Two years have now passed since I officially became a ward of the welfare state, and my journey into this deplorable valley of the shadow of bureaucrats still is at best perplexing. As age 67 greets me, I can vouch for the notion that the golden years aren’t all they are stacked up to be. There is no gold in these here years.

This Friday, Oct. 13, I will solidify my membership in the prune juice generation which formally begins when one reaches the lamentable age of 65 and becomes forever dependent upon a Medicare card, supplemental insurance for health care, and handouts from friends.

This is a time of life dedicated to maintenance and repair, just keeping the body and soul together and accepting the sobering fact that the alternative to old age isn’t really all that great.

I stand, at the moment, at the portal of the great unknown... at time of great failings — failing body parts, failing eyesight, failing eardrums, failing muscles, failing memory, failing organs, etcetera. The only comforting aspect of all this is that I tend to forget everything that has gone wrong with my body and I don’t care.

What I can’t forget is that 42 of 67 years — actually it is more than 42 if I count early days as a printer’s apprentice and summers while away at college — I have been continuously associated with this newspaper, and it is indeed frightening to ponder that the newspaper, at age 98, is only 31 years my senior.

If I sound older than my years, it is because I started my apprenticeship in this business early on — with a broom in my hand and ink under my fingernails — when its production was accomplished by an entirely different method. I have lived through two decidedly dissimilar ears of the printing trade which, for practical purposes, can be compared to exchanging a horse and buggy for a supercharged sports car with wings.

The printing trade has changed more in the past five decades than it did in the five centuries since Mr. Gutenberg started it all with moveable type. My recollections go back to when printing was not too far removed, technically, from those earliest years of the trade.

When I started as a printer’s devil — a rather inglorious term for a apprentice janitor — printing was synonymous with dust, ink, lead, linecasting machines, letterpresses, paper and profane language. The ink and paper are all that remain.

My job then involved sweeping floors, melting lead and pouring it into bars, taking type out of cases and putting it back again, and pouring it into bars, taking type out of cases and putting it back again, and getting generally black with printer’s ink from washing page forms and press rollers with kerosene.

In those days, printing was the primary business — that is why this place was and still is called a printing office — and newspapering was secondary: The town printer was expected to also be an editor. Such is not now the case. The publisher emeritus of this newspaper, the late R.E. “Foxy” Warden, was among the last of the old printer-editors.

At that time, with a lot of hard work, some talent, and a miracle called a Linotype, a newspaper was born every week. I am not certain how, but newspapering and those responsible for it survived those years of hot lead, heavy page chases, hand-fed presses, quoin keys, hand towels stiff enough to stand in a corner of the bathroom, and wall-to-wall printers’ ink.

Newspapering today, with high-speed computers, mind-boggling software, digitalized photographs, laser printers and offset presses, is strictly a white-collar business. It is difficult to believe that in the span of my lifetime I have witnessed so much change — change that never seems to end — in the way a newspaper is published. I have become, in my own time, an antiquity in the backshop.

And while nothing is the same anymore insofar as physical production is concerned, the philosophy of the business hasn’t changed. We still attempt to print the news, tell the truth, be fair, act as the community’s conscience and serve a repository of information about our town and it’s people.

As I creak into my 67th years, at times baffled by computers that do not respond to a blacksmith’s unkind touch, confused by bits and bytes and chips microcircuitry, and wearied by the fast pace of contemporary newspapering, I am filled with memories and come misgivings. As many have guessed by earlier comments here, if plans materialize this will be the last birthday I celebrate as editor.

Father Time has caught up with me.