Jul. 1—More than 50 years after Jimmy Salazar started pasting waxed strips of typeset paper to create the pages of The Santa Fe New Mexican, colleagues fondly remember the kindness he generously gave to the tenderfoots of the newspaper business.
Salazar, 90, died June 15. His funeral is scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday at St. Anne Catholic Church in Santa Fe.
"Jimmy had been there for a while when I started in January of 1973," said Ernie Casados, who worked under Salazar's tutelage for 10 years. "He was a pleasure to work with. He took me under his wing. He taught me so much. I was 19 and fresh out of high school. He was a great person to work with."
Back then, creating a newspaper was a far cry from what it is today, said Howard Houghton, who also began his career under the watchful eye of Salazar and who later became a city editor.
In the 1970s, typesetters were part of the International Typographical Union, Houghton said, and so the younger, nonunion hires were limited in the tasks they were allowed to perform. The Vietnam War was winding down, and the newspaper hired "a bunch of young guys for $100 a week. It wasn't the glamorous part of the newspaper business. We didn't get bylines," Houghton said.
"We laid out the pages and put headlines on them, which we did on paper," he said. "We used pica poles back then. The back shop guys were all older than us. We were all in our 20s, wet-nosed, and Jimmy was part of a crew that had been there for a while. He had a lot of tolerance for us young, green newspaper people. He was a very nice guy, very considerate and tolerant of our ignorance of how the newspaper would fit together."
Casados said he remembers Salazar arriving at work every morning with his lunchbox. He also remembers the donut breaks.
"We'd take our break right at 10 a.m. and go out the side door. There was a bench out there and there was this old gentleman, and he used to go to a bakery and buy all the day-old donuts and sell them to us for 10 cents," Casados said. "Jimmy and all of us would go out and buy a donut on our break. There are a lot of good memories. It was a nice place to work, a lot of company picnics and Christmas parties. We were a tight-knit family."
John Robertson also got his start in the 1970s. Inexperienced with newspapers, he was assigned, like so many new hires, to the copy desk by then-editor John Bott. In those days, the newspaper's operations, including the printing press, were all contained on Marcy Street.