It would have been nice to see Moris Dell one last time, but his health had been too bad for the past few years to let him travel from Denver to Emporia. We have to remember Moris as he was the last time we saw him, at a party Mike Turnbull gave for him and his wife, Jo, when they returned to Emporia for a visit.
Moris still looked good then — but he was a little older, a little slower, a little grayer.
It is easier to remember him as he was 40 years ago, when he was one of the gods of the backshop at The Gazette.
The “backshop” was what the staff called the composing room — a hot, noisy place where the metal type was cast and set into place for each day’s newspaper.
Moris was a compositor, one of the men who hand-set type and put pages together. Every day, he would stand at wheeled iron tables called turtles, assembling pages in big steel frames called chases. It was exacting work. The compositors and the Linotype operators were the most adept workers in the newspaper and, often, the best at spotting errors.
Putting a page together in type required a special skill. Compositors stood at the top end of the page as they worked, and they had to be able to read stories and headlines upside down and backwards. It was a common occurrence for Moris, laying type in the chase at lightning speed, to stop a passing editor.
“Hey,” he’d say, jabbing his finger at a place on the page, “is that right?”
The editor would bend close, squinting to make sense of the jumble of letters.
“No, it’s not.”
“It didn’t seem right to me,” Moris would say. Then he’d laugh and call over to a Linotype operator for a corrected line.
Moris was just about unique in the backshop in his good nature. Putting a newspaper together out of metal type was physically demanding and deadlines made the work mentally and emotionally demanding. It was a profession that could make the best of workers morose and the worst of them downright mean.
Not Moris. A really bad day might bring him low, but it could never get him down. He was always there with a kind word, a joke or friendly advice for those who were handling the stress with less aplomb.
He was a good and great man, and his retirement left The Gazette a poorer place.
The same can be said for Emporia. Moris and Jo were just as busy in the community as Moris was in the backshop. They were pillars of Mount Olive A.M.E. Church. He served on the United Way’s budget committee and the boards of the Girl Scout council and Camp Alexander. She was chairman of the Human Relations Committee and the Council on Aging and a member of the boards of the Eastside Neighborhood Association and the Emporia Day Care Center. She was also the director of the Fellowship Meals program.
Together, they shared a love story that would make you cry. They were first married when Moris was 6 and Jo was 5, in a “Tom Thumb” wedding at Mount Olive. Of course, they didn’t get really married until 14 years later, but it is nice to think of this year as their 78th wedding anniversary.
For their friends, 100 years would not have been enough.
Moris is coming home at last. His funeral will be Saturday and his friends will be there.
And all of them will have their own good memories of that good man.
Patrick S. Kelley
Editorial Page Editor
syewell (anonymous) says...
I was saddened to hear the news of his death. Interestingly, he died the same say my dad did, June 18th, but 41 years later. He and my dad bowled on the same team for years at Blustem Bowl and were friends. Years later he came up to me and told me what a good man my dad was, and I really appreciated that. Rest in peace Moris.
June 25, 2009 at 7:07 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )