A Special Sickness — Part II, the Conclusion

The Waldzell Publishing’s art show came and went. More than a couple of hundred people showed up but we didn’t raise a nickel. I just don’t know how to ask for money. We never did it in Almaden, except maybe for the PTA (Parent/Teachers Association). In the old Almaden, mainly we made what we needed or borrowed it for a day or two. We didn’t need so much money to buy things we could build or locate. Asking for money was generally considered distasteful. I always remember when some guy’s father welded some broken part for one of my inventions and I asked one of the farmers how much I should pay this father. The farmer told me that we didn’t use money for favors, that was uncouth, have someone buy you a six pack of beer to give to him. This father loved beer. That is generally the attitude I grew up with. So, no money from the art show. However, everyone told me what a good idea it was to open up an alternative avenue to these creditable but ignored artists.

Now, truly, the publisher’s illnesses bug had sunk its fangs even deeper into my hide. Since I had left the Time-Observer, I had remained in touch with other employees there. For the year I was there we had become good friends and we still socialized a lot. A young cub reporter, who had been hired just a few months before I was, became a good friend and fellow member of the Los Gatos intelligencia. We had very similar literary interests and social philosophies. The conceptual success of the Waldzell show got us both to thinking. What about something a little more practical and generalized than a visual art portfolio? It didn’t take us but a few months to come up with an idea for a magazine with a base concept similar to the portfolio. I was pretty adamant about not targeting urban areas but mainly the mountains and the coast. In considering what was a common element to these areas, I came up with an oft seen bird that could easily be found in all these rural areas, the Red Tail hawk. We called the magazine Red Tail. The sign business was starting to take hold and my time was very flexible. I started checking out books about publishing from the library. I bought all sorts of magazines and studied their ad/edit ratios, layouts, circulation, etc., etc. The publisher’s sickness bug had a solid hold on me now.

I built several large, freestanding light boxes like those we had used at the Times-Observer. These were used for pasting up pages. Computer composition hadn’t even been thought of yet. The printed page was exclusively built with the use of an exacto knife and waxed type galleys. The very first Apple computer was still a couple of years away. I had some business cards printed up and I spent some time with designer friends to come up with an attractive visual presence and layout guide for the magazine pages. Jeff was the name of the reporter who was still working at the TO. For the sake of his job, we kept his involvement pretty hush-hush.

The plan that evolved from all this was to build a sixteen page dummy edition of Red Tail to show to potential advertisers. We could get their responses to this sample edition, perhaps some advertising commitments and use this support to approach some wealthy investors who might put some real money into this project. We learned from our research that the publishing business had a real high ratio of startup failures so we figured the place to start was with pre-committed advertising. We came up with a few stories that applied to the area in general, not just Los Gatos, one about the history of Lexington Reservoir and another one about lady’s fashion in the area. There were a few dummied up monthly columns that might be used if this thing really took off. Jeff wrote the feature articles and I did the columns. I pretty much refused to write any of the serious stuff . . .

(click here to read the conclusion)