Dewey Jackson, a former press room operator at the Scottsboro, Ala.-based paper The Daily Sentinel, died Tuesday at his home in Grant, Alabama. He was 87.
After a brief retirement in 1986, Jackson returned to The Sentinel to run the press and train new operators. He retired for good in 1999, capping a 31-year career as a press room worker for Southern Newspapers Inc., the Sentinel's parent company.
In 1989 the Sentinel's press room was re-named in Jackson's honor. Current and former publishers at the paper remember Jackson as a hardworking and indispensable press room operator, capable of doing the ""impossible"" in getting Sentinel issues onto newsstands each day.
Jackson first started working as a press operator in 1968 under the guidance of B. Carmage Walls, a former owner of the paper and friend of Jackson's since the late 1940s. A veteran of the U.S. Army who served in World War II, Jackson worked for the Walls' family before becoming a printer.
Walls had Jackson trained as an offset printer at a six-month program in Cleveland, Tenn., at a print press for the Cleveland Daily Banner.
After working at another Tennessee press that printed other papers in addition to the Sentinel (then The Sentinel-Age). Jackson came to Scottsboro, Ala., when the Sentinel's press room was moved in-house.
Jackson is survived by wife, Lila Gene; a sister, Chloe Selvage; two daughters, two sons, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
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