DAILY RECORD
Torres retires from SMDR after 47 years
Sometimes the smallest of decisions can change the course of a person’s life.
Gilbert Torres graduated from San Marcos High School in 1977. The next year, his parents told him to get a job. He walked out of the door of his home on Sherwood Street in San Marcos. When he reached the interstate a few hundred feet away, he faced a very literal fork in the road.
“I chose right,” Torres said. “If I chose left, we’d be having a different party. I’d probably have been working at the gas station.”
The adjoining property behind the homes on Sherwood Street was the San Marcos Daily Record. He filled out an application for the circulation department and got a call the next day. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear.
“I wasn’t really too happy about it,” Torres said. “I was enjoying not having a job but not my parents.”
Torres started work at the Daily Record on Sept. 1, 1978, and he has been here ever since.
On Friday, Feb. 14, Torres will spend the last day of his nearly 47-year career with a retirement party at the Daily Record office. The community is invited to drop in from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. to wish him well.
Torres is retiring from a career that has seen nearly every aspect of newspaper production change from the days of developing film in darkrooms to the digital age. But while the technology evolved, one thing never did — his dedication to the paper and the people it served.
“He’s more than just a colleague,” Karen George, who has worked with Torres for more than two decades, said. “He’s a dear friend of mine. There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do for him. He’s one of the most dependable, loyal people I’ve ever known.”
He started in the circulation department, inserting sections of the newspaper together by hand. When a position opened in the press room’s darkroom, he jumped at the opportunity.
“It just seemed like something I could apply myself to — a trade I could learn,” he said.
Back then, newspapers were produced using large cameras, negatives and metal plates. Torres would take the pages that had been cut and pasted by hand and photograph them with a 20-foot-long camera before developing the negatives in trays. From there, he would burn the images of each page onto metal plates that would go onto the printing press.
“When the negative is finished, you can look at it and see how well developed it is or if it is over or under-exposed,” Torres said. “After you’ve developed a picture at that point, you’d put two of them together and register them up to make sure they were even on both ends. Then you would burn the image — the negative — into a metal plate, and the metal plate would go to the press.”
His work in pre-press was meticulous, and he took pride in his work.
“I liked working for the newspaper,” Torres said. “It is out in the public. People get to see it, and they would actually see my work. Depending on how good I was that day, I could make them really nice.”
In addition to his darkroom duties, Torres was also a pressman, and he was there when the Daily Record stopped printing in-house. He was also there when the press was brought back a few years later. Torres saw computers replace the darkroom and when design went from being done by hand to being done digitally.
When the press shut down originally in 2010, Torres didn’t know if he still had a job.
“That is a big moment when the press closes down, and they kept a pressman to try and do something else,” Torres said.
He transitioned into circulation; however, much had changed with the digital evolution, so the job was much different than when he started decades prior. It was an adjustment.
“For the first time in 30 years, I didn’t know what I was doing,” he admitted. “I sat in my chair and just waited to be told what to do.”
But he adapted, handling customer service, training newspaper carriers and even delivering papers himself when needed — often at odd hours of the night.
In the years Torres and George, the Daily Record’s circulation director, worked together closely, the two shared countless early mornings, late nights and deliveries under every kind of condition.
“If a carrier didn’t show up, Gilbert was the first person I called,” George said. “He’d answer, ‘What do we have to do, Karen?’ And no matter what, he’d be there.”
One of her favorite memories was a night they had to deliver 2,500 copies of The Hill Country Record, which was a free newspaper published by the Daily Record that was delivered weekly across the area. George had the idea of putting Torres in the back of the truck so he could throw papers to both sides of the street as she drove down the middle during the cover of night.
“He was all for it,” she said laughing. “Then it started pouring rain. He was soaking wet, still in the back of the truck, still throwing papers. It was a disaster, but we laughed about it.”
Through all the long hours and last-minute routes, George said Torres never wavered in his dedication.
“He cared about this newspaper,” she said. “If someone didn’t get their paper, he’d drive to their house and hand-deliver it, apologizing in person. That’s just who he is.”
Rowe Ray, a longtime editor of the Daily Record, remembers Torres as a steady force at the paper, someone who was always there when needed.
“Gilbert has been an important part of the Daily Record family for so long, I don’t even remember a time without him,” Ray said. “He was a great coworker and probably more importantly, a great friend.”
Ray described Torres as someone who never complained, no matter what challenges the newsroom or production team threw his way.
“We all wanted different things in different departments, and he just rolled with the punches,” he said. “He was a jack of all trades, and he made things work.”
Ray also recalled Torres’ work in the darkroom.
“He handled all the big camera stuff — none of us touched that. He took a lot of pride in it,” he said. “We would give him things we thought would never work and he always found a way to make it look good.”
After Ray retired, he still saw Torres around town occasionally.
“He’s the same person he always was — friendly, smiling, good-natured,” Ray said. “You meet some people who are just good people. That’s Gilbert in a nutshell.”
Beyond the newsroom, Torres found another lifelong passion — music. He started playing bass in the 1980s, learning from local musicians and playing in bands around San Marcos and Austin.
“I always tried to find musicians who were better than me, so I could learn,” he said. “And now I try to pass that on, teaching what I know to others.”
His first band, Slurred Vision, played classic rock at backyard parties and local bars.
“In San Marcos back then, every neighborhood had a band,” Torres said. “We’d set up in someone’s yard and play until someone called the cops.”
He later played with Rabb Rodriguez y los Killa Hogs, then joined The Undercover Killas, a heavy metal band that includes Jimmy Sweeps, who is the son of his late mentor Rabb Rodriguez.
“Rabb was special,” Torres said. “I knew the first time I heard him play that people were going to pay attention. He taught me so much.”
After nearly 50 years at the San Marcos Daily Record, Torres is closing this chapter. But his legacy — as a newspaper veteran, as a musician, as a mentor and as a friend — will remain.
“He has always been so passionate about this place. He loves the newspaper,” George said. “I don’t know. I guess the ink got in his blood like the rest of us, but you can tell that he is very passionate about this newspaper. He was 100% invested all the time. It’s not going to be the same without him.”
It’s not easy to summarize a 47-year career in one story. But maybe the best way to sum it up is this: Gilbert Torres showed up with a smile every single day and tried to make the Daily Record better. And San Marcos is better for it.
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