MARCH 19, 2021, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE B13
Remembering the past as a new era begins
The forerunner to the Keizertimes was
the Keizer News, founded in 1948. For 22
years the weekly community newspaper
reported on the news and the people of
the unincorporated community of Keizer.
Like all newspapers of its era, it was
produced on big presses—the fi nal home
of the Keizer News was in central Keizer,
about where the Oregon State Federal
Credit Union stands today.
The fi nal owner of the Keizer News
was Clarence Zaitz, father of two publish-
ers of the Keizertimes—Les Zaitz (1987-
2000) and Lyndon Zaitz (2007 to today).
The Keizertimes was established in 1979
by John Ettinger.
Content for the Keizer News was
printed on a big Cranston press. The
paper was set on a Linotype, a “line cast-
ing” machine. It was a hot metal type-
setting system that cast blocks of metal
type for individual uses. Linotype was
one of the mainstay methods to set type,
especially small-size body text, for news-
papers, magazines, and posters from the
late 19th century to the 1980s. In the 1980s
phototypesetting and computer typeset-
ting became the norm for the industry.
A linotype machine operator entered
text on a 90-character keyboard. The
machine assembled brass matrices, which
are molds for the letter forms, which were
assembled by hand in a line and used
over and over. The assembled line is then
cast as a single piece, called a slug, from
Above: The press room at the Keizer News as it looked in the 1960s. Right: The Heidelberg
press, the workhorse of print shops around the world for decades
FILE PHOTO, Keizertimes
molten type metal in a process known as
hot metal typesetting. The used type was
melted down and cast into ingots to be
used again in the Linotype. The matrices
were then returned to the type magazine
from which they came, to be reused later.
The Keizer News switched to off set
printing in the late 1960s. From that
point printing was outsourced and the
big Cranston press was old for scrap. The
Linotype and the company’s Heidelberg
press were sold to local printers.