It was a cold Thursday evening in February. The pressroom crew was assembled for the weekly run, to print the Gazette on our 50-year-old Goss Community web press. Tonight was a 12-pager, meaning three units were each running a 35-inch-wide roll, 975 pounds when loaded.

It wasn’t cold in the pressroom, thanks to the nicety of central heat, but the air was dry, much drier than normal on this Island, after a week of cold, sunny days and colder, windy nights. As a result, the paper was not cooperating, or perhaps the press was not amenable to the paper, but in any case it was wrinkling and drifting and the webs were tearing any time we tried to get up to speed. But without getting up to speed you couldn’t get the ink and water to balance and we were throwing away bad papers but hardly getting any good ones.

In short, it was a chaotic mess. For hours, myself and Music, our frenetic pressman, and the rest of the crew labored mightily to right the ship, but one problem led to another in a classic case of cascading failures. After running out of paper and changing rolls on two units we were down to just one roll and though we were making progress at overcoming our difficulties there was a sudden, unique realization: we didn’t have enough paper to finish the job.

A desperate call was placed to our man at Cape Cod Express, where we have a trailer full of paper rolls, but he could not be reached, having long ago learned to silence his phone to avoid these sorts of late-night entreaties.

We were out of luck, or at least out of paper, except of course for that trailer full of rolls up at the airport. And thus commenced a round of serious pondering and head-scratching. What if we just liberated a roll or two from the trailer? I did have the key so no breaking was required, just entering. And off-loading.

Music’s truck-bed was about 27 inches off the ground and a standard trailer is about 50 inches off the ground, so we only had to drop a roll about two feet. Did I mention that a new roll is around 975 pounds, close to half a ton?

While there was no doubt it could handle the weight, my vague grasp of Newtonian physics, not to mention a history of ill-considered endeavors, suggested that there would be considerable force from that two-foot drop. Would it bust the shocks, the springs, the axle? Hmm. Then someone suggested a mattress.

“Oh, I saw a mattress dumped up behind the high school,” said another.

It might work.

We piled into Music’s truck and headed up to the high school. Sure enough, down by the ball field someone had dumped a couple of mattresses and they weren’t in bad shape at all. We hauled them onto the truck and headed down to the storage trailer by the airport, backed the truck up to the trailer, carefully moved out a roll to the edge and plopped it onto the mattresses. The truck rocked back prodigiously, I swear the front wheels left the ground albeit briefly, but we had it. We couldn’t really budge the roll once so situated, so we strapped it in and headed back to Edgartown.

We don’t have a proper loading dock at the Gazette, the rolls are normally delivered with a lift gate so we were confronted with the new challenge of getting the roll out of the truck and off the two mattresses. In order to avoid damaging the roll too badly we needed to get at least one mattress out from under the roll and down onto the street to act as a landing pad. It was dreadfully difficult pulling a mattress out from under the roll (did I mentioned that it weights 975 pounds?!). But everyone piled in to the front of the truck bed and yanked and pulled and we were actually making progress when it slid right out, and under the strap, and knocked open the tailgate and thwacked down onto the ground.

If that was the worst of it, so be it, but the damned thing had a lot of momentum and landed in motion, quite a lot of motion actually, and proceeded down Davis Lane toward South Summer street.

Have you ever seen that Indiana Jones movie with the giant boulder rolling right behind our heroes? Well, fortunately we had avoided that situation because all of us were behind the boulder, er, the paper roll. But it did keep going, and rather fast and rather straight. Turns out that street is more downhill than I realized....

For our part, we decided it was time to throw in the towel for the night and get a new roll delivered properly the next day, while everyone still had all their limbs and digits attached.

So next time your paper arrives a day late, consider the many possible reasons. Oh, and sorry about the ruckus.

Some of this story is actually true.

Jim Pfeiffer is the operations manager of the Gazette. To hear more stories, both true and mostly true, visit the Vineyard Gazette office on Tuesday, Sept. 9 beginning at 5:30 p.m., when Jim will lead a talk as part of the Tuesdays in the Newsroom series celebrating the 50th birthday of the Goss Community Press.