Letter to the Editor

To The Editor:

It brought me much joy to read Martinsburg Musings by Tom Reese. Tom and I are contemporaries so the town he described was the town I grew up in. Those of us who grew up in Martinsburg in the 1950s were as blessed as any young person could be. I could picture myself at 13 years of age (70 years ago) walking the town passing the businesses that Tom described.

I can think of only one addition/correction that I can make. As I remember, the grocery store in the Leidy building was called The American Store and was managed by Mildred King. For a short time there was also a small grocery in the basement section of the building next to the Penn-Mar. Can you imagine, we had five grocery stores within 500 feet of the center of town?

The telephone numbers brought back memories to me. As Tom mentioned, the telephone office and the Herald were in the same building. The Herald number was 280, our home phone number was 248. That sounds pretty easy but when I was 6 or 7 it was too difficult for me. I wanted to talk to my dad one day so I picked up the home phone and told the operator, “I want to talk to my daddy.” And sure enough she connected me to the Herald and I talked to my daddy.

The Herald was a big part of the life of my brothers, Charles and Richard and myself. We started our newspaper careers sweeping the floors and cleaning the bathroom. When that duty came to Richard, Charles and I informed him that since he was the youngest that would be his job for the rest of his life. Being an ambitious young fellow and not wanting to clean bathrooms for the rest of his life, he ran to Dad to protest. He must have had a good argument because eventually he moved into positions with more prestige. The next job in our climb up the ladder was melting lead. In those days linotypes set type that was placed into a huge printing press to produce the newspaper. The linotypes were fed by 25 pound bars of lead, called pigs. The linotype melted the pigs and the letters were then formed by pressing against the molten lead. After the paper was printed, all the type was thrown down a chute to a huge pot in the basement where it was melted and dipped into molds to form pigs for the next week’s paper. Usually about 25 to 30 pigs were poured each week. The quarters were cramped, dark and barely high enough to stand up in. This job was considered a move up from cleaning the bathroom, but looking back I wonder.

Eventually Charles and Richard graduated to linotype operator and I moved to the job department to run presses for small printing jobs. Those were great days.

I appreciate Tom’s kind remarks about my father, Blair M. Bice. He was an inspiration to many, including myself.

Blair B. Bice

Alexandria, LA