Goodbye Letterpress

I asked the typesetter:
Who is Elrod?
And what did the "D" man do?

And he told me:
the D man handled Ds and only Ds
except on days when the F man did it,
and then D became L.

The L man was pushed to the Ts
all the rest of the alphabet his,
though Zs were what kept him awake,
never regular, always needed.

As for Elrod, it's a machine.

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NO, here's how he really answered:

"The 'D man' would distribute foundry type.
When slow and no composition
to be done, compositors would help.
The D man would routinely bring an lc, b, p, q, d to comps
who he suspected didn't know the difference
and returned the q to the b box in the CA job case."

Frankly, when he mentioned Elrod, I thought as much, but of the wrong guy.
I expected the D man to be more serious.

"The Elrod was a machine used to make the spacing material,
ie: 2pt, 3pt, 6, 12, 18 and 24pt
cut off at about 3ft. lengths.

Most medium sized shops had their own smelter
to make pigs for the typesetting machines."

I always suspected that Elrod would come to no good, now sure, him really a machine.