ABSTRACT

My father (first author’s) lived until he was sixty-four. He had been a printer for most of his adult life, having returned from service in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1946. Soon thereafter, he began employment in the small print shop operated by his brother and his brother’s father in law on the Near West Side of Chicago, in the shadows of the elevated tracks, known to all Chicagoans as the ‘el-tracks’. He toiled long, tedious hours – often in solitude – in noisy, cramped, poorly lit, poorly ventilated conditions. The printing presses roared endlessly, or so it seemed. This is something I would experience at first hand whenever he would bring me with him to ‘the shop’ beginning from when I was about ten years of age. In order to prepare the press for a print run, he would clean the massive black machine using a strong chemical with a powerful, unforgettable odor. Later I would learn that this foul-smelling solvent was called benzene. This solvent has become the bane of all printers who worked in the printing industry in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s because, in retrospect, it has since been linked to various forms of leukaemia, among other diseases. For years he repeated this same routine, tirelessly washing the presses he worked on with this foul chemical. It was an essential step in preparing the press for the next printing run.