The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

her personality, sticking to the facts at hand. There was nothing special about the finished product, nothing like what the Herald and Examiner would surely come up with, though Maurine did linger on the infidelity that caused Belva’s divorce back in 1920. The story had the feel of being rushed. Considering the late hour when Belva arrived at the police station, it’s possible Maurine called the story in, with a copyboy running to the “morgue,” the paper’s archives, to pull information on Belva’s divorce for her. But the young reporter knew she’d done a competent job. It was a start. The typewritten pages, pounded out by her or a rewrite man, were sent down to the composing room in a basket. The story had been designated for a page-one position in place of another item already on the presses; once the story was ready, the remade pages would be cast, the presses shut down, the new plates inserted and the presses sent flying again, all within minutes. All Maurine could do now was wait. In the composing room, a copyboy took the pages over to the copy cutter’s desk. The cutter sliced the story into sections for the copyreaders and marked each “take” with a number to keep it in order. Everybody worked quickly, and soon the Linotype operator began to knock away at his keyboard, transferring Maurine’s words into hot type.
    The Tribune was a massive operation, a city institution, and any reporter was just one very small part of it. This fact was represented perfectly by the Linotype, which differentiated not a whit between sports or crime, star columnist or suburban reporter. The machine operator read every word of every story that was dropped onto his holding plate, but he didn’t comprehend any of it—there wasn’t time. He simply shoveled it into the mechanical maw.
    The Linotype, or line-casting, machine was part typewriter, part foundry. The machine had revolutionized newspaper publishing late in the previous century, allowing a small team to swiftly set page after page of metal type, resulting in casts that could be used on multiple presses at the same time. With this innovation, along with the electric-powered rotary press, newspapers suddenly could be far more than a handful of pages each day. They could cover the whole world, with as many pages per edition and copies every day as readers and advertisers made economically feasible. The Tribune ’s maximum capacity for a forty-page edition was well over one million copies. Yet there was nothing glamorous about the technological triumph that made this possible. An operator sat before a ninety-character keyboard, the rest of the Linotype machine rearing up before him at close range, making him look like a disobedient child being forced to face the wall. A pot of molten metal was attached to the back of the machine, providing the source material for the lines typed out by the operator. The Linotype was, quite simply, a large, dangerous beast, with various safety mechanisms built in to keep the 550-degree liquid metal from spraying through gaps between the letter molds. As the operator typed, little mechanical arms swung just above eye level, releasing matrices—small pieces of metal—on which letters were stamped and then arranged into completed lines of hot type, spitting them out one by one with a satisfying tick-tick-tick and then distributing the letter molds back to their magazines for the next line. On the fourth floor of the Tribune Plant Building, dozens of these machines stood side-by-side, clicking and humming in unison as deadline approached, the operators one with their Linotypes.
    Maurine’s story may have been treated just as dispassionately by the Linotype operator as every other item going into the paper, but Maurine recognized that hers—and similar stories about Belva “Belle” Gaertner in the city’s other newspapers—was going to make a greater impact than anything else on the page. Every Chicago reporter knew that a gun-toting