For longtime pressmen, move to print Star in Phoenix is bittersweet

It was a badge of honor, really, when the old guys with decades of ink beneath their fingernails gave Jeff Aronhalt the job of working the color section.

He was in his early 20s and just a few years on the job as an apprentice pressman with the Arizona Daily Star, putting to work all that he had learned in high school vocational classes. And to get to man the controls on 1A, the front page of his hometown newspaper, was pretty special.

“I took pride in this,” he said last week, as the clock ticked down to the last time the Star will be printed at the paper’s south-side plant. “We were printing nearly 200,000 papers (between the Star and the Tucson Citizen). It was a fun time.”

That fun time will be a memory when the Arizona Daily Star moves its printing operations to Phoenix. The paper, which has been published in Tucson since 1877, will be printed on the Arizona Republic press in northwest Phoenix beginning with the May 21 issue. All editorial and business operations will remain in Tucson.

The move means the loss of 15 part-time and 45 full-time positions from the pressroom, packaging and transportation center, where employees insert advertisements and get the papers ready for delivery. There’s a chance that some of the pressmen will make the leap to Phoenix and continue printing the Star, but Aronhalt, who turns 60 in August, won’t be among them.

“I had a good run,” he said. “I think I’m ready to go get a $12- to $15-an-hour job, maybe as a delivery driver.”

Pressman Marco Fierro can see himself driving a truck part time after he leaves the Star. Just something to keep the 55-year-old south-side native busy until he’s able to retire, he said. He wouldn’t need insurance; his wife, Eunice, whom he met at the Star not long after he started in 1984, works at a nearby public school and gets good benefits, he said.

Fierro was two years out of Sunnyside High School when the Star hired him to work in shipping and delivery. When there was an opening in the press room the following year, he made the switch, apprenticing his first four years before becoming a union pressman.

He has spent the past 35 years listening to the rumbling, whizzing rhythm of the press running at full throttle, the smell of ink permeating the air as it cranks up to spectacular speeds.

“I like the smell of ink,” he admitted. “It reminds me of when I was a little kid smelling the paper.”

Damian Nunez has been smelling that ink for 32 years alongside his press maintenance colleagues. He won’t miss it when he retires along with the press, but he said he’s sad that the Star’s long tradition of printing in Tucson is coming to an end.

“We’ve been printing the Star since the 1800s. For them to close this place down … ” he said, sitting in the small press maintenance office earlier this month as the press hummed loud enough to drown out conversations behind the closed door.

His colleague Ted Furphy, who has worked at the Star since 1998, said pressroom employees have long joked about the day when the press at the Star would stop running.

“I could see this coming,” said the 60-year-old Australian who has lived in the United States since 1986.

“It’s going to be bittersweet,” added Steve Wood, 59, who joined the crew in 2005. “It’s going to be sad when it’s gone.”

Nancy Loyola never imagined that she would spend most of her adult life in the Star’s packaging center, where she started 27 years ago working the insert loader machines. Over the years, she was given more and more responsibility until she eventually was promoted to supervisor.

“I actually love my job,” said the 52-year-old, who is exploring opportunities that will keep her in the Tucson print industry. “I’ve been there so long, and I know the people. The people that you work with are like your family. You work with them every day.”