Born To Be a Newspaper Man

by Martin J. McGowan Jr.

Volkmuth Printing

After leaving St. Ben's Betty and I looked for something else to do. That something came in an advertisement in the St. Cloud Times. It said Volkmuth Printing, a large commercial printing firm in St. Cloud, was looking for an account representative. While printing was not as interesting to me as news and editorial work, I had been associated with printing since I fed the big newspaper press as a teenager on the Appleton Press.

So I applied and was soon accepted. The firm was run by Don Volkmuth, who could be rather crusty and abrupt but had a good nature. I was really hired by Jerry Tomczik but had to be approved by Don. His wife was from Benson and we knew people in common. Don also seemed impressed with the fact that I had served in the state legislature from the Benson area.

This was a non-union shop that did printing by the offset method. Fortunately, I had become acquainted with offset printing in Blue Earth. My early experience had been with letterpress printing with movable type. That all changed in the years I was working in public television. When I returned to publication work letterpress was largely gone and offset printing had taken over.

Volkmuth did work for firms all over the country. It had a pretty sharp sales staff that kept the work coming in. Some of the largest accounts were farm catalogs. Don Volkmuth seemed to reserve the religious publications for himself. He had contacts with various Catholic religious orders in New York and kept their publications coming.

I worked with some local religious publications at St. John's. I also had one account with a firm in California printing a publication called Windows when that computer program was just getting started. Since I was an amateur radio operator I was assigned the publication for hams called CQ. That job lasted only one year. I don't know why they left but they seemed uncomfortable dealing with a printer in Minnesota from an office in New York.

Our department acted as the representative of the customer with the printer. Once the job had been sold it was our job to get some time on the presses to do the work. We had to watch for delivery of the copy, see that the printing plates were made and put on the press according to schedule.

We had a dummy layout to follow in assembling the publication. It was my job to check the first pages off the press, to see that any corrections were made and that the color printing was in register, meaning that it all lined up. I had a crisis in this area once when I missed a small color block that was not in alignment. Don was most unhappy but I survived.

There were four account reps in our department and two secretaries who handled the mailing of proofs and received the orders. They also arranged for the mass mailings when they were needed.

Jerry held a staff meeting every morning with the four account reps, the scheduler and the printing superintendent. We went over every job that had been ordered, those in process and those finished. If there were any delays in any department the person handling the account had to see why there were delays and to correct the situation.

It was generally a good group to work with. They were friendly and generally everyone got along well. There were a couple of the staff who seemed to have a reputation for being hard-nosed about their work and their relations with others, but it was not a major problem, at least not for me.

I am eternally grateful to Don Volkmuth for one big favor. After one year he offered me an option on some shares of stock in Webb Publishing, a large printing firm in St. Paul that subsequently bought the Volkmuth firm. I wasn't able to exercise the option at that time. I resigned my job on my 63rd birthday when Don Volkmuth happened to be out of the office on business. When he returned he sent me a letter saying that I could still exercise that option and recommended that I do. So I borrowed $2,000 to exercise the option and buy the stock. I immediately sold the stock for $6,000, the price to which the stock had risen. I took that amount and put it down on a new car.

I gave my notice to retire a bit early for Social Security. Although I would not get the full amount I would receive if I waited until I was 65, I gambled on the possibility I would get more money in total if I lived long enough. That seems to have worked out well for at this writing I have been collecting Social Security for 17 years.

I was honored when one of my colleagues decided to give me a farewell party at her home. All my friends at the firm attended, I was given a gift-not a gold watch-and my career at Volkmuth Printing was over.

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