Every time Charlie Hess has walked into a new Anniston Star building for the first time, he figured it couldn’t get any better.And after having had that experience three times, he said he can not image what the future will bring next.
Hess, Anniston Star Publisher H. Brandt Ayers and four other Anniston Star employees are the select few who have experienced the inner workings of the city’s newspaper in three different buildings.
Moreover all six say each new building has changed their lives by doing more than just offering them a different route to work — the new buildings also have changed how the paper operates.
As Ayers put it, “There was really a desire to build a present to the community, but (it was) also a very practical and necessary move.”
10th Street reflections
In 1959, The Anniston Star moved from a building across from the courthouse on West 11th Street to its home for the next 43 years on West 10th Street.That move was a great decision, all six said, considering how tiny the first building was in comparison. Although at the time, most of them said they didn’t know any different.
“It was a small building, but I was proud to have a job,” said Lela Davis, who started working at the paper on May 7, 1953.
“Back then I wouldn’t say it was state-of-the-art, but it was all we had,” Eddie Moore agreed, reflecting on the first building where he started working in 1956.
Almus Thornton, the treasurer for the board of directors for Consolidated Publishing Co., said when he first came to work for the paper, his desk was more like a vault than a workplace.
“Back then my desk was pushed back against the wall, and there was just enough space for me to get in and out,” he said smiling in remembrance. “I had about this much room,” he added, measuring about a three-foot span with his hands.
George Smith, who started as a copy boy in 1955, said the important part was having a job, not the building.
“I didn’t think much about it ’cause I wanted to get married, and I wanted a job,” Smith said. “But it was very enjoyable being downtown at that time. Nobel Street was a half block away, and you could go out to the Courthouse Café for lunch. All the businessmen would be there. One of the best places was the Smokehouse.”
Listening as three or four sermons drifted from the courthouse steps in through the windows of The Star on a Saturday morning was one Smith’s best memories about the first building.
“You would see everybody on Nobel Street on a Saturday,” he said.
Ayers said some of his favorite memories of the 10th Street building are of when he was managing editor and the Civil Rights Movement was finishing off and creating “one hell of a story.”
“Those were the days when we had sort of a one-man editorial department. We’d write like crazy hoping to fill the column up,” he said.
A dream move in 1959
Moving into the “new” building in 1959 was quite an exciting change, all six said. Between a new press and more space, most said it was a dream move.“We were just as proud of it then as we are for this one,” Davis said. “We needed the room and were growing. In the first building, our desks were backed up against the wall, and we barely had room to get in and slide out. In the new building, it was so clean, and there was so much more room.”
Moore said that when he moved to the second building, he thought it was as state-of-the-art as newspapers could get considering the new press and other new gadgets.
“But things keep changing,” he said.
Yet almost all said it was a little sad to be farther from Noble Street at first.
“The move was easy. All we did was pick up our typewriters and walk down the street,” Smith said. “And at that point, (the second building) looked as big to us as this building looks to us now. But we did miss being downtown.”
However none of the six said they miss the old buildings.
“… The building was pretty oppressive in a way,” Ayers said. “People ask me about nostalgia for that building. And what I tell them is, ‘What if they put you in a box for 42 years, and you didn’t know whether it was night or day or it was stormy or a clear day and then they let you out?’ Well we’re out and happy to be here. It is a feast of the eyes inside and out.”
Change keeps coming
Although the move in 1959 brought some changes like the new press and desks, it was the technological changes, the six said, that occurred during the following 43 years at the building on 10th Street that really affected their lives.“It’s amazing,” Hess said. “It seems like there’s almost continuous change here.”
Sitting in an office without a computer and working at a desk that was originally the publisher’s father’s, Thornton, 80, said he has done his best to resist change. But even he said it has managed to find its way to his office.
The number of employees at the paper and the way he and others figured the payroll, he said, have been some of the bigger changes. When he started in 1954, the paper had about 67 employees, now it is closer to 150, he estimates.
“And we used to do all the payroll by hand. We even paid off in cash when I started,” he said. “Reporters probably made about $65 a week back then or less.”
Hess, 62, and Moore, 58, said the biggest change for them was the way the paper uses computers to lay out or compose the paper. Neither Hess nor Moore started out composing the pages, but both ended up in that role after a few years.
When Hess started in 1954, and when Moore started in 1956, the paper was composed by laying out each line of metal type individually in metal trays, in a process called hot type.
“We basically now use three programs to put out the paper now: Word, Pagemaker and Quark,” Hess added.
And both Hess’s and Moore’s jobs have changed again with the move to the latest building. Hess now works in the computer department, and Moore works in the prepress department overseeing the computer transmission of page layouts from Consolidated Publishing Co.’s affiliated papers and sending those computer layouts on to the press.
Like Hess and Moore, Davis says computers have changed her job the most. She started out punching type, a process that set the position of the printed lines on the paper. She now composes and sets up pages on a computer.
Computers and laptops also were the biggest change in the newsroom, said Smith. He recalled how excited the newsroom staffers were when they got new typewriters not long after moving into the second building.
The newest home
Moving into the latest building has brought a series of changes for all six as well.For Hess, Moore and Davis, the new building has meant more space.
They used to work in the composition and computer room together, but now all three, along with the rest of the composition department, are spread out throughout the building.
The paper does not even have a composition department anymore.
Hess is in the computer department, Moore is downstairs near the pressroom, and Davis is in the features corner of the newsroom.
For Thornton, the new building also has changed his connections to the accounting department.
He no longer works in the accounting department, and his desk now is closer to Ayers’ office. Now he works less with figuring the daily payroll and more as a consultant on the paper’s investments.
For Smith, the new move means a bigger office, but he said it has not changed his job too much otherwise except that he enjoys the beautiful building and a view of the outdoors through his window.
For Ayers, the new building has brought him a new way to serve the paper for the future. As he put it in his column on Aug. 11, “Today we leave our familiar post on 10th Street, west of the tracks, and assume the forward-looking duties of sentinel at the front door of Anniston’s new city within a city — McClellan.”
