Speaker 1: you know, incremental change positive. As long as you can
Speaker 1: get we could just get life expectancy to like pace
Speaker 1: our aging. That would work well for me. And I
Speaker 1: think this is kind of interesting to me because like
Speaker 1: most of the time unions, you don't hear about unions
Speaker 1: adapting to new technology incredibly well, you know, and like
Speaker 1: one day I'm gonna do an episode about the Luddites,
Speaker 1: who weren't actually mad at the concept of technology. They
Speaker 1: were mad at the concept of ending their way of
Speaker 1: life that provided them the food that they ate. M
Speaker 1: you know. But but the Union conquered this new technology,
Speaker 1: which is funny because like the bosses were like, like, hey,
Speaker 1: this will finally break the Union, and it didn't, and
Speaker 1: partly because it was a giant machine with a pot
Speaker 1: full of five fifty degree molton lead. If you ran
Speaker 1: them at speed for too long, the melt pot could
Speaker 1: overheat and a bunch of molten metal would shoot out
Speaker 1: at the operator. And one printer said, quote, it didn't
Speaker 1: burn you, it cooked you. That's what they called a squirt.
Speaker 1: Oh sexy, fascinating. Yeah, damn h. But now I want
Speaker 1: to talk about two influential tramp printers. Both are actually
Speaker 1: pretty cool stamp of they get the stamp of cool.
Speaker 1: People did cool stuff in messy ways. People are gonna
Speaker 1: be like, why did you advocate for such anyway? Whatever?
Speaker 1: Complicated people, everyone's complicated famous tramps. One's named Horace Greeley.
Speaker 1: Horace Greeley was a tramp printer. There's a whole town's
Speaker 1: named after him. While there's one town at least it's
Speaker 1: called Greeley, Colorado, Okay, Horace Greeley, a poor as hell.
Speaker 1: And then as a as a scrawny teenager, maybe thirteen,
Speaker 1: maybe fifteen, depending on which book you read, he went
Speaker 1: off to become a printer. He spent twelve years as
Speaker 1: a tramp printer in the mid Atlantic, and then he
Speaker 1: moved to New York City. He founded the New York Tribune,
Speaker 1: which was the widest circulating paper in the country. He
Speaker 1: became a politician at one point, he was a congressman. Actually,
Speaker 1: at one point he ran for president loss, but he
Speaker 1: helped found and possibly named the Republican Party. So it's
Speaker 1: completely possible that the guy who named the Republican Party
Speaker 1: was a well he's a socialist. I'll get to that part, socialist, vegetarian. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the Republican Party was the less offensive party at the time, right,
Speaker 1: It's important understand about mid nineteenth century, and he was
Speaker 1: a radical Republican, which was the group that wanted an
Speaker 1: immediate end to slavery, in contrast with moderate Republicans like Lincoln,
Speaker 1: who were like, well, we'll get there. And he fought
Speaker 1: against the Republicans embracing the anti Catholic, anti immigrant, no
Speaker 1: nothings into the party. He might have coined the fray
Speaker 1: is go West young man, But the Internet likes to
Speaker 1: argue about that. He was into like non communist socialism
Speaker 1: of the Charles Fourier utopian socialist variety that I don't
Speaker 1: totally understand, so I'm not going to try and explain
Speaker 1: right now. I was gonna say what, Yeah, I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: he was a socialist, but not in a way that
Speaker 1: makes but not in a like Marxist way. Socialism was
Speaker 1: a lot more diverse in it, well, is a lot
Speaker 1: more diverse and interesting than people presented as um and
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century that was like more open people understood.
Speaker 1: Socialism is a much more complicated field, got it. He
Speaker 1: was a universalist, which is like a Christian who believes
Speaker 1: everyone gets into heaven and is they tend to be
Speaker 1: the people who are like less assholes about it. M hmm.
Speaker 1: He was also like basically a vegan straight edge. He
Speaker 1: followed it. I mean, I don't know, but he probably
Speaker 1: ate eggs and ship but he followed a diet of
Speaker 1: no meat, no alcohol, no caffeine, no tobacco. One downside
Speaker 1: of him he's using to prohibition. I'm like, not drinking rules,
Speaker 1: but telling another people they can't drink sucks mm hmm.
