As she prepared to print hundreds of newspapers inside the ink-stained walls of the Petersburg Pilot’s pressroom, press operator Ola Richards made a wish.
“She will behave today,” Richards said. “She will be nice to us.”
“She” is Tasha, a metal printing press machine the size of a school bus. It’s named after the previous press operator, Tasha Prus, who died in 2023.
Women have helmed the Petersburg press for over two decades. Prus started work at the Petersburg Pilot shortly after the press machine arrived in the 90s. Prus passed down her knowledge to Richards, who was the press assistant at the time.
Now, only a handful of women run printing presses in the entire country, according to Jerry Loesch. He works for printing press company Impressions Worldwide and is the brother of former Pilot publisher Ron Loesch. He occasionally visits Petersburg to give Tasha a tune-up.
Prus’ daughter, Indigo Hanahan, remembers how proud her mom was of working her way up to become press operator.
“She was proud of being a press operator, and she was proud of being a woman press operator and she was good at her job,” Hanahan said.
After her mom died, Hanahan briefly worked at the Pilot as a press assistant. She said the distinct smell —the must from loads of newsprint and ink— is the same as when she and her family used to live in an apartment above the Pilot.
“When I first went back [in the press room] to help out, it … hit me like a ton of bricks, like my childhood,” Hanahan said.
But the job, ultimately, wasn’t for her.
“I was impressed that my mom could. I’m impressed that Ola can. For me, it was way too loud,” she said. “I can’t think, let alone work on a machine with that much noise.”
The machine was built in 1966 and started printing in California before it was brought to Petersburg. On top of being loud, it’s also very finicky.
“It feels like, if you’re not careful, you’ll just get sucked into it and squished up into a newspaper,” Pilot publisher Orin Pierson said. “It takes a … sort of intuitive sense of how to do it well. And Tasha [Prus] totally got there, which was really awesome.”
Pierson said Richards has continued Prus’ legacy of being patient in the pressroom and maintaining the machine.
“I will also give Ola major credit,” he said. “Her skill as a press operator is really what lets us have a high-quality locally printed newspaper that you can hold in your hands.”
A third of the nation’s print newspapers have shut down in the past two decades, but print is still popular in Southeast Alaska. Pierson says 10 to 1 Petersburg Pilot subscribers have a print subscription rather than an online one.
In addition to their weekly run of the Pilot, Petersburg’s crew also prints two other regional publications: the Wrangell Sentinel and the Chilkat Valley News.
“I feel like the small newspapers they still have … heart,” said Richards. “I mean … those papers are about us, right?”
Richards said the machine has many good years left, leaving an opportunity for others to continue the legacy.
“I really would love to meet some young person who is kind of like, ‘Oh yeah, I want to learn. I want to take over one day,’” she said. “Maybe there’s a brave, crazy person like me.”
Sometimes, printing those thousands of newspapers each week is a breeze for Richards. Other times, Tasha doesn’t cooperate.
Hanahan said, “It’s because my mom’s bored in heaven, trying to make trouble.”
(Photo courtesy of Indigo Hanahan)
Editor’s Note: For transparency, KFSK News Director Olivia Rose worked at the Petersburg Pilot before joining KFSK. Editors from Alaska Public Media and Coast Alaska reviewed this story to ensure accuracy.
