= PAGE 4, THE HERALD, Tuesday, September 6, 1977

{the herald)

Published by
Sterling Publishers

EN aA Tiere coe

2 aa
epee fee.

_ General Office - 635-6957
Circulation (Terrace) - 635-6357
{Kitimat) - 632-6209

CS PUBLISHER... W.R. (BILL) LOISELLE
. MANAGING EDITOR... STU DUCKLOW

Published every weekday at 3212 Kalum St. Terrace B.C, A
; Member of Varitied Circulation. Authorized rs second class
: mall. Registration number 1201. Postage pal.» cash, return

- Postage guaranteed.

NOTE OF COPYRIGHT

; . The Herald retaing tull complete and sole co
’ Pyright in an
| advertisement produced and-or any: editorial oF
photographic content published in the Herald. Reproduction
Pu eran permitted without the written parmission of the

2

r,

lat ete oe

“in relief over a cup of coffee after the first
~-.. morning's chaotic rush to get them out the door

==“and off to school.

ot

At least it was a great summer. It was hot
*" enough to send the kids out-of-doors to play with
their friends and that, for Terrace, was
., something.
* Teachers may find the first few days as
:.,¢haotie as the parents. The children are still in
_, the holiday spirit and it will be an never ending
*“ehore to put them in the work habit,

School’s in

Summer is over and the kids are at last out of
_..their parents hair for most of the next 10 months.
oz. Mothers can now collapse at the kitchen table

A few youngsters won’t like their teachers for

awhile. They will be told to do something they
don’t want to do and there is nothing worse than

that for some.

Most of the students will plod along, accepting
their duty, even though there are more exciting
.. things to do than school work.
xz: Then the final bell rings and before the teacher
cknows it the classroom is deserted and she can

Skeena Valley

Despite soggy weather the
Fall Fair

wt

years of operation. At least
$1,500 was made by the fair

First-prize winners in the

Flag race: Buck Barber,

14 age group was won by.

ons park Sunday.

Skeena Fall Fair better than

ever

Diane Parfitt,

English Equitation: ‘
Alison

tripled its attendance over
_ last year’s figures and next
be better than ever, says
club director Diane Wyatt.
The fair was carried over
two days this weekend for
the first time and over $1,500
saw the show, In addition to
‘thetraditiona] horticulture
exhibits, livestock was also
exhibited in the new barn
built on a Young Canada
Works grant sponsored b

ms
ne
+
i ora
re
aaa
oP te
ape tee
4
began ll

©1977 Universal Preis Syndicate

Price-Skeena Forest Ltd,

Next year, the organizers
hope to have another barn
built as grant money has
already been arranged. The
organizers also hope to sign
a five-year contract with
Wagner Shows to get a
‘carnival to beef up fair
attendance.

The two-day affair was
bolstered by the Terrace
Quarter-Horse Club which
held ashow Saturday and by
the Totem Saddle Club
which held a gymkhana
Sunday on the grounds in
Lions Park. McEwan
Motors also displayed
several recreational
vehicles and other com-
mercial displays were
evident in the horticultural

building,
District agriculturist
Graham Johnson opened the

fe

fair at’ noon, Saturday,

“Hey, Harry! Look at this guy's wife.“

Don’t blame me, it’s only Etaoin Shrdlu! —

&

Stu Ducklow
Managing Editor

Etaoin Shrdlu has struck again,
this time with a vengeance.
Readers of this paper have
already met him, though you may
not known him by name. He’s the
demon of the typographer and he
lurks everywhere. By the time this
Bela into print, he may have
motished this very line.
Normally, I've got no particular
beef with the gremlin, sometimes I
think his schemes are rather funny.
But these are not normal times.
Etaoin (I should know him well
enough to call him by his first name
by now) has been playing his pranks
at a furious rate lately, and it
behooves us to offer an explanation
since we haven't been able to fix the

remarking that the festival

plus an auction of displayed
goods and the funds will go
to prize money and building
maintenance.

First prize winners in the
horticultural and livestock
exhibits are as follows:

Cut Flowers:
Waldbaure. .
Flower Arranging:

Barbara Hoveland.
Contain-grown Plants:
Mary Waldbaure.
Vegetables: Thora Ar-
nold-Smith.
Fruit: Chuck Cey.
Canning:
baure.
Fancy Work :
James.
Photography:
Waldhaure,
Overall winner:
Waldbaure. :

Mary

Trene
‘Mary
Mary

Overall winner in the
children’s division: Debbie
Godfrey.

