I have an interesting story relating to my business. We were tenants at Rockwell's house (Richard
Rockwell's folks were our landlords...) At that time it was the last house at the end of Crestmont Drive. We rented the basement suite... and it was in the basement rec room of that apartment that I operated my silk screen printing operations. I built a vacuum table to hold the pages tight to the table so they didn't stick to the screen after pulling the squeegee to print them. We also had a large drying rack with 40 trays to hold the posters during the drying process. I had a drawing board where the posters were designed. I was an art major at PUC.
Anyway, one day a very elderly man stopped by our house with a book Counsels on Stewardship in hand. The college had plans to build a church, and members were visiting every home and passing out the book, hoping to get some support for the Church building fund. I took the book, not planning to read it. But it was not that long before I actually started to read it. There was a very nice rock over the hill on the east of the house that I would sit on and read in the morning. It didn't take that long before I got into the book far enough that I realize I had been robbing God. I had never had any habit of returning tithe and as a young man I had made quite a lot of money, never gave a dime back to the Lord. I felt convicted to do the right thing and promised the Lord that I would pay a double tithe as long as I could afford to do so. It was amazing. At the end of the first month after pledging to pay tithe, I added up my receipts and deducted my expenses and calculated 20%. I think we gave 10% to the building fund and 10% tithe. Amazingly, when I looked at the bottom line after all was paid I had just as much for our living expense even after paying the tithe as I had the month before when I didn't pay tithe. Wow! that was wonderful. And I can tell you that every month the Lord sent me enough customers so that every month was better than the month before. I never stopped paying 20% for the next 30 years or more... and the Lord continues to bless us.
When I graduated from PUC I was hired to work for Dr. Mervyn Hardinge at the School of Health LLU. I remember that my starting annual salary was $7500... about $2,000 less than I earned in my part-time sign business at PUC my last year. But it was wonderful to have a 9-5 job. I would come home at 5pm and the rest of my day was free. I was so used to working into the night every night on printing and designing posters and projects. We were living the good life! God was good to us. I sold my silk screen equipment to Myron Widmer, and he took over printing posters for a while.
The photography is far less than perfect. I just took them very quickly with my iPhone camera, but I just wanted a record of what I had. It was a trip down memory lane for me to go thru this stuff I had not seen for 50 years!
So here they are in no particular order.
This was likely one of my first screen prints... all hand-lettered. Soon after I got a machine where I could set type photographically. Today I look back and that equipment was pretty primitive.
This was another event that we added to. There were discussions ongoing at different times.
This Candlelight Concert series was done with a standard format for the year where I printed the basic stuff in red and yellow on different colored posters and then could add in white the specific event date and group.
Before I got the silk screen operation going, I used to just hand letter the posters. That was very labor intensive... but it gave some extra colors... like the green stems for the flowers.
I did a lot to help my friend Buz Starrett, who put together this group of guys. I even helped them to produce a record album and designed their album cover... no idea where that is. Buz may have one.
A little hand coloring to make the flowers stand out.
I did a lot of signs for this fair in Calistoga!
I think that was Garry Donesky at the piano... another Canadian. Don't remember the others. It would fun to figure out who they were.
I think this was initially done for the Conference. It was fun to design the keys with three T's: Treasure, Talents and Time. ( since then a fourth key has been added with another T that stands for Temple... our body is the Temple of God and a good steward takes care of his body)
I remember going to this Pops Concert... it was Fantastic!
Towards the end I was getting a lot of the guys running for class offices asking for posters.
Looks like I did this once with black ink... and then in white. Not the usual.
This one didn't turn out very good.
Looks like something I probably did for Duane Cronk or Mary Cronk.
I helped Myron with this poster... I think he did some of the work, but it was a teaching process and since he was buying my silk screen equipment, this was a project we did together so he could learn how to do it. No doubt he will get a kick out of seeing it!
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This next section shows the silk screen process from the very beginning where you come up with the initial design idea... how the artwork is done, and all the steps to get a finished printed poster.
In the upper left corner is the first little thumbnail sketch of the idea. I wanted to show the different ways to make up the art to print a project.
This is the master art done on clear mylar using Letrset type, India ink, Rubylith, printers tape, photography, photo type setting, Cut paper, grease pencil and type printed on mylar.
This is the artwork to give the solid color white background over which we will print the black copy.
The white colored background is printed first.
This is what the job would look like with just one color of ink.
This is what it looks like when printed on the white background... a two-color run.
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