AFTER NEARLY 50 YEARS, SOUTHEAST MISSOURIAN EMPLOYEES SAY GOODBYE

Don Boeller retired from the Southeast Missourian Friday after 46 years in the reproduction photography department.

Much has changed since Boeller began working at the newspaper in July 1953 when he was 17 and just out of high school.

Boeller began in the engraving department, where he took pictures of pages, with the resulting negatives used to engrave zinc plates used in the letter press printing process. When the paper made the switch to offset printing of the newspaper, which uses negatives burned into aluminum plates, Boeller's department changed to reproduction photography. He took pictures of the pictures that appeared in the paper, as well as pictures of the pages with copy and ads to make negatives for making the plates.

With the advent of computers, copy is placed on pages by computer rather than by hand. The last few years, Boeller has been making negatives of those pages. Now some page negatives come directly from the computer, bypassing the need for reproduction photography. "Computers have changed a lot of things in production," Boeller said.