The Wolverine Press. Photo by Rob Hess.

Wolverine Press is a letterpress publisher owned and staffed by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and housed by MLibrary. We own 6 presses, but when I think of The Press, this is what I think of.

This press was made by the Chandler and Price company of Cleveland, Ohio sometime in September of 1904. It was purchased new by G.K. Doud, owner of the Parma News Publishing Company of Parma, Michigan. The Parma News was a traditional village newspaper and printshop with a wide assortment of presses. Their primary press was a large bed Lee Cylinder used for printing the newspaper, but Doud likely bought this press for what was called “job” printing.

This is a 10X15 Chandler and Price “Old Style” Platen Press. It’s an “old style” because it is the original design that CP made between 1884 and 1913, and it is characterized by the Victorian curve of the spokes on its flywheel. CP went on to make New Style presses, with straight spokes, fewer individual parts, and more efficient production methods from 1911 until 1964. The press is designated 10X15 because this describes the largest dimensions of the forme that can be printed. The press closes like a clamshell with the 10X15 forme striking against a 12X18 platen where the paper is placed. It’s perfectly calibrated to print letter-sized sheets.

Doud would have used it to print letterhead, social and business stationery, business and legal formes, pamphlets, and hand-bills. It was not designed, generally speaking, for book-work, multi-color work or “prestige” printing. It printed business cards and packing slips, invoice sheets and parking tickets. Because it only required one man to operate, it was the Victorian equivalent of a Xerox machine.

It originally came with a foot treadle, and was powered like an old sewing machine. It may also have had a drive wheel that was driven by an overhead belt. Sometime in the 1920s or 30s, a Kimball electric motor was added, which still runs the press today.

The Parma News was established in 1897 by C.D. Potter and Snyder, and then exclusively run by Potter until at least 1903. G.K. Doud assumed control of the print shop in 1904 or 1905, and is the most likely person to have bought the press new, probably as an upgrade to expand beyond newspaper and book printing. He owned the press until 1915 when William E. Beebe took over, and Beebe likewise operated the company until at least 1922. Rae S. Corliss ran the press from 1925 until in 1939 he abruptly failed to pay his mortgage.

It happens that the mortgage at that time was held by Chase Salmon Osborn, who had served as the 27th Governor of Michigan from 1911 to 1913, and had served on the University of Michigan Board of Regents before that from 1908-1911. Osborn had worked at and owned several newspapers in his time, but most famously he had bought and built up The Sault News, the weekly newspaper serving Sault St. Marie in the Upper Peninsula of the state. It was from this vantage that Osborn built the political connections that would lead him to State Fish and Game Warden in 1895, Commissioner of Railroads in 1899, Republican Delegate in support of William H. Taft in 1908, then the board of regents and the Governor’s Mansion.  As governor his two lasting achievements were the establishment of a presidential primary where party delegates were directly elected, and a workman’s compensation system that protected injured workers in the state.

But for University of Michigan Literary history, Chase Osborn should be best remembered as the man who paid the full $5000 for the Fellowship in Creative Arts that brought the famed poet Robert Frost to campus in 1921. Frost thanked Governor Osborn directly in his letter accepting the year-long post in Ann Arbor. And it was Governor Osborn who bought the house that Frost lived in that year, and which is now on display at Greenfield Village in Dearborn. This makes Osborn one of the first major benefactors of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, predating Avery Hopwood by about 10 years.

But Osborn was also attentive to smaller things. Osborn seems to have always kept his hand in newspapers, and when Corliss failed to pay his mortgage on time in October of 1939, Osborn took possession of the Parma News, and thus this press. But at 79, Osborn wasn’t interested in running a small print shop in a rural village with fewer than 600 residents and no substantive industry. Instead, he turned the operation over immediately to his grandson, Chase Osborn III, who had recently graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, and was then working in the advertising department of the Ann Arbor News.

Governor Chase Osborn owned the Parma News for less than a week, passing it on to his grandson Chase Osborn III in October of 1939 after the previous owner, Rae Corliss, defaulted on his mortgage.

Young Chase and his wife Cornelia (Davidson) Osborn took possession of the paper, the print shop, and this press, but Chase wasn’t with the press for long.The world went to war and Corporal Chase Osborn III served in the Army, while his wife returned with their new son to stay with her parents in Port Huron. Chase was especially scarred by the Battle of Anzio in 1944, where he stayed in a foxhole for three days with the body of a dead friend. The next year, still shaken, he wrote a long letter to the Sault Evening News (then owned by his uncle) where he said, “I wondered what his mother would think if she really knew what an unnecessary thing—what a useless thing it was for her son to die, and all the other sons.”

Incidentally, it was in that same battle that Eric Waters, the father of future Pink Floyd Bassist Roger Waters, would die. Waters would later go on to write a score of rock albums about the trauma, including the landmark THE WALL. For his part, Chase jumped to his death in 1966, from the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron.

But in 1945 a badly shaken Chase Osborn III had returned to oversee the Parma News, and he didn’t have the stomach for it. The News at that time had a pair of older women who kept accounts, and an elderly tramp printer named A.O. Le Bell. But Chase needed more help, so he brought in a young navy veteran named Lee Chamberlain.

Lee, 70 years later, remembered, “Here Chase was, studying law at Michigan, and all of a sudden he became a publisher and he didn’t know anything about it.