Speaker 1: But he actually politically worked against the people the parties
Speaker 1: of prohibition, like the know nothings, So he whatever, he
Speaker 1: seemed all right some ways. He was very actively feminist,
Speaker 1: although in some ways of course he fell flat on that.
Speaker 1: But he gave a lot of speeches about the importance
Speaker 1: of like including women in labor unions and like all
Speaker 1: of this kind of stuff. At one point, asshole racist
Speaker 1: New Yorkers, mostly Irish immigrants I think, had a race
Speaker 1: riot in the eighteen sixty three in response to the
Speaker 1: Civil War, and they were like, we're going to go
Speaker 1: get Greeley because he's a you know, anti slavery guy,
Speaker 1: and so they like were stormed his offices and most
Speaker 1: of the other editors and ship who were being called
Speaker 1: to be killed fled the city. But really was like,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to leave the city. And what
Speaker 1: he did is he's just like put on a hat
Speaker 1: and walked out of his office and walked through the
Speaker 1: crowd and no one recognized him. Huh. And yeah, there's
Speaker 1: all these statues of him around and like a lot
Speaker 1: of history. Things that are like from like a pro
Speaker 1: America point of view were at him as like goodhearted
Speaker 1: but naive, which I think means he was a socialist
Speaker 1: and we don't know how to handle that because he's
Speaker 1: very important to us history, is like an incredibly important
Speaker 1: figure in US history, and so he was naive and
Speaker 1: that he didn't follow whatever system. He was the first
Speaker 1: president of the New York Typographical Union. He wrote editorial
Speaker 1: and support of women printers. He wasn't perfect. He did
Speaker 1: a bunch of ship that wasn't great. He opposed divorce
Speaker 1: reform and women's suffrage. Interesting guy or as greeling tramp printer.
Speaker 1: I love that it's possible. The Republican Party was named
Speaker 1: by a sober vegetarian socialist hobo. Yeah, pretty cool. And
Speaker 1: if you want a cool lifestyle like sober socialist hobo,
Speaker 1: you can buy a cool lifestyle with lifestyle products like
Speaker 1: car heart. He love was work car cards. Is it true?
Speaker 1: That part is true? But I'm really not actually trying
Speaker 1: to This isn't a free ad for car rds. This
Speaker 1: is me trying to make a joke. Please don't go
Speaker 1: out and buy car rards because of this. But instead
Speaker 1: listen to these ads or don't. You can press the
Speaker 1: fast forward button. I don't care. We are back. How
Speaker 1: did that have? Haitlyn? Any good ads in there for you?
Speaker 1: What were you most excited about? I well, let me
Speaker 1: tell you what I during that ad break, I logged
Speaker 1: onto carhart dot com. I bought myself a jacket. I
Speaker 1: got myself some some work pants, nice beanie, a beanie,
Speaker 1: some gloves, all kinds, all manner of items. For a while,
Speaker 1: I actually still think there's a cool outfit. But for
Speaker 1: a while, the the um krusty traveler women's outfit of
Speaker 1: choice was you take a pair of car Heart overalls
Speaker 1: and you cut you cut it into a mini skirt
Speaker 1: and re set it into a mini skirts. Yeah it's yeah,
Speaker 1: I know it rules. Yeah, I'm like cool people do
Speaker 1: cool stuff that. Okay, thank you so much. A whole
Speaker 1: episode on it, please and thank you. I would. I mean,
Speaker 1: I really want to At some point, someone's going to
Speaker 1: have to let me do an art exhibit, some fucking
Speaker 1: fancy gallery, and I want to like find all my
Speaker 1: crusty friends and get all of their clothes and like
Speaker 1: put them up and like pressed between glass of all
Speaker 1: the weird sewing that everyone does. Awes. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you have a fancy gallery, reach out to Margaret. Thank you.
