Dolores “Dolly” Gagnon died last week, 16 months after retiring from more than six decades at The Greenfield Recorder chronicling the lives and deaths of others.
Gagnon had been the face — and the typing fingers of — the Recorder’s Talk of the Towns compendium of community happenings for more than 30 years, and had spent years typing up birth and wedding announcements, real estate transactions and other notices that included the names of thousands upon thousands of people over several generations.
A lifelong resident of Greenfield, she died Saturday, July 1, at the Center for Extended Care in Amherst. She was 80.
Gagnon, who began her career as a Greenfield Recorder keypunch operator while still a 16-year-old Greenfield High School junior in the 1950s, watched over 62 years at the newspaper as technology changed from “hot type” to photo-offset and then into the digital age that depended less on her fingers and more on digital technology.
“Dolly has probably worked at The Recorder longer than anyone in its 224-year history,” said Editor George Forcier at the time of her retirement in March 2016.
Gagnon began her job before The Recorder’s Hope Street brick building was constructed in the mid 1960s. She worked on the second floor of the newspaper’s earlier wood-framed home that sits just beyond an All Souls Church alleyway.
Told about the typist’s job by a GHS classmate who’d already been working there, Gagnon had taken a part-time Christmas job two weeks earlier at McClellan’s five-and-dime store on Main Street. But she had learned typing as part of a commercial-skills track at the high school, so she was in a good position to take advantage of the opening.
“My mother said, ‘You’d better go and sign up. After Christmas, they’re just going to get rid of you (at the store) anyway. She was right!,” Gagnon recalled with a trace of triumph and vindication in her voice.
With McClellan’s and the other Main Street five-and dimes long gone, Gagnon recalled the technologies that also passed on, beginning with the Linotype and its operators for whom she and two or three other typists punched holes in paper ribbons that were fed into the Linotype to set the lead type that would form the words used on press plates.
“They started me out on ‘Little Benny’s Notebook’,” she recalled, referring to a feature at the time in which the main character couldn’t spell correctly.
“They had all these misspelled words, so I was correcting his spelling, which I wasn’t supposed to do,” she remembered.
“You had to be careful. The machines you typed on had a dial, and you couldn’t go beyond a certain point — you had to stop,” said Gagnon. “If you went over, they’d get a tight line, and it would cause the hot metal to squirt, and someone could get burned. … We were really good.”
She recalled typing pages and pages of “Christmas locals,” seasonal social notes about which area residents were hosting guests or were visiting relatives for the holidays — with each item paying a nickel above the typists’ regular pay.
Gagnon, who would also fill in from time to time in the circulation department and would type up letters for the newspaper’s general manager, H. Irving ‘Hi’ Jenks, became supervisor for the growing newspaper’s seven keypunchers when the brick addition was built and moved toward a “cold-type” photo offset operation in 1966.
Along with the other typists, Gagnon punched in all of the news and sports stories that editors placed on hooks in the newsroom after reporters typed-up stories on paper — often cut and pasted using glue on sheets of newsprint that had been hand-edited.
An army of correspondents also kept Gagnon and the other typists busy dictating their news stories by telephone from around the county and beyond in the 1950s, ’60s and the ’70s, even after the newsroom’s only manual typewriters were traded in for computers.
Gagnon’s familiarity with the news operation led to her added role as tour guide for visiting school groups for several years.
As she saw Linotype operators and the rest of the paper’s composing crew trade their skills for those of paste-up artists with photo-offset printing, and proof-readers give way to word processors when computers were introduced into the newsroom in 1976, Gagnon stayed on, as the newspaper’s human “word processor,” typing up thousands of birth announcements, school lunch menus, along with high school honor rolls, graduates and scholarships — plus college dean’s lists, engagements and weddings — during a transition time when that material still came in as printouts.
She was even responsible for typing the livestock auction results, local TV listings, senior activities and religion calendar.
When funeral directors brought obituaries into the newsroom — often announcing the deaths of people she knew from her years in the community and from typing their names through the years — Gagnon was often the first to know, typing them up for the news pages.
She was a Holy Trinity Church greeter and community meals team member.
“I love to garden,” said Gagnon, who was a core member of the Greenfield Garden Club.
A breast cancer survivor, Gagnon was a Relay for Life team member, raising money participating year after year — including this year’s event, not many weeks before her death.
A Liturgy of Christian Burial will be held July 15 at 10 a.m. at Holy Trinity Church in Greenfield, followed by burial at Calvary Cemetery. There will be no calling hours.
Memorial contributions may be made in lieu of flowers to the American Cancer Society, 59 Bobala Road, Holyoke, MA 01040; Attn: Relay for Life of Franklin County, Team “Wishing Wiles You Work.”