Lee sat for an interview with Fritz Swanson, current director of the Wolverine Press, on April 19th, 2012. He turned 91 two days previously. They spoke for about 3 hours.

“At the time I was working on a daily newspaper out in Albion, The Recorder, and the man [Chase] that owned the Parma News, it was a weekly, didn’t know anything about printing but he was trying to print a newspaper, a four sheet. Starting in around 1945, I used to come over here nights after I got through with the daily and I’d help him put the paper out and do a bit of job printing. He did a very little–a meager amount of commercial printing.

“One day, when I was working at the Recorder, Chase knew where I was at and he called me and wanted to know if I could come over and take a look and assess and see if there was anything worth anything. He was about to suspend operations. He wanted to know if I would make him an offer. Now, I don’t have any recollection as to what I offered, but it was ridiculous. Just a number, just a figure out of the air. I was standing at the boss’s desk in Albion, who was the best man, the only man I ever really worked for, and he said, “Would you buy it?”

“And I said, “Yeah.”

“My boss turned around and said, “You gotta be crazy.” But he said, “Try it anyway.” And he offered to let me come back if it didn’t work out. He was that kind of a guy. The years I worked for him he treated me more like a son than an employee.”

And it was in that way that this press passed into the capable hands of Lee Chamberlain, who ran the Parma News Publishing Company, and then the renamed Lee Printing, from 1949 until 1982. Lee and his wife Jean owned this press, and the Parma News, for more years than any owner before or since, for a total of 33 years. But Lee had already decided that letterpress, as a commercial enterprise, had died, and so he worked to buy new offset presses when he was able. The old Chandler and Price was quickly surpassed, but it stayed in the shop, pulling its weight as best it could.

Jean and Lee Chamberlain. The Michigan Press Association recognized Lee and Jean Chamberlain in the early 1950s as the youngest newspaper publishers in the state. Here they are holding The Parma News, Jackson county’s oldest weekly newspaper. Shortly after purchasing the paper, Lee put his design stamp on it by changing the flag and headline type to Goudy Bold, which gave the paper a more antique, colonial feel.

Lee and his wife Jean Crawford Chamberlain practically lived in the shop, their daughter slept in a day bed beneath the paper cutter when she was small, and their whole lives were made through printing.

“My wife, Jean, and I were living in an apartment in Albion and I went home and told her what I’d done and… She didn’t think too much of that.”

“But she says, “Let’s go try it anyway.” That was the kind of a gal she was.

“We were together from the time we started dating in school days, so we were together almost seventy years before I lost her. She worked with me in the printing business all those years. She did all the book work and the estimating, the hand work.”

Jean herself attended the University of Michigan for a time, in the School of Music, though she finished her degree at Cleary Business College, because it seemed more practical.

Just a few years later, Lee took on an assistant of his own, a boy named Tom Trumble.

Lee and Tom. Taken in 1957, this would have been from very shortly after Tom was hired.

It was Tom, in the mid-1980s, who would buy the letterpress component of Lee’s enterprise. The paper was sold to Jerry Kohler, the first woman to own the paper, and she had it printed at The Exponent in Brooklyn, Michigan. (The News would then pass on to Ralph Rice for several years—like Chase he had bought it for his son, and like Chase his son ultimately refused it; then my sister Erika and her husband Lucas bought it—out of pity more than ambition. But before all that, I worked for the Parma News when it was owned by Jerry Kohler. I managed the subscription catalogue, which was a box of 1200 index cards. I also prepared a copy of each issue to be microfilmed by Central Michigan University. I was 14.)

But while the paper, as an idea, went with Jerry Kohler, most of the equipment went with Tom. He brought our press, and a wide array of other type and equipment, back to his home on South Parma Road.

Tom Trumble, drawn by Jason Polan.

My father, the game warden for the region covering Jackson County, was very good friends with Tom Trumble. He would drive down to Tom’s house and they would work on tractors together. I remember seeing the press for the first time in the late 1980s. I believe it was still in the barn, by the dairy cows, as it had not yet made its way into the basement. I remember sitting on an overturned milk pail while my father cut steel with a torch, and I slowly rotated the flywheel of the press and studied its motion.

Tom and his wife Susie operated our press, printing envelopes, cards, even election ballots on it well into the new century. Tom was actively printing commercial work on his two letterpress presses until his health began to fail in 2007. Tom died of cancer in 2011. He had owned our press for 29 years. He was 70, and fate had prevented him from besting Lee who didn’t die until this year, 2016, at the age of 95.

My brother-in-law Lucas owned the press briefly after Tom’s death, storing it in his barn.

And when the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan agreed to help me set up a letterpress publisher that its students could work at, I knew immediately what press had to come to Ann Arbor.

Traditionally an historic press is named for its first owner, or in some cases its most famous owner. By rights we might call it the Doud press, because he was the one who bought it. Or we might call it the Osborn press, because the governor was certainly the most storied person to ever own it. We might call it the Chamberlain press, because dear Lee owned it for the longest time. Sometimes I call it the Trumble press, because I miss Tom, and sometimes I call it the Tom and Susie Trumble Press, because Susie ran it herself for many years, and so often the wives of old printers are lost in the telling of history, and usually they were as much “the printer” as their husbands. But none of this is satisfactory. There is too much history in that press to tie it to one person, or one period.

It has Michigan in it.

I think we will call it The Wolverine Press.

By Fritz Swanson, director of the Wolverine Press.