Speaker 1: So you know who else was hobo? This isn't an
Speaker 1: ad break. This is me trying to get back into
Speaker 1: the script. Tell me the father of American literature, Samuel
Speaker 1: Clemens a k A. Mark Twain. Oh hell yeah, that
Speaker 1: motherfucker well so. And actually I want to know because,
Speaker 1: like I, I had always heard like kind of mixed
Speaker 1: reviews on this guy. Right, Oh, I know nothing besides
Speaker 1: he wrote I'm pretty sure I wrote the screenplay for
Speaker 1: Hawk Finn starring Elijah Wood. Yeah, yeah, he was the
Speaker 1: screenplay guy. He's from nineteen nineteen nineties. Um, I don't
Speaker 1: know when that movie came out. The actually the ninties, exactly,
Speaker 1: the fifteen forty one, I believe. Okay, Yeah, so Mark
Speaker 1: fucking Twain, he was a tramp printer and he is interesting.
Speaker 1: Like Greeley, There's still more I want to understand about him.
Speaker 1: And these ones got kind of the skim treatment. I
Speaker 1: didn't go out and read autobiography biographies about these people.
Speaker 1: I read like a ton of articles about them and
Speaker 1: tried to cross reference and try and figure out what's true,
Speaker 1: but I didn't like really deep dive them. He's very
Speaker 1: American in his politics, but he basically gets more and
Speaker 1: more interesting and radical and leftist as he get older.
Speaker 1: He has this quote, there's no good government at all,
Speaker 1: and none is possible. Um, And that started in a
Speaker 1: sort of like kind of American libertarian is kind of
Speaker 1: way of like a free markets and government leave everyone
Speaker 1: alone whatever. But he was once again in it's kind
Speaker 1: of weird socialist e or confusing way. And I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to call him a socialist specifically. He was like
Speaker 1: a markets guy for a lot of his life, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't a capitalism guy. Um. He didn't like welfare,
Speaker 1: but he also hated plutocrats and monopolies and capitalists. And
Speaker 1: he started off all stars and stripes America, rah rah rah,
Speaker 1: and said lots of not great stuff about a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff. He also once fought for the Confederacy for
Speaker 1: three weeks, but he did dessert, and I think fighting
Speaker 1: for three weeks and deserting was like kind of like
Speaker 1: a cake or like a pie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 1: was the pastry chef and he poisoned them all. Now
Speaker 1: he Yeah, so it's like during the Confederacy. If he
Speaker 1: lived in the South and were white and a man,
Speaker 1: you were like expected to fight for the Confederacy or
Speaker 1: they'd like burn everything you've ever loved mm hmmm, including
Speaker 1: possibly you. And so he fought for three weeks and
Speaker 1: then he was like this and he uh, he fled
Speaker 1: to I think to Nevada and whatever. He ended up
Speaker 1: anti imperialist and anti racist near the end of his life,
Speaker 1: and he would talk about how the Emancipation Proclamation set
Speaker 1: the black man free and the white man too, because
Speaker 1: basically how evil white people were being as a result
Speaker 1: of um the system of slavery. He was a tramp
Speaker 1: printer before he was a riverboat pilot. When he was
Speaker 1: a tramp printer, one time he decided to play a
Speaker 1: prank on another tramp printer. So he got, I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've done this kind of prank before, Caitlin, Sophie, everyone's
Speaker 1: done this prank. You go get a whole lass, real
Speaker 1: human skeleton, and you put it in the guy's bed
Speaker 1: while he's sleeping, so then he wait, when he wakes up,
Speaker 1: he's sleeping next to or possibly Cuddlina realized yesterday to Jamie. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that guy who is actually Jamie Lost so aggressive.
Speaker 1: First of all, you also like, just you have a
Speaker 1: real human scut I mean, there's just so many Yeah,
Speaker 1: because he's a ho, he's a tramp. So he's clearly
Speaker 1: not going to his own closet of skeletons. He clearly
Speaker 1: went to someone else's closet. Skeleton's probably a graveyard, went
Speaker 1: and got a skeleton. Can you imagine if he's just
Speaker 1: drunk and he's like, I got an idea, this is
Speaker 1: this is my plan. Guys are guys, this will be hilarious. Yes,
Speaker 1: And then so the guy wakes up next to a
Speaker 1: skeleton and he's like, and he goes and he sells
Speaker 1: the skeleton for seven dollars and he gets good and
Speaker 1: drunk off of it. Nice jokes on you. Samuel Clemens,
Speaker 1: near the end of his life, he gets more and
Speaker 1: more radical. He spent his last days doing ship like
Speaker 1: writing pamphlets against various imperialists in his usual sarcastic tone.
