I have to admit I've been thinking about posting for a long time – just never got around to it. I can appreciate that the blog creators are feeling frustrated.
I was never part of Dumont Press Graphix, but was very much involved in On the Line. For a time, we used to send the copy by air cargo to Montreal (I think) where it was typeset. We'd pick up the set copy about a day later at the airport. One time I was sent off in the Datsun with Eddie and Adrian to pick up the copy from the last flight of the evening.
Remember Adrian? He was a tall, gangly grad student from England who literally turned up on the doorstep of 404 King St. North. He had a very long face and reddish hair and was even stranger than most of the rest of us.
The copy didn't come in when expected, but we were told it would be on the first plane in the morning. Instead of driving home we decided to wait for it (Don't ask me why). Very bored, we hung out in the cargo area for a while – played cribbage with a partial deck of cards we made out of shipping tags or something. I guess they kicked us out of there, because we went driving around exploring the airport and vicinity.
Someone noticed that every time we entered or left the parking garage, the guard at the entrance made a note. So of course we drove around and around several times just to annoy him. Then someone realized we had some props in the vehicle – a motorcycle helmet, a pair of goggles, and a gas mask. A funky old-fashioned gas mask with the round pluggy things sticking out of it (How the heck am I supposed to know why there was a gas mask? But it was Fast Eddie's Datsun...).
So Adrian, who was driving, put on the helmet and we drove into the garage. We could tell we'd got the guard's attention. Adrian donned the goggles and around we went again. Imagine our delight that the guard was obviously upset. Then Adrian added the gas mask to the costume. His head looked very much like a grasshopper's. Again we drove into the parking garage. This time the guard grabbed a phone. We figured we'd better get out of there, so exited as quickly as we could. As we drove past the guard's station he was on the phone – wildly waving his arms. We beat it, and behaved ourselves for the rest of the night.
I still laugh about this every time I drive into an airport parking garage.
I remember Adrian's old Vincent motorbike which he had at Strange Street. He was a character. Goodness knows where he ended up.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great story, Bernadine, and it reminds me of a couple of important points about those days. First of all, when Adrian was with us, we all had to learn to drink beer faster. Every time somebody brought home a case of beer (all 24s in those days), we could be certain that it would all be finished off by the next morning... Adrian was indeed a colourful character.
ReplyDeleteMore importantly, those weekend trips to the airport in 1970 to ship and receive the copy for the pages of On the Line were always an adventure. We had the paper typeset by Frank Brayton at Northern Press Graphics in Montreal. Northern Press had been established to do production for the Last Post magazine, where the business manager at the time was John Dufort. Frank would spend every other Saturday typesetting the copy for On the Line, charging us for materials and a nominal wage. It was great.
So we would head off from Kitchener to the Toronto airport late on a Friday evening to ship off the raw copy to Montreal, Frank would spend all day Saturday setting the copy and send us back the waxed galleys, which we would pick up on Saturday night or Sunday morning, spend all day (and often into the night) Sundays pasting up the paper on the dining room table at 192 Strange Street (one of two houses that formed the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Commune, the other at 192 King Street south), and then first thing Monday morning, a couple of us would take the paste-ups off to Acton to get the paper printed... talk about hot off the presses!
On the Line was published every other week, and on those alternate weekends we engaged in vigorous social gatherings (several of which took place at Hobey's Hollow, but that's another story). One weekend in July of 1970, Frank Brayton and Norm Bolen (from Regina, one of the editors of the Prairie Fire, an alternative community newspaper much like ours) came to visit us in K-W. The discussions that were initiated that weekend led to the conception of what ultimately became Dumont Press Graphix: our own production tools to assist with publishing On the Line, established as a worker-controlled co-operative, and creating jobs for some of the members of the good ol' Dumont Commune.
Sadly, On the Line ceased publication before we managed to get Dumont Press established, but the idea for the print shop continued to be developed and nurtured and we opened our doors at the shop on Victoria Street in May 1971. That first summer of operation was an interesting collaborative learning experience (but that's another story too).
Thanks for your story, Bernie. Not all of those trips to the airport were that wild, of course, but production of the paper was always an adventure!