The Blue Mountain Eagle said goodbye to an old friend last week. It was a vintage Champion paper cutter, a relic of the paper’s commercial printing past. Roughly the size of a foosball table but more closely resembling a drill press, it was a heavy-duty piece of industrial equipment with a cast-iron base, a broad steel work surface, and a 3-foot guillotine blade for slicing thick stacks of paper. If you’re old enough to remember telephone books, imagine a blade built for cutting the metro New York City directory. It had a big adjusting wheel for getting the blade into position, and a two-handed lever as long as a hockey stick for forcing the blade through hundreds of sheets of paper at a time. It weighed around half a ton.

We’re not sure how old the thing was, but we assume it followed the Blue Mountain Eagle staff decades ago to our “new” office at 195 N. Canyon Blvd. from the newspaper’s old digs on West Main Street. We are confident in that assumption because, as we learned recently when we tried to move it, the big iron beast was too big to fit through the door.

As much as we liked having it around, it took up a lot of space. And when we got ready to remodel our office, we knew it was going to be a problem to work around. We finally decided we would use some heavy-duty floor jacks to lift it off the ground, then slide a piano dolly under it so it could be moved around while we had new flooring installed.

Then Caleb from Hutch’s printing came to our rescue. He agreed to take the antique off our hands and partially dismantled it to the point that it could be wrestled out the door. Then Jake from True Value Hardware showed up with his forklift to transport the base of the machine — which still weighed several hundred pounds — to Caleb’s print shop on Southeast Dayton Street. Caleb, who has a great appreciation for the history of the printing industry, plans to reassemble the paper cutter there and put it to work. He has also promised to let the Eagle staff come and visit.

In this week’s edition of the Eagle, look for Rick LaMountain’s front-page story on Grant County’s volunteer fire departments and the struggle they are all having to maintain a sufficient volunteer base. We’ll also have an update on the antitrust lawsuit filed against Iron Triangle by a coalition of businesses, loggers and timberland owners, plus coverage of local high school sports and more.  

As always, I want to take this opportunity to thank our subscribers for their support. We can’t do this work without you!

— Bennett Hall