We had a full page Illinois Power Company ad each week in our weekly newspaper. We would receive the mold for the ad in the mail from the power company. It would be a hard and thick single layer paper material with the image embossed in it. Maybe twice as thick as card stock, and hard and brittle. It would have the text and any picture they wanted in the ad. It was a mirror image, of course. We would set the mold up in a holder (can't remember the proper name) and pour hot lead in the cavity between the holder and the mold. We used modeling clay on the back side of the mold to keep it from bending out from the weight of the lead, which would leave an unwanted dark spot on the printed page. The finished casting would be about a quarter inch thick. After it cooled, we would carefully strip the mold away and see if we got a good cast. If we did, (it rarely failed) we would drill small holes in the corners of the casting, then carefully nail the casting to a piece of wood about 3/4 inch thick (so it would be at the same elevation as the type). Card stock was used for shims behind the wood to fine tune the height. You strived for a clean image without indenting the paper.
It was an interesting place to work. I was a teenager, so that was 55 or so years ago.
The machine that we poured the ads with had an open hot lead pot with a big handle that would tip the pot to pour the lead into the molds. After the last casting was made, the shop owner would lay a sheet of newspaper on the surface of the hot lead, then set an old coffee pot on the newspaper. The newspaper sheet would turn brown, but wouldn't ignite, and it would "float" that coffee pot all evening. I never did figure that out.
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Today's Featured Article - A Lifetime of David Brown - by Samuel Kennedy. I was born in 1950 and reared on my family�s 100 acre farm. It was a fairly typical Northern Ireland farm where the main enterprise was dairying but some pigs, poultry and sheep were also kept. Potatoes were grown for sale and oats were grown to be used for cattle and horse feeding. Up to about 1958 the dairy cows were fed hay with some turnips and after that grass silage was the main winter feed. That same year was the last in which flax was grown on the farm. Flax provided the fibre which w
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