Speaker 1: In his essay The Conquest of the Philippines, Twain writes
Speaker 1: about a time when you a soldier's massa, heard some
Speaker 1: moros people in the Philippines by firing down on them
Speaker 1: from the ring of an extinct volcano, which is a
Speaker 1: thing that happened that he was responding to. Quote. The
Speaker 1: enemy numbered six hundred, including women and children. We abolished
Speaker 1: them utterly, leaving not only not even a baby alive
Speaker 1: to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the
Speaker 1: greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers
Speaker 1: of the United States. Headline death list is now nine hundred.
Speaker 1: I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now.
Speaker 1: That's sarcasm. See that's it's different than actually might be sardonic.
Speaker 1: Sardonic sarcasm. What's the difference? We don't actually want to know,
Speaker 1: don't Yeah, tell the person sitting next to you, say,
Speaker 1: Margaret is a fool. She does not know the difference
Speaker 1: between sarcasm and sardonatry. Sar dolla tree, which is like
Speaker 1: idola idolatry, only about the sardonic god. Kayla gerant me
Speaker 1: sardonic God. Thank you, Yeah, that sounds like an earnest
Speaker 1: Thanks yeah, sorry, Iman, thanks okay, good. I was a
Speaker 1: little concerned. Samuel Clements did more than just right against imperialism.
Speaker 1: He spent years as the vice president of the American
Speaker 1: Anti Imperialist League. Once he got money from his writing,
Speaker 1: he used it to pay for several black people's education.
Speaker 1: He was friends with Helen Keller, the radical Socialist in
Speaker 1: IWW member who was also a disability rights icon mm
Speaker 1: hmm for sixteen years. By the early twentieth century, he
Speaker 1: left the Republican Party to do his own weird thing
Speaker 1: and referred to both Republicans and the Democrats as insane
Speaker 1: and that each party was incapable. Each party was able
Speaker 1: to understand that the other party was fucked up, but
Speaker 1: neither party could see that they were sucked up, which
Speaker 1: isn't wrong, And I think this is still like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he supported the Revolution of nineteen Basically, I was like
Speaker 1: kind of expecting because like the stuff I've heard is
Speaker 1: that he the way he handles race is one very
Speaker 1: different from how people would try and handle race now,
Speaker 1: and to a lot of it was like not great, right,
Speaker 1: and a lot of his writing and so I was
Speaker 1: like aware of a lot of that stuff, and I
Speaker 1: wasn't aware of this other stuff, and so I started
Speaker 1: doing this research about him. He supported the Revolution of
Speaker 1: nineteen o five in Russia, like wholeheartedly, especially the willingness
Speaker 1: to do violence against the czar. He had no time
Speaker 1: for liberal half measures. He wrote, quote, what is the
Speaker 1: Czar of Russia but a house of fire in the
Speaker 1: midst of a city of eighty millions of inhabitants. Yet
Speaker 1: instead of extinguishing him together with his nest and system,
Speaker 1: the liberation parties are all anxious to merely cool him
Speaker 1: down a little and keep him. It seems to me
Speaker 1: that this is illogical, idiotic. In fact, suppose you had
Speaker 1: this granite hearted, bloody drawed maniac of Russia loosen your house,
Speaker 1: chasing the helpless women and little children your own, what
Speaker 1: would you do with him? Supposing you had a shotgun? Well,
Speaker 1: he has loosened your house, Russia, and with your shotgun
Speaker 1: in hand, you stand thinking up ways of trying to
Speaker 1: modify him. When we consider not that not even the
Speaker 1: most responsible English monarch ever yielded back a single public
Speaker 1: right until it was wrenched from them by bloody violence.
