As The Mount Airy News celebrates its 129th birthday today, two of its employees can speak with first-hand knowledge about the changes and improvements in the paper over the past several decades.

One, Eleanor Powell, is in many ways the face of The News, with her society columns gracing The News’ pages for much of the past 60 years. The other, Dennis Flippin, has been toiling away for 40 years doing work often unseen by the public, yet vital to getting the newspaper out every day.

“Miss Ellie,” as many of the folks at The News call her, began her career at The Mount Airy News in 1948, while she was still in school.

“I was a senior at Mount Airy High School,” she said of her beginning here. “I was writing a teen-age column at that time.”

With no plans to go into the newspaper industry for a career, she was pressed into service the summer after her high school graduation because of her column-writing experience.

“There was a lady here, her name was Miss Cora Earp. I think she was about 90 when she died, and they pulled me in to do her work as a replacement,” Powell said. “I went in just to work for the summer, and I ended up staying.”

She continued working for four years, then she married Pete Powell and retired from the newspaper business while she and her husband had three children.

“I came back in 1963, when my children were in school,” she said. “(Former publisher) W.M. Johnson used to always say once you get ink in your blood, you can never get it out.”

In Powell’s case, that would seem to be true, as she has continued working since then, writing stories, taking photos, designing ads, and representing the newspaper at many functions in the community.

Not too long after Powell came back to the newspaper, Flippin joined the staff.

“I was working at Procters (Silex) at that time and my brother was working at the newspaper,” Flippin said. “I just started working there part-time, helping with slip sheets.” Those are preprint inserts that go in the paper. While most of that sort of work is done by machine today, it was common for newspapers in the past to do all of that work by hand.

“They needed a Linotype operator. They asked if I would be willing to try, and I said yes,” Flippin said.

A Linotype machine utilized 90 characters that the operator would use to essentially build a single line mold of type, which is then used to cast a line of type in metal. Prior to the Linotype machine, such lines were assembled one letter at a time.

While the characters included the modern alphabet and numbers, other characters were also included, thus the keyboard was larger than modern typewriter and computer keyboards.

“To learn the keyboard, I cut a piece of cardboard the size of a keyboard, drew out the keys as they were on the keyboard, then I took the cardboard home very night to practice,” Flippin said.

In those long-ago days, when the newspaper was published just once, and then later twice, a week, the work schedule was much different. It was not uncommon to work long hours during press days.

“I’d go to work every morning at 7 o’clock, then work until the next morning. It took three hours to run a pressrun, if we had 40 pages, we’d run eight pages at a time, then we’d have to insert the sections by hand. It just took a long time,” Flippin said. “We’d see the publisher coming in when we were leaving. Sometimes, he would reach into his pocket and pull out some money and slip it in mine and say ‘Take your wife out to dinner tonight.’”

While Flippin was in the back running the Linotype and helping prepare the papers, Powell was out front and in the community, which meant she did a little of everything.

“During that time, I was doing all the weddings, engagements, babies, waiting on customers, helping on advertising, when we got through with all of our work we’d go to the back and start slip sheeting.” she said. “Often we’d have to go out and deliver the newspaper and tear sheets.”

Flippin said while most of his work was in the press and prepress areas, he has spent a little time on other projects as well.

“I sold ads part-time for a while,” he said, which got him out in the public. “I liked the selling part, but I didn’t like making them up. Back then, you had to draw up the ad like you wanted it, and I didn’t like doing that,” he said. Now, advertising representatives often turn over that part of the job to creative service professionals.

“Back then, you did everything,” he said of a major difference in newspapering of old. “The last thing we did was load it in the truck and carry it to the post office and put it in the racks around town. We didn’t have carriers then, most of the papers that went out in the county went out in the mail. That’s the reason you were there all day and all night. ... When you were leaving at night, the editor would tell you to take an arm full of papers and throw them out to your neighbors. I guess he thought if people read it they would start buying it.”

Powell said she has always enjoyed being out in the public, meeting people and putting their stories together for The Mount Airy News readers to see.

She did not, however, take too kindly to photography. At least not at first.

“I had a big camera I had to carry,” she said, holding her hands far enough apart to fit a football between them. “I was so embarrassed. At that time ladies didn’t carry a camera and go out shooting pictures. This thing was probably five pounds, with a big old flashbulb.”

She got used to that part of the work, even to the point of really enjoying the craft, when John F. Kennedy won the presidency.

“Jacqueline Kennedy was a photographer,” she said. “She would go out and take pictures. So, I thought if Jacqueline Kennedy can do that, I can do that, too.”

Over the years that part of the job grew easier, with cameras becoming smaller and lighter, eventually moving from film to digital.

“The changes have been drastic, but wonderful,” Powell said of her time at The Mount Airy News.

Flippin has seen his work change just as much. Semi-retired, he still works at The News in creative services, helping with advertising design, scanning in photos, and lending a hand in the prepress department.

“The computers ... it’s made it easier. You have to use your head more than you do your back.” he said. “You had to stand on your feet so much in those days. I wouldn’t think it would be better to go back there. At least I wouldn’t want to.”

Powell echoed his comments about the jobs being, in some ways, less demanding. She also said working through the changes have had an added benefit.

“It’s so wonderful that I can converse with my grandchildren about computers, speak their language. I feel like I’ve been educated for 50 years by working here, keeping up with the changes day to day, meeting people from all walks of life, the not so well off, the well off, the wonderful people in Mount Airy.”

Contact John Peters at jpeters@mtairynews.com or 719-1931.