Around two a.m. on Saturday, December 8, 1962, the presses stopped. Not with a dramatic yell and a frantic pull of the kill switch to run some late-breaking front-page news, like in the movies, but with a negotiator for the International Typographical Union Local No. 6 telling a labor mediator, “It’s too late.” Big Six was on strike—“the strike to end all newspaper strikes,” an I.T.U. official later told The New York Times, one of seven newspapers suddenly out of circulation.
Back in 1953, when the Photo Engravers Local No. 1 went on strike, “most Timesmen felt compelled to respect the picket lines,” Gay Talese wrote in The Kingdom and the Power. “Now, however, the personal bond was not so strong. The Times had seemed to become a much less personal place in recent years, more coolly corporate as it had grown larger and more important, and veteran Timesmen were at peace with themselves as they watched the picket lines. Some younger Timesmen even felt a sense of adventure and freedom during the strike’s earlier stages: their daily lives now did not revolve so directly around The Times, they had time to think more about themselves, to reevaluate their present circumstances, to contemplate the future.”