Speaker 1: Is it rational to suppose that gentler methods can win
Speaker 1: privileges in Russia? Mhm? And then final Mark Twain quote
Speaker 1: I'm gonna use for this is in two he said,
Speaker 1: let us abolish policeman who carry clubs and revolvers and
Speaker 1: put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth
Speaker 1: with poems on spring and love. So wow, I kind
Speaker 1: of like him, and he was a tramp printer. And
Speaker 1: then later at one point another writer, William Dean Howells
Speaker 1: asked Mark Twain, being like, how should I write about
Speaker 1: tramp printers? And Mark Twain wrote back, hands off incomprehensible
Speaker 1: delay readers, oh um, and so here I am trying
Speaker 1: to whatever anyway. So interesting. Okay, So those are two
Speaker 1: of the two of the famous tramp printers. I guess
Speaker 1: the need that I didn't really talk about Mark Twain
Speaker 1: as a printer or any of that, but he did
Speaker 1: that for a while. That's that's what I got. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the takeaway there is that if you start
Speaker 1: out as a tramp printer, you're gonna go on to
Speaker 1: do some interesting stuff. All of them did as long
Speaker 1: as they lived past. Yeah. There was a second wave,
Speaker 1: a sort of second golden age of the tramp printer
Speaker 1: after World War Two, when train type setters were in
Speaker 1: short supply, and it's a different thing. It was a
Speaker 1: different lifestyle. More couples where both people were tramp printers
Speaker 1: would travel with their kids in like RVs and ship
Speaker 1: tramps would stay at motels instead of on the floor
Speaker 1: of the job. All night diners were placed replaced the
Speaker 1: dunes and the Second Golden Age ran up until the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, and it used the same union system, literally
Speaker 1: the same union, the I TU. They could show up
Speaker 1: at any printer, skip the personnel department and work whatever
Speaker 1: shifts they wanted, and the typographical union. It survived the
Speaker 1: move to line of type, but it didn't survive the
Speaker 1: move to digital printing. The earliest electric type setting machines,
Speaker 1: the teletype setter or the TTS, were referred to by
Speaker 1: some people who are really excited about them. Some bosses.
Speaker 1: They were like, this is the electric man that sets
Speaker 1: type and doesn't strike. Uh. Some of the earliest applications
Speaker 1: of computers. Actually it was to hook them up to
Speaker 1: these teletype machines to calculate hyphenation and justification settings, which
Speaker 1: were like kind of like the last skilled parts of
Speaker 1: some of the type setting, so the operators didn't need
Speaker 1: to be highly trained. Jobs got scarcer more and more
Speaker 1: journeyman decided to stick around and home guard rather than
Speaker 1: risk not finding a job in the next town over.
Speaker 1: And then phototype setting took over hot metal type setting.
Speaker 1: And I could not easily tell you about phototype setting.
Speaker 1: And even though I've been vaguely involved in it at
Speaker 1: various points in my life, I don't know how to
Speaker 1: easily explain it, and I'm not great at understanding it. Okay,
Speaker 1: this means that you no longer have the squirt right,
Speaker 1: you no longer have the like if you do this wrong,
Speaker 1: hot lead will burn everything. So even more so now
Speaker 1: people don't need trained skilled people. Computers can't take over everything.
Speaker 1: Editors of paper start coming out of the university system
Speaker 1: instead of off the shop floor. Even union shops stopped
Speaker 1: wanting tramp printers. One by one, they all stopped accepting
Speaker 1: the travelers card. By six tramp printing was over and
Speaker 1: the union was to the same year, it merged with
Speaker 1: the Communication Workers of America, ending its run as the
Speaker 1: oldest union in the US. With the death of the union,
Speaker 1: wages dropped and a hot metal compositor was getting two
Speaker 1: d dollars a week, which is about a salary about
Speaker 1: seventy si I was a year in today money. By
Speaker 1: four years later, the same amount of work was forty
Speaker 1: seven thousand dollars a year, so it's like barely your
Speaker 1: your your wage got halved, um with the union gone.
Speaker 1: And I want to go out with a story about
Speaker 1: one more random cool tramp. This is a second Golden
Speaker 1: Age tramp, Big Marie Emery, one of the last tramp printers.
