ComfortZone

I worked for Print­istry for about 8 and a half years. Seven of those years were spent as the man­ager of the Tualatin Branch office (actu­ally within the Durham city limits). My office and design studio were in an awe­some old log house sur­rounded by large trees.

It was a very nice set­ting, with the old Costco about a block south. I got a LOT of busi­ness from this prox­im­ity, as I had many small busi­ness owners that would get their design and print­ing quite con­ve­niently on their way to and from shop­ping at Costco.

I don’t have many pic­tures of the office and studio, but Deanne did get a few when she brought young Alison to the office! She (and later Aaron too) loved to work at my office desk, and put pen caps on all their fingers!

My first com­puter was a 286 PC with 2 MB of RAM! These were the pre-​Mac years (and even pre-​Windows for a while!). I used it for esti­mat­ing and other office work. My office printer was a “daisy wheel,” that nois­ily typed out the let­ters and numbers.

In the back were my light tables and design area, shelv­ing and copier. I did all my design, paste-​up, logos and illus­tra­tion by hand on that light table in those days! (It seems impos­si­ble to me now!) In the next room I built a dark­room, and there was a large hor­i­zon­tal PMT camera in there. Prob­a­bly the MOST excit­ing thing for my young kids was this dark­room with its revolv­ing “time-​machine” door! Being a log cabin, it did have a very cozy atmos­phere which was com­fort­able to work in.

The actual print­ing was all done at the main office in McMin­nville, and for the first couple of years I worked alone. As the volume grew, I hired other design­ers, which all worked out very well: Amy, Alyssa, Mar­i­lyn, and Ruel.

This shop was located on Lower Boones Ferry Road, about a quar­ter mile south of what is now Bridge­port Vil­lage. (In those days the Bridge­port area was an aban­doned gravel pit.)

I left that office in 1995 and soon after that the shop closed up. I enjoyed dri­ving by that famil­iar build­ing when­ever I got the chance. Imag­ine my sur­prise when a couple weeks ago Deanne and I went by there… and it was GONE!!!

The sight really caught me by sur­prise. I have known even­tu­ally it would have to go, since it was in a prime loca­tion for devel­op­ment. I have tried to find out online where they moved it, but I have not found any­thing yet.

Here is what I did find… this image from Microsoft’s Vir­tual Earth gives a pretty good idea of the loca­tion. It was taken before the build­ing (see white circle on left) was removed, but after the trees were all cut down. Bridge­port Vil­lage can be seen in the upper right of this image, and REI is right in the middle.

Here is the Street View image from Google Maps (pretty sad look­ing, huh?):

Even though the Print­istry era ended for me about 13 years ago, I con­tin­ued to keep a link to it by dri­ving by this log house over the years. Since it is gone now, I wanted to tell the story and cap­ture some of the mem­o­ries and images here on my blog.