Owner of the pet winning,
the most point: Margo
Fosberry, ,

Honey: Dave Cain.

Eggs: Norma Holmberg.

Wine: (tie) Donna Graf
and Thora Arnold-Smith.

Rabbits: Ed Chaplow.-

Goat: Ed Chaplow.

Poultry: Doug Holmberg.

Pigs: Darryl Wyatt.

Mary Wald- -

Totem Saddle Club's Debbie Anderson, Rhona Martin Forbes on Domino.
gymkhana Sunday are as Falconer. High point trophy for the 15
follows: . Barrels: Danny Muller, to18age group was awarded
Keyhold: Danny Muller Arlene Hamer, Sheena Lynette Hehr on Gezan.
(senior) Joleen Goodwin Falconer. Showmanship at halter:
((junior) and Skeena Ring-spearing: Buck Diane Parfitt (11 and under)
Falconer (little britches age Barber, Mike Barber, Sherry Dahl (12 to- 14),
group). Sheena Falconer. Lynette Hehr (15 to 18).
Figure 28: Sheena’ _ First-place winner in the Western Pleasure: Karen

Falconer, Kathy Barber,
Rhona Falconer.

Scurries: Danny Muller,
Debbie Anderson, Sheena
Falconer.

Pole-bending: Danny
Muller, Arlene Hamer,

Chris Barber.

Vegetable monsters fight It out amongest a jungle of

Terrace Quarter-Horse

‘Goodwin, Alison Maxim-

Club’s show Saturday areas chuk, Lynette Hehr.
follows: Trail and Horse: Diane
Trophy for the highest — Parfitt, Martin Forbes, Kim

points in the 1l-and-under Van Herdon.
age group was won by Diane Western Riding: Karen
Parfitt on Shillelagh Victor, Goodwin, Joleen Goodwin,

High point trophy in the 12 to

‘Lynette Hehr.

Maximchuk and Lynette -
Hehr.

English Pleasure: (no 11
and under entry), Alison
Maximchuk, Lynette Hehr.

Boot Race: Karen
Goodwin, Debbie Dahl, (no
15 to 18 entry),

Costume class: (first
place tie) Martin Forbes on
Domino dressed as a
mountain man and Diane
Parfitt on Shillelagh Victor
dressed as a bunny.

Pee

had grown a lot in its seven

Sheep: Eugene Rafuse.,

sters were created by Steven Boullanne, left, Bonny

potted plant leaves in the horticultural exhibits. Mon- Brink, background and Debbie Gdfrey,

THE DEMON OF THE TYPEOGRAPHER

problem yet.

Like any ephemeral character,
Etaoin moves in strange and
mysterious ways, bunging up the
works with sometimes spectacular
results, I first met Etaoin in the fall
of 1973 while I was working at the
Ottawa Citizen,

That paper was the first in North
America to convert from hot metal
to cold type production and they did

e ho

it whol , with a new building
housing a new offset press and a
newsroom cluttered with a

magnificent array of electronic
goodies for editing and typesetting.
They thought they had Etaoin
licked. They sure had a lot to learn.

Etaoin, who's been around since
the monks started copying out the
scriptures, lost no time in adapting
to his new surrondings., For weeks,
hardly a day went by when the
system didn't “crash” just before.

adline and great yards of news
stories, conyerted to electronic
sqeaks and moans, were lost forever
in the labyrinth pathways of the
computer’s memory. Snatches of
these stories, like ghostly echoes
from the void, would reappear days
later in the middle of an entirely
unrelated story. It made for some
interesting, though mysterious,
reading.

Etaoin’s high point came one night
after the staff though he'd tired of
the new electronic game. A desk
editor had finished boilding down
one of my over-written business
page features, this one on the future

of down sleeping bags, while L
agonized over every cut. Finally, he’
nched typesetting commands into
lis new-fangled black box and
waited for the story te come out of
another black box in nicely justified
columns.

But Etaoin got in there
somewhere, and changed the
command setting the point size.
What should have come out in
normal, nine-point type spewed out
in 72-point, a headline size normally
reserved for the second coming of
Christ, or, in towns like Terrace, a

raising of water rates. We

decorated the newsroom in great
ribbons of copy with letters so big
only one or two could fit in a colum
and there were hyphens
everywhere,

That's how I met Etaoin. I liked
him right away.