Speaker 1: She was over six ft tall. She was loud and
Speaker 1: brash and cool as hell. She always blew her money
Speaker 1: on like fancy clothes and jewelry and ship but she
Speaker 1: didn't actually have that money, so she like pawned them
Speaker 1: the next day. Um, she'ld like wear them around, be
Speaker 1: seen in them, and be like, all right, never mind,
Speaker 1: go take them back. That is such a flex excited,
Speaker 1: she gave away money constantly to her down and out compatriots.
Speaker 1: The foreman asked what she could do. She like showed
Speaker 1: up at a shop as tramp part like, well, what
Speaker 1: can you do because she's a woman or whatever. So
Speaker 1: she poked him on the shoulder and said, I can
Speaker 1: do anything a goddamn man can do except pissing a
Speaker 1: bottle mm hmm, which is very just Yeah. She liked
Speaker 1: to marry tramp printers who are about to die and
Speaker 1: then become their sole beneficiaries. Oh my god, she's amazing. Okay,
Speaker 1: Eschine would say, big sleigh. Uh. And so she lived
Speaker 1: large as best as she could off of you know that,
Speaker 1: no shame. And to quote that Charles Overbeck book, The
Speaker 1: Tramp Printers quote, she continued tramping into the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: but the FBI came for her at seventy two in
Speaker 1: not in two, but when she's seventy two years old,
Speaker 1: alleging that she was drawing a deceased husband's checks from
Speaker 1: a Navy pension, social security off to other dead print
Speaker 1: printer husbands, her own social securities check and a full
Speaker 1: union wages as a proof reader, and using food stamps
Speaker 1: to pay an undocumented worker to clean clear her trailer clean. Sorry,
Speaker 1: sounds legit to me. Yeah. Now the quote from Charles
Speaker 1: Verbeck ends a first class tramp to the end. Hell
Speaker 1: yeah nice. And that, dear listeners, specifically Sophie and Caitlin
Speaker 1: is the tramp Printers. Love it. Thanks for sharing, Thanks
Speaker 1: for um, Caitlin. Thank You're really so funny the entire time,
Speaker 1: which is why you are miractually the healthiest person on
Speaker 1: e I'm cured. Um, do you have anything you would
Speaker 1: like to plug? Oh, just the same stuff as usual.
Speaker 1: Follow me on Instagram and Twitter, and I guess TikTok
Speaker 1: even though I barely understand it. At Caitlin Darante, listen
Speaker 1: to the Bechtel Cast, the movie podcast I do with
Speaker 1: Jamie Loft. As we're going on tour in um in
Speaker 1: the West coast of the US. We'll be doing shows
Speaker 1: in l A, So Francisco, Portland, and Seattle late January
Speaker 1: early February, and you guys also performing at s F.
Speaker 1: Sketch first, Yeah, that's the San Francisco show. That's so good.
Speaker 1: Sketchy first, it's so sketchy. And guess what classic San
Speaker 1: Francisco movie we're doing. George of the Jungle. Yeah, you're welcome.
Speaker 1: Love that, um, Margaret, and you have a new book,
Speaker 1: would you like to plug that? Well, imagine it's called
Speaker 1: George of the Jungle, right, it's it's probably imagine if
Speaker 1: you believe that the government owed you a woman as
Speaker 1: a public service, and you were already there, I already
Speaker 1: do invited to move to an island where that would
Speaker 1: be met. You're the government provides Just kidding, it's a trap.
Speaker 1: It's a prison. All of the men who believe that
Speaker 1: they are owed women as a public good are trapped
Speaker 1: on in Cell Island. And then our two protagonist title
Speaker 1: of the book must infiltrate infol Intel Island. And then
Speaker 1: now here's the title, escape from in Cell Island. It's preorderable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say where it can people pre order?
Speaker 1: And what can they get with that preorder? Tangled Wilderness
Speaker 1: dot org is the publisher, and you can get a
Speaker 1: free poster if you pre order. And my gratitude not
Speaker 1: personally explained Magpie's gratitude, which is, yeah, exactly can't buy that? Well,
Speaker 1: you literally can. You can buy it, buy pre order
Speaker 1: in that book. But for everything that money can't buy,
Speaker 1: there's money. Yeah, And we'll be back next week with
Speaker 1: the story of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff? Okay,
Speaker 1: by now, hi everyone. Hi. Cool People Who Did Cool
Speaker 1: Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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