My column this week is slightly different: I profile Ron Pike, who just retired from the Monitor after working here 55 years. He’s 80, and only retired because he hurt his leg and it slowed him down so much that he thought he was making work harder for other people.
There are techy aspects to the story, because he started on old letterpress printer, went to offset, then to a brand of offset called Flexographic.
This might be my favorite part, about the paper route he had in rural Epsom when he was 8 years old:
The route had 36 homes but stretched out over a full 7 miles, because Epsom was a farming town back then. He walked the whole route – “I could have run half of it,” Pike said wistfully – after picking up the daily bundle of papers dropped off by the Suncook Valley Railroad after school (the Monitor was an afternoon paper back then).
“It was a steam engine, I kid you not,” he said. “I did the route for about five years. I can see every one of those stops even today.”
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