Lean Ranger’s Tribute to Steve Jobs

OK, since all the cool bloggers have related their particular Steve Jobs story, it’s time to relate mine.

In 1985, I was working swing shift at Graphicolor in South Seattle. My regular truck driving gig at Bayless Bindery kept me busy enough, but the extra income was nice, and, as my mother used to say, “It keeps him out of the taverns.”

GC’s big web press was there and they had recently added a MGD saddle stitcher to their arsenal. Saddle stitching is a method of binding magazines that’s still in use today, but you don’t see it much. Open up your favorite small magazine. If it’s held together by at least two staples, that’s saddle stitching.

Back then there was a publication called The Auto Trader. If you wanted to sell your car, you called them. You could put a photo of your car in there with the listing. It was a great way for potential buyers to see what you were trying to sell.  Very much like Craigslist, only black and white and done on cheap newsprint.

At Graphicolor, we loved The Auto Trader for several reasons:

• It was free.
• We saw the listings days before anyone else.
• It was a ‘bread and butter’ job – we ran that mag three nights a week, every week.

Running that MGD saddle stitcher was about as challenging as running an automated sausage grinder. The hard part was making sure you loaded the different sections of newsprint into the machine in the right order and right side up. This required the ability to read and count up to four. Setting up the trim knives meant sizing the magazine so the pages would open correctly, and that was about it. Pretty hard to screw up.

Once we got rolling, the night settled into a regular pattern – the forklift driver brought up pallets piled high with newsprint, the loaders jogged the stacks of paper into shape and loaded them into the machine, the MGD howled as the folded sections raced down the chain to the stitcher head. The stitches were shot in the blink of an eye, the trim knives slicing through the edges in another. I checked the quality of the product, spelled everyone while they took breaks and was responsible for making footballs out of newsprint, water and super sticky packing tape.

Throwing the football around was a way to keep from getting hypnotized by the monotony of the job. Zoning out could also be dangerous. If you had to keep an eye out for a flying spitwad that could knock your glasses off and stick in your hair while you worked, you stayed sharp. There were no rules to this game – if we were setting up, the football stayed on the control panel. If time was beginning to crawl, we threw the ball. We’d throw it at other workers passing by our area. If it was warm and the roll up doors were open, we’d throw it at cars passing by on Marginal Way. Supply was not a problem. If the ball was seized by a furious co-worker, or stuck to a Metro bus windshield, we just made another.

The other great entertainment was looking at the stuff the pressmen had made during day shift. There was a small Heidelberg GTO four-color press nearby, and it was assigned to some pretty jobs. Lots of four-page Nordstrom ads, Frederick & Nelson seasonal sales, posters for Wagner operas, stuff like that. They’d print these masterpieces by day and let them dry all night.

One night, the pressmen left us a pallet of Apple brochures. It featured a black and white exploded view of a drill motor. The brochure explained that now, thanks to the Apple Macintosh and this new thing, the LaserWriter, it was possible to make a line drawing this good AND print it out.

Twenty-five years later, I’d like to assign some drama to this moment, but it’s not that simple. I took the brochure back over to the control panel, peeled the football off the work table and hurled it at a passing forklift. I spread out the Apple brochure to read about this new thing, a Laser Printer. It was fascinating.

I called around and discovered that Shoreline Community College had a room full of Macs and would soon have LaserWriters. To get at them, I signed up for a day class. While I was there, I heard about this journalism class that was very hard to get into – you had to submit a writing sample.

That fall, I returned to school full-time. They liked my writing sample. I left two steady jobs for what my family described as “basically nothing”. Four years later, I got my degree.

Once upon a time, two guys named Steve set out to change the world. In their wake was another guy, impressed by what they’d built, who also set out.

Rest in peace, Mr. Jobs.

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