Every Monday morning at a quarter to eight, Duane Eckstein unlocks a narrow door on the third floor of the Bluestone County Courthouse, climbs forty-seven wooden steps and a ladder into the cupola, and winds the clock.

He has done it for twenty-three years. Before him it was his uncle, and before his uncle it was a man nobody now living remembers. The clock went into the cupola when the courthouse was built in 1911. It came on the train from a clock company in Massachusetts in eleven crates, and it has four faces, two big iron weights on cables, a pendulum as long as a man, and a bell you can hear on a still night clear out to the Pine Knob road. Duane winds it by hand with a crank, a little over a hundred turns for the clock and the same again for the bell, and then he oils what needs oiling and sets it right by his wristwatch, and comes back down for his coffee.

I went up with him Monday to ask him how the courthouse clock is fixed for the Year 2000.

Duane thought it over. "Tom," he said, "that clock doesn't know what year it is. It doesn't know what day it is. It knows what hour it is, and most of the time it's close." It struck midnight for the first time on New Year's of 1912, and he sees no reason it won't strike midnight on New Year's of 2000 exactly the same way. If anything in the building is ready for the date change, he said, it's the one thing in it with no electricity at all.

The rest of the courthouse has had to work a little harder.

The County Commission set up a committee on the Year 2000 problem in January, and since then County Clerk Lavonne Berry has replaced the computer that keeps the land records, the assessor's office has a new program, and the sheriff's office and the 911 center have tested every piece of equipment that has a date in it by setting the date ahead to New Year's and seeing what happened. Susan Jacobsen, who runs the 911 center, tells me what happened was mostly nothing, and the few things that did go wrong have been fixed and tested again. Commission President Gerald Leonardo says the county's records are backed up on paper as well, "the way we used to do it, which never once crashed."

Some of our readers asked about last Thursday, which was the ninth day of the ninth month of '99. A few experts had warned that some old computer programs used 9999 as a code for "end of the file," and might stop cold when they saw that date. Lavonne kept her whole office until six o'clock that evening, just in case. At six o'clock she turned off the lights, went home, and made supper. That was the whole story, and I'm glad to print it.

I have been asked whether the Ledger is ready. The Ledger's computers are about four years old and the man who sold them to me says they are fine. The press is twenty-one years old and doesn't know there is a calendar. And if all else fails, I still remember how to set a headline by hand, though I'd rather not.

On New Year's Eve, the Commission, Sheriff's office and 911 center will be open all night in the courthouse, and I've been invited to sit in and report what happens, which I expect will be very little. At midnight I intend to climb those forty-seven steps with Duane and a thermos of coffee and hear that bell ring in the new year.

It will be about four minutes early. It always has been. That's the one thing about the Year 2000 I can promise you won't change.

I stood on the bank corner Monday morning with a pencil and a notebook and counted the Labor Day parade, the way I have counted it for twenty-one years, and I make it sixty-three units, not counting the dogs that joined in along the way or the boy on the bicycle who wasn't supposed to be there. It took forty-one minutes to get past me. It was hot, as it always is, and the crowd was as big as I've seen it, and nobody fainted, which is better than some years.

Leading off, as she should have, was our grand marshal, Mrs. Iva Renninger, who taught third grade in this county for thirty-eight years before she retired in June. She rode in the back of a red convertible with a sash on, waving like a queen, and there was hardly a block of Main Street where somebody didn't holler "Hi, Mrs. Renninger!" and get a wave back that said she remembered exactly which desk they sat in and what they did in it. I'm told she taught about eleven hundred children in all. It looked to me like most of them came.

Behind her came the fire trucks from all four volunteer departments, with the sirens going, which never fails to set off every dog in Ansel, and then the Ansel and Pine Knob bands, marching together this year as one band for the first time, under the new county band director, Ronald Wilson. They played well and they stayed in step, which I want it on the record I did not expect from a band that has only been together since the first week of August. Next year they'll march as Bluestone County High, and that will be fine too, but this year you could still see two kinds of uniform in the ranks, and two sets of grandparents cheering.

After the bands came the retired miners, as they come every year, about forty of them walking behind the union local's banner in their caps and their good shirts, some of them slower than they used to be and a few on canes, and the crowd stood up and clapped them the whole length of Main Street. In a coal county, that's what Labor Day is about. My father used to say a newspaper in a place like this has two jobs: to tell people what happened, and to say thank you to the folks who did the work. He meant those men.

Then came everything else. Thirteen antique tractors, the oldest a 1928 model that backfired in front of the drugstore and made a lady drop her ice cream. The Little League all-stars, who won the district this summer, in the back of a hay wagon. The 4-H float, which was a barn made of chicken wire and crepe paper with three real chickens in it. Seven candidates for offices that won't be voted on until next year, throwing candy, two of whom I noticed were throwing it at the same children. A clown on stilts I did not recognize and did not ask.

And bringing up the rear, as he has every Labor Day since 1971, Marvin Forrest on his mule. Marvin is seventy now and the mule is the third one he has ridden in the parade, all of them named Jake. Nobody knows why Marvin rides his mule in the Labor Day parade, including, as far as I can tell, Marvin. When I asked him once, years ago, he said, "Somebody has to be last." That seems to me as good a reason as any for most of what we do around here.

The parade was followed by the dinner at the fire hall, where I had two plates of beans and a piece of Mrs. Renninger's own coconut cake, which she bakes every year even when she's the grand marshal. My wife Jewel reminds me that I promised my doctor in March that I'd have one plate. I had one plate of beans and one plate of beans. I am a newspaperman and I know the value of a precise statement.

