August 16, 2020 (Monday)
It happened again this morning. I woke up with a song in my head. It played one line over and over again: “and you’ll find that you’re in the Rotogravure.” Of course, I remembered that the line came from an Irving Berlin song, “Easter Parade.” Berlin’s first version in 1917 had different lyrics. Bing Crosby made it famous but almost every singer recorded it.
As the one line kept repeating itself again and again, I asked myself, what does “Rotogravure” mean? I sort of remember it as a section of the newspaper with lots of pictures, usually printed in Sepia tones. But where did that word come from?
OK, I did a little more reading (in the omniscient world wide web) and discovered that the word describes a printing process. The word comes from two Latin roots, one meaning cylindrical (or something like that) and the other having to do with engraving. It replaced the old style printing press which was flat, slow and laborious and hard work. The new process, utilized by newspapers, engraved the news onto metal cylinders that printed their images and words on the paper whizzing through the mechanisms.
The old Houston Chronicle building featured huge plate glass display windows arranged by the sidewalks so that people such as I could stand there and watch the paper being imprinted with the news. It was a fast moving long sheet of paper that whizzed by as I stood there, almost hypnotized by watching. It stood on Texas Avenue at Travis (The Rice Hotel took up the next block east on Texas Ave.) It gradually took in the buildings in the block and was eventually renovated to look like one big modern building. And then they built a new building on Southwest Freeway, tearing the old one down completely. The entire block was cleared.
The original building was next door to the Palace Theater, an original showplace of the city where Clark Gable made his theater debut back in 1927. The Chronicle building eventually swallowed it and all the other buildings in the downtown block. I saw the original King Kong movie in that theater. If you wanted to sit in the balcony of the Palace Theater, you rode in an old-time elevator with decorative wrought iron designs and a scissors-like door, that stood, free standing, in the lobby.
Getting back to the rotogravure, newspapers hardly ever printed photos until the rotating engraved cylindrical tube process came into vogue. It was expensive, so the photo section was separate from the main body of the newspaper, usually what we would call an “insert,” but with many pages. That was what the song was about: the photo section of the Sunday newspaper. The process should not seem strange to anyone who has worked with stencils and mimeograph machines, which is much the same idea. The big difference for me was that operation of old-time mimeograph machines was injurious to one’s mental health. Restarts were common each week for me. All the secretaries handled those machines much better than I.
And so, the earworm has conquered once again and produced another blog, reminding us of the famous crooner and an old song, and bringing to mind a lot of other things as well. It’s like pulling a raveling on an old sweater. There’s always more.
From the movie, “Holiday Inn,” 1942 Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and Marjorie Reynolds.