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.
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