My affection increased when the
gremlin made his second notable
appearance more than a year later.
At the time, I was editing a trade
magazine for librarians. ‘One of the
articles was about the image of
librarians and devoted much space
to the denouncing of something
called the LOLITS syndrome.

Librarians, sald the article, may
fall prey to the LOLITS syndrome
any time, and great pains must be
taken to avoid surrendering to it or
the image of librarians and libraries
will be forever besmirched.

LOLITS stands for Little Old Lady
In Tennis Shoes. Today's librarian,
warned the article, should be ab-

solutely terrified of being classified
a LOLITS.

Now that magazine was proofread
both by the independant printing
firm and by our staff. But Etaoin
still managed to slip on glorious
typographical blunder on to the
readers, With
marksmanship, he changed the
second L in the acronym toa T. That
was the last issue of that particular
magazine. Publication was
suspended ostensibly because
budget cutbacks were necessary,
but I never knew if it was really
Etaoin that cost me ‘my job,

The only place I've ever worked
where Etaoin didn’t gum up the
works somewhere was at News of
the North, a weekly in Yellowknife,
NWT, where they had a human
being type the whole paper out on a
huge mongrel of a machine made of
parts cannibalized from every

rinting apparatus ever made, She

~ just didn’t make mistakes, that was

all there was to It. Such employees
are rare and the staff grieved when
she left with her husband for
Frobisher Bay. oe
The Nelson Daily News, where [
once worked, has a_ typesetting
system so incomparably bad that
the matter was once raised before
city council. In fact, it would be safe
to say that the city of Nelson would
be reluctant to advertise in that
paper were it not the only daily in
town, Reporters write their stories
on electric typewriters with special
typing bails that add a dot-dash code

exquisite |

below each letter. The copy paper is
fed into something that looks like a
machine for changing dollar bills.
The machine reads the code and
punches the message on computer
tape. The tape is fed into a photo-
typesetter and the story come out in
a long, neat column, sometimes
bearing only an incidental resem-
blance to the original story.

Unfortunately, the typographical
errors look just like typographical
errors are supposed to.. A reporter

can’t misquote somebody and blame.

it on the machine. '

Etaoin has found a _ most
hospitable environment at the
newspaper in Port Alberni, which
seemed to be doing just fine until the
company spent untold thousands on
new electronic goodies. The ap-
paratus has been dubbed FRE
MacHine, FRED Is an acronym, the
last three letters of which stand for
Ridiculous Electronic Device. 1
have spent as many as ten straight
hours at one of the shiny, new
keyboards typing a story that should
take 80 minutes, then had FRED
wipe it out without a trace. The
particular story I'm thinking about,
a 20-inch summary of the city's 1977
budget, had to be re-written three
times before Etaoin got tired of
playing with it and it still didn't
come out right.

But I thought I had bid Etaoin
goodbye when I came to the Herald
two weeks ago where the typesetting
equipment is of the tried and proven
type used on hundreds of small daily

newspapers.
Instead, the curse of the
typegrapher has undergone a
diabolical transmogrification.

’ Etaoin Shrdlu has forsaken the spirit

world and manifested himself as two
bulky- photo typesetters nicknamed
Harriet and Harold.

Harriet and Harold are supposed
tobe able to read computer tape and
transform the code into readable
copy in justified columns. Their
counterparts all over the land seem
to do. the same thing every day
without causing trouble at all,

But since Etaoin's taken them

over, they’ve become sullen and |

unco-operative to say the least.

Harold refuses to remember
anything and takes far too long.

As a result, our over-worked
typesetters, Elreen Toovey and
Maxine Moen have been hand-
setting the entire paper every

day for nearly two weeks. Harold.
still

drops .out crucial line and
phrases out of a sentence with
demoralizing regularity.

Proofreading such copy is futile.
We'd never get the paper out,

So far, efforts to fix the
recalcitrant machines have proved
just as futile, but we're working on
It,

Somewhere, in amongst those
blinking lights, coils of wire and tiny
snips of micro circuitry lurks the
spirit of Etaoin Shrdlu and we'll find
him sooner or later,

In the meantime, bear with us. At
least the copy isn’t coming out in 72-
point. °