Warren Proctor Kalteyer

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The only member of the family who ever set a line of the Ledger's business in hot metal was Warren Proctor Kalteyer, a newspaper compositor who spent forty years among the Linotypes of the Midwest, reading the news backwards and noticing which deaths in it did not belong. He was born in 1925 in Indianapolis, Indiana, and died in 1992 of pneumonia, aged sixty-seven. He belonged to the House of Proctor and to the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and he was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, although his mother was one. He was the younger child of the railway clerk Warren Kalteyer and of the seamstress and slayer Elizabeth Proctor, The Winter Yoke, and the brother of the nurse Evelyn Proctor. He worked in the composing rooms of Chicago, among the stockyards, the rail hubs and the lake-front wards of the Midwest, and he never married and had no children. The Proctors remember him as the compositor who read the obituaries before the editor did and who kept, in a drawer of his imposing table, the stories that never made the front page. He was born in Indianapolis because the railway sent his father there. In the winter of 1925 the Southern Pacific lent Warren Kalteyer, who was the best waybill clerk in San Antonio, for four months to a firm of railway auditors who were trying to untangle the freight accounts of the Big Four line, and he took his wife with him, since he was a man who disliked being parted from a person who corrected his figures. Elizabeth Proctor, who was twenty-five and heavily pregnant, who had a two-year-old daughter on her hip and a pistol in her hat box, put the household on the train in the first week of January. They took two rooms over a stationer's shop on Illinois Street, a block from Union Station, in a city of snow, smoke and brick that was the hub of eleven railways. The baby was born in the second room in a blizzard, in the middle of the night, with the trains running and a midwife from the Irish quarter who had been sent for in a sleigh. He was named for his father. His mother, who had been told by the Ledger's cousin in the city that there was a matter of a closed car on a siding that she might look at, spent the next three weeks, between feeds, at the window, with a set of statements, a notebook and a pot of tea, and was said to have been the only woman in Indianapolis to have had a baby and cleared a freight yard in the same month. They were home in Texas by the spring. He grew up in San Antonio, in the little house by the Southern Pacific yards, among timetables, hat blocks and a sister who was two years older and a good deal bossier. He was a tall, fair, shy boy, with his father's short sight and spectacles to match, and he liked, more than anything, to read. He was not particularly interested in what he read. He was interested in how it was made. At nine he was taken to the plant of the San Antonio Express, by an uncle who knew a foreman, and shown the composing room, with its row of Linotypes, its hot pots of lead and its long steel galleys, and the boy stood for an hour with his hands behind his back, watching a man in an apron set a line of type, cast it, and drop it into the stick, and then asked whether he might be permitted to touch it. It was cold, and small, and heavy. It said, backwards, in the letters of a headline, something about a fire. He went home and drew a typeface on the kitchen wall. His mother said that she did not know where he got it. His father died in the autumn of 1941, at his stool in the freight office, over a waybill, and Warren, who was sixteen, left school and took a clerk's place in the railway office, for the sake of the wage, which he did not like, and was kept at it for a year and a half. In the spring of 1943 he was called up. He served for three years in the Army as a clerk in an ordnance depot in Illinois, where the Army, which has a way of putting a man where he is least wanted, kept him at a desk, and where he found the post printing shop and made himself useful in it, in the evenings, for nothing. It was a small shop with a platen press and two cases of type. He set the depot's notices, its Christmas programme and the funeral cards of the dead, and learned that a man who could read a line of lead upside down could always find work. He was discharged in 1946, with the war years behind him, and went to Chicago on the G.I. Bill to learn the trade at a school on the west side. He was one of four hundred young men in the city who had come home to a trade of letters and found it a good one. Chicago in 1947 was the printing capital of the middle of the country. Dearborn Street, in the old district south of the Loop, was a long row of print shops and binderies, the stockyards stank on the south-west side whenever the wind turned, the elevated trains rattled round the Loop and the lake front, with its wards of brick two-flats and long, flat, grey winters, was home to a million and a half men and women who read the paper. He took a place as a journeyman compositor in the composing room of a morning daily. It was a long, loud, hot room, full of the smell of ink and hot lead and the clatter of thirty machines, in which men in paper hats set the news by the line, and in which a man who could read type upside down and backwards, and who did not talk, was prized above rubies. He was good. He was meticulous, and he was fast, and he had a particular patience with the obituary column, which was the hardest to set because every name in it was somebody's. It was the obituary column that put him in the Ledger. In the winter of 1951, in the early days of the Korean War, when the city was full of notices of young men killed abroad and he was setting a dozen a night, he noticed a run of another sort in the home-town deaths. Six people in a block of the near west side, in the same three weeks, had died, as the notices put it, suddenly at home, aged between nineteen and thirty, of no stated cause. They had the same funeral director. He cut the six notices from the proof, pasted them on a card, and mailed them to his mother in San Antonio, with a note that said only that he thought they were interesting. His mother, who had not been told that her son had a nose for it, wrote back by return that it was an extraordinary piece of work. She enclosed the address of a cousin in Chicago, a retired railway detective of the White Ledger, who lived in a flat in Rogers Park, and who called on him the following Sunday with a bag of oranges. For the next thirty-five years the compositor was the Midwest chapter's most useful clerk. He set the news, and he read it, and as a man who handled every paper's obituaries, police reports and legal notices he knew what the city had been told. Each week he cut the paragraphs that did not fit, the deaths without cause, the vanishings of whole households, the notices of estates settled in a hurry, and put them in the drawer. On Thursday evenings a man in an overcoat came and took them away. It was never said what became of them. He said that he was a printer, and that he knew how to put a thing in the paper, and that it was a printer's business, also, to know what to leave out. In the Vietnam years, when the paper's columns were dark with names, he set the dead as he had set the others, one letter at a time, with the same care, and went home to his two rooms on the north side, a block from the lake, and played the radio, quietly. His mother died in 1963, in the autumn, in her chair by the window in San Antonio, with a hem across her knee, and it was her son who set her notice. He had come home for the funeral, and when he returned to Chicago, he asked the night foreman for the obituary page, and set it himself. It was a short column, as she would have wished. He kept the slug. It is said that he had it in his waistcoat pocket until the day he died. He did not marry, though he had, in the sixties, a long friendship with a proofreader, a widow named Mrs Bell, who could read his handwriting. His sister Evelyn, who was ill for the last years of her life, died in 1980, and he came down on the train to be with her. The trade that he had known went out in his time. Hot metal gave way to photographic typesetting in the seventies, and the Linotypes, those great, intricate, clanking machines, were sold for scrap, and the compositors, who had been the aristocrats of the newspaper, found themselves with keyboards and screens. He learned the new machines. He said that they set a decent line and that he missed the lead. He retired in 1989, at sixty-four, with a pension and a silver rule, and spent the last three winters of his life in his two rooms, with the radio and the lake, doing a crossword in ink. He died of pneumonia in the February of 1992, after a short illness, in a hospital on the north side, with Mrs Bell at his bedside. In the drawer of the table at home, when the Ledger's man came, there was a last bundle of cuttings, tied with a string, and on the top of it a card in his small clean hand that said, quite simply, that it was not finished. Warren Proctor Kalteyer is remembered in the Proctor family as the compositor who read the obituary column before anyone else and who kept the notices that were never printed. In the Slayerverse he stands for the printers and clerks of the White Ledger, the quiet readers of the news who found the pattern in the small print, and who proved that a drawer of cuttings, honestly kept, can be as sharp a weapon against the night as a pistol.