Complete Story
11/15/2013
Final Issue: After 72 years, the publisher of the Continental News-Review leaves the only career he’s ever known
Image at right: Nyle Stateler in front of his 1927 Linotype machine. You can watch an interview with Stateler at the bottom of this article and also download the last issue of the News-Review.
By Jason Sanford, ONA Manager of Communications and Content
When Nyle Stateler walked into Curtis Show Print two days after graduating from high school, he knew this was what he wanted to do with his life. Now, after 72 years as both a printer and the publisher of the weekly News-Review newspaper in Continental, Ohio, he has retired from the only career he’s ever known.
“It was the smell of the ink,” said Stateler, who turned 93 this year. “When I smelled that I knew what I wanted to do for my life’s work.” And that’s exactly what he did. Aside from three years in the Army during World War II—where he served as a machine gunner under General Patton—Stateler worked his entire career in Curtis Show Print. He started off as an apprentice and soon learned to run all of the shop’s print equipment. When the owner of Curtis Show Print died in the 1950s, he left the print shop to Stateler and two other co-workers. A few years later Stateler bought out the other two and ran the shop from then on.
Show Printing
Image at left: Stateler with some of the circus posters he printed.
There are many small towns in Ohio similar to Continental, a northwest Ohio village of only 1,200 people—towns with Main Street buildings unoccupied for decades, and railroad tracks running trains which no longer bother to stop. However, no other Ohio town has a print shop with a history like Curtis Show Print. Founded in 1905 by Bill Curtis, the shop printed posters, fliers, and tickets for circuses and vaudeville shows across the United States, using the railroad stop in the village to ship the items.
“We printed just about everything,” Stateler said. “Circuses. Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows. We even printed circus letterhead and envelopes.”
Curtis Show Print also functioned as a meeting place for circus and entertainment agents, who travelled well in advance of their tent shows. Once the agents booked performances in far-flung locations, Curtis Show Print would create the needed posters and fliers—using woodblocks and woodcuts and dies, including intricate hand-carved designs for the individual circus logos—then ship the printed materials by train to their destinations.
While the heyday of circus and vaudeville printing was already over by the time Stateler began working at Curtis Show Print in the 1940s, they still printed posters and fliers for entertainers through the 1970s. And within the print shop the evidence of the past is everywhere, with thousands of woodblocks and wooden letters lining shelves and resting on tables.
“I’m one of the last people who knows how to do this type of printing,” Stateler said. “But now a few people are starting to become interested in what we used to do.”
As proof of this, Stateler mentioned how several people were interested in purchasing his original printing equipment. He also described with pride how more than a thousand of his shop’s vintage prints and printing blocks were now stored in the collection of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University.
The public television station in Columbus, WOSU, even produced a 30-minute documentary in 2004 on Stateler and Curtis Show Print and their history of entertainment printing.
The News-Review
Image at right: One of the custom-made circus dies from Curtis Show Print.
While Stateler and Curtis Show Print received national attention for their entertainment printing, in Continental they were known as the publishers of the News-Review, the only paper in this Ohio village. The weekly paper was founded in the early 1900s and published continually except for the World War II years, when Stateler and the other print shop workers joined the military and the owner didn’t have enough staff to continue publication.
“The News-Review was a unique paper,” Stateler said. “We covered probably a dozen small communities (around Continental). People sent or called in their news. If you borrowed a cup of sugar from your neighbors, they’d put that in. Our secretary would also go up and down Main Street talking to people to learn the news, asking what they did that weekend. Then we’d put that in the paper.”
For most of the paper’s history the News-Review was a large broadsheet of either 6 or 8 pages, switching to tabloid size in 1968. And well into the 1990s the entire paper was composed on a vintage 1927 linotype machine, which Stateler purchased used from the Putnam County Sentinel. With its mix of whirling gears and flywheels and belts to delight any fan of 19th century technology, the linotype created reversed rows of lead type, which could then be laid out for printing. Once the printing was finished, the lead type rows would be melted down and reused.
“You could do eight lines a minute with the linotype,” Stateler said. “But to use it you had to be able to read reversed type.”
When asked if he ever worried about lead poisoning from using the machine, Stateler laughed. “I never had an issue. Just don’t breathe in the fumes when you melt (the lead type) down.”
The circulation of the News-Review reached a peak of around 1,300 copies in the 1960s, back when there were five automobile dealers in Continental who made sure to advertise in each and every issue. In recent years, as advertisers became harder to find, Stateler continued publishing the paper even though it lost money. He saw the paper as providing a service to the community and subsidized its cost with his commercial printing business.
“Everyone always looked forward to getting the News-Review,” said Kathy Prowant, the village administrator for Continental. “You could catch up on the news, learn what classes your kids were in, see the trick or treat contest winners. I grew up in Continental and I don’t remember a time when the News-Review wasn’t around.”
The Last Day
Stateler often boasted that he’d keep printing until they carried him out of his shop, but after suffering a heart attack in the 1990s, and a stroke earlier this year, he finally decided it was time to stop. He’d hoped to find someone to continue the print shop and the newspaper, but times had changed and no one was interested in the back-breaking work for being a small-town printer.
“I worked 70 to 80 hours a week when I started in 1941,” Stateler said. “But people don’t want to work like that anymore.”
On Oct. 29, Stateler’s family, friends and former co-workers showed up at his print shop for the final press run of the News-Review. They had helped him continue printing the paper after his stroke, and they wanted to help him with the final issue.
There was Neil Dunlap, who now worked for General Motors but could still operate the shop’s antique 1965 Gazette Compact Press. Dunlap had original run the presses for Stateler years ago, as had Dunlap’s brother before him. There was Susan Darby, who when she first began working for Stateler had been told the newspaper wouldn’t last much longer, maybe only a year or two. But she’d been helping print the paper for the more than a decade since.
And of course, Stateler couldn’t have done any of this without his wife of 67 years, Helen. They’d met during high school and married when he returned from World War II. Stateler said Helen had always been supportive of his love of printing, as were their children, all of whom helped out in the print shop over the years.
“They’re really good people,” said Kathy Prowant. “And they’ve done a lot for the community.”
Now, as the presses ran one more time, Stateler and his family and friends took pictures and told stories of publishing their small paper. When asked where the people of Continental would get their news now, they shrugged and said they weren’t sure.
Then the front page of the paper emerged from the press, with its headline of “FINAL ISSUE,” and Stateler and everyone around him simply stared and didn’t say a word.
“I had a lot of help and made a lot of friends” Stateler said, when asked later how he’d been able to keep his print shop and newspaper going for so long. “If I hadn’t gotten such support I couldn’t have done all I did.”
Additional Resources
