In the back of a carport, Larry Hauser pointed to a dust-covered relic weighing in at several thousand pounds.
It had been sitting there for 20 years, and on Friday, Jan. 9, three people were excited to see the 100-year-old piece of equipment.
“This is a Chandler and Price 10-by-15,” Hauser said. “Every press I worked for that had a job press, had one of these presses.”
Hauser, 76, of Cortez, was showing the printing equipment to Jim Price, Tami Graham and Betsy Harrison, of the Mancos Common Press, a group dedicated to preserving the art of printing.
Hauser said he collected the equipment in Dolores.
“They did a lot of small jobs, such as business envelopes and cards,” he said.
The Mancos group was excited to see the Chandler and Price because it looked like one in an old photograph of the Mancos press, which they recently got running again.
Hauser glanced at the black-and-white photo.
“Hey, I have that chair too,” he said. “It’s a linotype chair.”
Inside a storage room, Hauser held up the chair.
“They would cut off the legs of the chairs and use them as linotype chairs,” he said.
Hauser was 14 years old when he got into the printing business. He retired from the Cortez Journal in 2002.
“I worked after school and on weekends on a press just like this,” Hauser said, pointing to a photograph of a flatbed press.
Inside a storage room, Hauser had 50 cases of type, all different fonts, sizes and types.
“My uncle was a pressman at the Cortez Journal before me,” Hauser said. “I came to his funeral, and Russ Brown offered me his job.”
Hauser showed the group a variety of tools: a make-up rule, a container that held white kerosene for cleaning the press, a planing block, forms, height measurer, type sticks and blanks.
“We are trying to build a school for the printing and graphic arts,” Law told Hauser. “To have someone who has used all these things in real life is priceless.”
Law told Hauser he needed to teach his trade.
“These kids don’t know what printing is,” Harrison said.
Small hand presses, used to print cards, really got Harrison excited.
“Children can learn to use these,” she said.
Hauser said the hand presses used to be part of the Dolores Star. Hauser bought the presses from Don Ripley, who bought them from Larry Pleasant.
“Nobody knows this stuff anymore,” Law said.
Hauser also said he had the operating manual somewhere of the Cranston Press, the large press inside the Mancos Times building. The building and press were recently donated to the Mancos Common Press by the Ballantine family, which owns The Cortez Journal, Dolores Star and Mancos Times.
Hauser said he would donate his printing relics to the Mancos Common Press and felt good that the art of printing will continue.
“A press like that is what I learned to run,” he said.
Now the tricky part comes – how to get the large press, which Hauser nicknamed “The Snapper,” out of the carport and into the Mancos Times building.
As far as what has happened to the large press that actually printed the Dolores Star all those years ago, there is no word. It would have weighed two or three times that of “The Snapper.”
“It was common for papers to have these smaller presses for smaller jobs,” Hauser said.
Rob Carrigan, a former Dolores resident, who would get paid a half-cent to fold a Dolores Star as it rolled off the press in Dolores in the 1960s, has been looking for it and was excited to hear that Hauser might have it, but figured it was one of the smaller presses.
The last he heard, he wrote in a column, is that it was loaded on a truck and headed for New Mexico.
“It will turn up,” Carrigan wrote.