Geezer printer help?

The geezer printer is an ancient Epson L1000 from the early nineties. Don't laugh-- it works great and the ribbons cost practically nothing. I recently got it working beautifully in Mepis except it stalls when beginning to print the second page. The whole printer freezes and must be turned off. Then I can go back and print the second page, but only as if it were page 1.

I'm using Mepis 6.0 on an older Dell (P4, 256 MB RAM). The printer does not have this problem when used with Windows XP on my other partition. The freeze is not a Mepis problem since the same thing happens when I try it on a "live" session of Ubuntu. It isn't a CUPS issue, since the same thing happens when I try other printing systems. I don't think it's a driver issue, since Mepis supplies the right one for this printer and I've tried others with identical results.

I don't print often anymore, but it would be nice to have this working for that occasional hard-copy document. Any print geezers out there with ideas?