Saturday Memory
June 14, 2025

The first “girl Friday” was a young male selected by Robinson Crusoe to be a helpful servant on that day. “Girl Friday” came from the movie title. My first real job was as a “boy Friday,” as the owner called it, to be an all-around helpful hand in his local stationery store. I would stock stuff, sweep the floors, and run errands.
It was the summer of 1953, I was 14 going on 15, and my pay was $0.75/hour. The best thing, though, was what I fell in love with in the back room: a print shop, complete with an old-style Chandler & Price press, a Chandler & Price paper cutter, and several type cases and type stands. The owner set type by hand for business cards, stationery, envelopes, and a variety of other printed items. He noticed my interest and over the summer taught me to set type and to use the press and the cutter and even let me do real jobs as he began to trust me to do a good job. I was hooked.

I started high school in the fall of 1953 and immediately volunteered for the school newspaper, which, as I had discovered, also included a press room. I became the business manager after a while, and my girlfriend became editor in our senior year. I spent a good bit of time in the print shop. I gave one of the graduation speeches (entitled “Franklin and Einstein”). I spoke of Ben Franklin’s love of printing and talked about the importance of doing what one loved. In spite of all his achievements, which were extraordinary by any standard, his gravestone refers to only one thing: Printer.
In the fall of 1956, I started college, and one of the first things I did was to secure a volunteer position in the university’s Typography Laboratory, as it was called. It was indeed the most advanced such place I had ever seen, but it was still, basically, a print shop. But as my studies began to consume my time through the college years and then graduate school, my involvement in printing fell away.