Tommy Plymesser, a gentle and soundly anchored soul, greeted the world just over 100 years ago during his home-birthed arrival on – ironically – Farewell Street in Newport.
Later, during a long career in South County, he honed a particular skill: He could close his fingers around an idea, or a well-turned metaphor, and actually hold it in his hand.
That’s because he was a printer, mostly in the hot-type era when the columns of a newspaper – in his case the weekly Narragansett Times – were assembled line by line in sentences cast from molten lead.
Tom, who died April 12, was buried with military honors in the Rhode Island Veterans’ Cemetery, an indication that he was also conversant with a calling beyond the print shop.
In wartime 1942, long before he learned to operate the newspaper’s typesetting machines, he joined the Navy and trained in Newport to handle a more lethal device: the torpedo.
I met him in the composing room of the Times when the paper hired me as a fledgling reporter in 1962 – fresh out of the Army myself and full of youthful swagger that Tom abided with a patient smile and a teaching hand.
In that bygone era he introduced me to the colorful, inky world in which newspapers were birthed, populated by turtles, pigs, dingbats, and an initially terrifying receptacle known as the “hell box.”
Turtles were rolling, metal-topped tables on which the heavy lead page forms were taken from compositors’ workbenches to the press.
Pigs were elongated ingots of lead fed into the crucibles of dinosaurian Linotype machines – clanking, keyboarded behemoths that molded the liquid metal into words.
Dingbats – and I am not referring to those of us who worked in the newsroom – were typographical extroverts, the ornamental arrows, stars, flags, and what have you that dressed up ads.
I quickly learned under Tom’s tutelage that after each press run the type was tossed into the “hell box” – so named in the trade because its contents were destined for a furnace, to be melted down and re-used.
Over the dozen or so years I worked with him, Tom mentioned his Navy service, but never offered a jot about it.
It was only from his obit that I learned he was assigned to an 80-foot torpedo patrol boat, PT120, which patrolled enemy-infested waters off New Guinea.
The small, speedy boats, the most famous of which was John F. Kennedy’s battle-ravaged PT109, were dubbed “devil boats” by the Japanese for the daring of their crews who engaged enemy craft of all sizes.
Tom’s boat, nicknamed the “Roarin’ 20,” could dash at 46 miles an hour and was armed not just with machine guns, but with four torpedoes that were his responsibility.
A long time coming was the revelation that in my early years I had worked alongside a “torpedo man” who left the service in 1945 possessed of the Asiatic Pacific Ribbon and the World War II Victory Medal.
The Narragansett Times hired Tom in 1947, a year when in a fascinating confluence of national and local history the vice president of that little newspaper was the same JFK who once commanded war-torn PT109.
In 1946, Kennedy had invested $2,000 in the Times to help a Navy buddy, Fred Wilson, buy it. The future U.S. president retained his long-distance title at the Times for 18 months, during which Massachusetts voters sent him to Congress.
The Tom Plymesser I knew, who personified two eras long since gone, was neither president nor publisher – just a quiet American who with courage and deftness held fast to his values and commitments. I suppose that’s not front page material, but I’m convinced that set in type there, it would look just fine.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist and a former editor of the Narragansett Times.