New York Printers — Perceptions Cloud Reality

“Years ago, I was talking to someone from Colorado who asked me where I was from,” recalls Dan Mahany, president and CEO of Canfield & Tack in Rochester. “When I told him, he said, ‘Wow! Is it tall buildings all the way to Manhattan?’ ”

That would be about 325 to 350 miles worth of skyscrapers. No wonder New Yorkers cop an occasional attitude.

“There’s a lot of fertile land between here and there. People grow crops on them,” Mahany laughs. “I just thought it was comical.”

Misconceptions can cause natives of any state to roll their eyes, but for some New York printers, the questions asked of them can be bizarre. Take Steven Vid, the president and CEO of Merlin Printing, the leading printer in Amityville. Name of that town ring a bell?

Yep, Amityville Horror, the story about a family who moved out of their new home 28 days after moving in because they were terrorized by paranormal activity. A bestselling novel and several movies “documented” the events in this house, which we’re led to believe became haunted in the mid-1970s because the previous owner murdered his family there.

“We take in a tremendous amount of paper from Canada, and most of the truck drivers want to know where the house is,” Vid admits. “We get occasional customers asking about it. It was a long time ago for people to still be asking, but they keep making movies, and it keeps bringing the story back into people’s minds. I guess it will never go away.”

The house is now owned by the former Village of Amityville police chief. Guess the spirits are keeping their noses clean.

“We laugh at the movies,” Vid notes.

New York boasts a hearty stock, and not just the NYC folk. The Rochester area is a hotbed of printing activity and has been known to have some wintry challenges in the form of precipitation (it averages more than 90˝ of snow per year). So when a Southern print buyer evaluated a proposal from Rochester’s Flower City Printing, the client began to question the prospect of doing business with a company in the snow belt.

Mark Ashworth, president of Flower City, was undaunted. He pulled out the company’s disaster recovery plan, which revealed the printer had never closed due to a weather event, then made a report with other relevant information and e-mailed it to the print buyer. Ten minutes later, Ashworth called the buyer to make sure he had received the information.