Maynard Ball died Friday at his daughter's home, at the age of eighty-seven. His obituary is on page two, and it says what obituaries say. I want to say a little more, because for forty years he was the Ledger, and most of you never knew it.

Maynard came to work at this paper in 1928, when he was sixteen, to sweep the back shop and run errands. In 1938 the paper bought its first Linotype machine, a great black iron contraption about the size of a pickup truck stood on end, and Maynard was the one who learned to run it. He ran it every week for the next forty years. When my father bought the Ledger in 1951, he liked to say he bought a newspaper and got Maynard thrown in for free, and that he'd gotten the better half of the deal.

For those too young to remember: a Linotype was how newspapers set type before computers. You sat at a keyboard with ninety-some keys, and every time you touched one, a little brass mold for that letter dropped down out of a magazine overhead and clicked into a row. When you had a line, you pulled a lever, and the machine squirted hot lead into the molds and kicked out a solid metal line of type, still warm, called a slug. Then it carried all the little brass molds back up to the top and dropped each one back in its own slot, all by itself, with a sound like rain on a tin roof. The whole back shop smelled like hot metal and ink. It is the best smell I know.

Maynard could set a column of county commission minutes faster than the commissioners could say them. He hardly ever made a mistake. When he did, he would run his finger down the first two columns of keys to fill out the line so it would be thrown away, and that made the nonsense words etaoin shrdlu, which once in a long while got past everybody and into the paper, in this paper and in a great many others all over the country. In forty years I know of only three times it happened to Maynard, and he could tell you the date of every one.

He taught me to read type upside down and backward when I was ten years old, standing on a crate beside him. He taught me that a newspaper is made in the back shop, no matter what the fellow in the front office thinks. And when I came home from the Army in 1971 and went to work here, it was Maynard, not my father, who told me I wrote too long. He was right. He is still right.

In 1978 the Ledger went to offset printing, like every other small paper, and the Linotype went to a scrap dealer in Bluefield for less than my father paid for it. Maynard stood in the alley and watched them load it on the truck, and then he came back inside and learned to do paste-up with hot wax and a razor blade at sixty-six years of age, and did it until he retired in 1984, though I don't believe his heart was ever in it. That same year, 1978, I took over as editor and started writing this column. I named it "From the Back Shop" for him. He told me it was a good name for a column and a poor excuse for one, and he read every one of them for the next twenty-one years, and called me up about the commas.

The funeral was Monday at the Methodist church, and they buried him beside his wife on the ridge above his old home place. There were more people there than I could count, and I can count a parade.

Printers used to put a 30 at the end of a story to say it was done. Maynard put one at the end of his last slug, on his last day, in 1978. I have it on my desk. It's still the heaviest thing on it.

The forty-eighth Bluestone County Fair is over, and I have the sunburn, the funnel cake grease on my good shirt and the fourteen rolls of film at the drugstore to prove it. It rained Tuesday, which it always does, and the demolition derby on Friday night ran until a quarter to midnight, which it always does, and on Saturday night at the show barn we held the 4-H and FFA livestock sale, which is the best two hours of the year in this county, and I'll fight anybody who says different.

For the newcomers: all summer, the boys and girls in 4-H and FFA raise a steer, a hog or a lamb. They feed it every morning and every evening, all summer long. They walk it, wash it, and learn to show it in the ring with a stick and a comb. At the fair it's judged, and on Saturday night it's sold, to the highest bidder, and the money goes to the child. A lot of it goes to college. A lot of it goes to next year's animal. And everybody knows, though nobody says so out loud, that the people bidding are not really buying meat. They're buying a little piece of a child's summer, and telling him he did good.

Samuel Skinner called the sale, as he has since 1958. Sam is sixty-nine and can still sell a lamb faster than I can spell it, and he has a way of looking straight at a bidder and saying "Now, you know that child," that has separated more men from their money than any banker in the county.

The grand champion steer was raised by Brittney Fisher, who is thirteen and lives up on the ridge above Pine Knob. It weighed 1,214 pounds and she had named it Buster, which she told me is a mistake you only make once. The Bluestone Valley Bank bought it at $2.75 a pound, which comes to $3,338.50. Brittney didn't cry in the ring. She went behind the show barn afterward and did it there, which is where everybody does it.

The grand champion hog belonged to Frankie Dillon, who is seventeen and showing for his last year. His hog weighed 251 pounds, and it brought $4.50 a pound, $1,129.50 in all, from a group of eleven coal truck drivers who pooled their money in a coffee can and asked me not to print their names. I won't. But I'll say this: hogs on the open market have been bringing well under forty cents a pound this summer, which makes four and a half dollars something more than a price. It's a whole county patting a boy on the back on his way out the door.

The grand champion lamb was Melanie McDowell's, in her very first year. She is eleven and about the size of the lamb. It weighed 121 pounds and sold for $6.00 a pound, $726, to Ansel Hardware & Feed, and the store's owner tells me he's going to put the ribbon up by the cash register.

All told, Sam sold eighty-seven animals Saturday night, and the children of this county went home with a little more than forty-eight thousand dollars among them. In a year when a good many of their parents are worried about the mines, the timber and the price of everything, I don't know a better way to spend two hours on a Saturday night or a better thing to put on the front of a newspaper.

Next year's fair will be the forty-ninth. Brittney tells me she's already picked out next year's steer. She has not named it. She says she's learned.