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Other companies change their names. Many more just fade away.
Printing establishments come and go, but the industry is laden with career lifers. Remember the journeyman printer? The craftsman? Remember a time before iMacs or desktop publishing? How about lead type? Linotype? Red opaque? Any of this stuff ring a bell? Were you at the shop when Kennedy was assassinated? Or when Nixon resigned? If so, you’ve collected more than a few gray hairs...if you’re fortunate enough to have eluded scalp erosion.
This has been, and always will be, a people business. And we’ve assembled a cast of 20 men and women who have logged at least 35 years on the job to tell their funny, sad, interesting and enlightening stories. Printing has been a vital part of their lives for many years, just as it has impacted your own experiences. The images and memories are enduring. And the following people have been kind enough to take a trip back in time and relate the experiences that have stayed with them for many years. Read on:
Maudie Briggs, 61
President and CEO
Morrison Communications
Morristown, TN
“The way I look at it, my employees and I are here at least a third of our lives, so it’s important to have fun every day,” Maudie Briggs stresses. “If not, we’d be pulling our hair out.”
The printing and publishing industries have served as the background music for Briggs’ life. When she was in kindergarten, her father, Dick Morrison, would bring home perforated tags for her to string. Briggs even confesses to learning about the birds and the bees while a teenager working with other women in the bindery.
Though she primarily worked for School Calendar Co., a publishing offshoot of her father’s Morrison Communications sheetfed printing business, her two brothers asked Briggs to lead the printing operation through a turnaround in 1993. Though she successfully navigated the firm out of choppy waters, the experience was downright frightening.
“It was the scariest time of my whole career. When you think you might end up living out of a piano box, and that the people you’ve known all your life might lose their jobs…I’d never want to go through that again.”
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