My printing career started with a Swiftset rotary press that I got as a Christmas present when I was 12. My father was an Army officer stationed at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia after his return from the Korean war. I started a newspaper with that press and did some 22 issues, complete with advertising. I heard about Kelsey and slaved all one summer mowing lawns at Ft. Belvoir to raise the cash for my 6x10 press and all the goodies that came with it. It was shipped by rail and the day we got a call from the local railroad station that it had arrived was about as good as any Christmas I can remember. I joined the AAPA then ('53 or '54) and continued with my paper printed letterpress, complete with a front page halftone, for another 7 or 8 issues. My dad retired and we moved to Palo Alto, California so he could go to graduate school at Stanford.

 

I moved from the Kelsey to a 10x15 C&P that I still have and printed during my high school years. By my senior year, I had heard about the printing program at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, and with a Crown Zellerbach scholarship, graduated with a Printing Management degree in 1963. Ours was the last class in that program, and the college replaced it with a technology/computer oriented program. We were fortunate to have people like Hermann Zapf teach at the school on visits arranged by another famous typographer, Jack Stauffacher, who was one of my instructors as well as the late George Mills, who taught letterpress press work.

 

I then worked at Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. in tech publications in Sunnyvale, Calif., then started my 2 year career as an Army officer in Germany, returned to Lockheed for another 2 years starting in 1965. Some of our publications were set in hot metal at Holmes Typography in San Jose on Monotypes. I then worked at Carlisle Co. in San Francisco for 2 years. For the first year I was in charge of the steel die engraving department. Then I became an estimator and did most of the letterpress estimating. We had several Miehle flatbeds, 2 new Heidelberg cylinders, 2 windmills, and a 12x18 C&P that the plant manager hated. But it was used to imprint city and county bond offerings and I once calculated that it earned the company something like $500 a day based on what they charged for the work. We also had a large offset department that included 54x77 Miehle sheet fed offsets. There was also pen ruling, a complete hand bindery department doing leather bound books, and a bronzing machine. The company did large volumes of food can labels, the first 4-color checks, the first Jefferson Airplane poster, etc. A fascinating place to work--we even had union proofreaders on the staff.

 

I left Carlisle to work for an ad agency as the print buyer and estimator in Palo Alto, then moved to Silverton in 1970. I arrived here with a new wife, and a job/partnership offer at the local letterpress-printed newspaper that was withdrawn soon after our arrival as the fellow woke up and realized he was barely making it himself, let alone adding 2 more mouths to feed. We ended up buying a building and started the Pickle Barrel restaurant that I still own but it is presently leased. My mother grew tired of my print shop, residing all those years in her garage in Palo Alto, so I moved it here about 1979. Along with fellow list member George Chapman, we bought out the contents of a newspaper in Friday Harbor, Washington and moved it to Silverton, and that forms the core of the print shop today. That collection had been hand picked over a 40 or so year span by the former publisher of the paper, and was not the typical job shop of a weekly paper--prime stuff.

 

With my business partner Loren Lew, I am also involved with Klinke & Lew contractors specializing in historic building restoration. We work on court houses, town halls, mine and railroad structures, churches, museums and schools.  I added to my print shop, buying a Miehle V-50 from George Mills, got a Little Giant #6, a model 31 Linotype given to me by Chapman when he sold the newspaper here back in 1990, a Ludlow and Elrod, several Monotypes that came from Morneau Typographers in Phoenix, and then I bought NA Graphics from Hal Sterne and Tom Bell in 1996. That required a 2 story addition to our ice cream parlor building--guess I skipped mentioning the ice cream business. I've come full circle--Hal tells me I own Kelsey, we definitely own Vandercook and Cowan Pressroom Products, and NA is a major letterpress supplier. If I knew how that was all going to come together 50 years ago, I could not have imagined ending up as being part of the handful of people supplying what was once a vast and complicated part of the printing industry. I should have known that when I saw

my first Linotype at the Denver Post when I was a Cub Scout that those machines

and everything that went with them would set the tone for the rest of my life.