Fast Flow Printing #

I do not know how I found these guys maybe there was a want ad in the newspaper, but they were looking for someone to do printing sales. You know going down the street soliciting businesses for a special on business cards and so on. I did that for a while and then I started going after some bigger projects. That led me back to Central Pentecostal Church and the music director that I was pretty good friends with Laurie Bertig [Just a note here, I think I promised a story of the Centurions earlier in my story and that should come earlier than this because I somehow introduced Wes to Laurie and Wes got very involved in many of Laurie’s projects.]

Laurie was excited about a church bulletin that he received from a church in Washington I think. It was a duo-tone image. It took a while to get all the details ironed out, getting estimates from Fast Flow and going back and forth. I even had to make a presentation in front of the Central Church board, but in the end it was approved and I got my big job. For a while it was even re-occuring revenue because we would print the inserts that would go in these bulletins. They later devised a template and printed the weekly ones on their photo copy machine.

The printer guy, his name was Len, was getting a little overwhelmed with the amount of work that was coming in so I was able to put to use my graphic photo skills to use and shot negatives for him and masked them up and burned the plates and he printed.

The company was expanding fairly quickly, they got into typesetting and design, and I think they might have used a different name for that part of the company. They brought in a couple of graphic artists (Helen Wong and I don’t remember the name of the guy) and a typesetter (Catherine Jacques). An interesting side note here, Helen designed all my logos and usually for the price of a lasagna from the restaurant next door.

They bought a bigger press, so now they had two presses. One day Len says he wants to teach me how to run the press. Of course, I had run one of these same offset presses when I was in high school during the graphic arts class. Len worked the big press and I worked the original offset and things were moving along. One day, Len gets upset about what I do not know, but he quit and he never came back. Now I was the only printer. Gary one of the managers promised that he would keep the printing jobs simple so that it would be easy for me. Of course that did not happen, we all discovered how natural I was with this machine and I was quite capable of getting multiple color jobs and even more complicated jobs than Len was doing.

While at Fast Flow, I really need to go back a bit here as there were some fairly important events that also took place here. While I was a printing salesman, Fast Flow had hired another salesperson and her name was Tracy Parcells and eventually she and I were an item. I think she was my first really serious girlfriend. I was at all of her family functions, she came with me many times when I went back to Barrhead for a visit. It got to the point where we were even talking about getting married but I think it was Tracy who got a glimpse of what I needed to accomplish and knew that if that was to happen I would have had to make some serious compromises that would not sit well down the road, so we broke up but still remained good friends for many years.

The other thing that happened was I got to know Catherine more and we found we had some similar goals and ambitions. Her boyfriend at the time was a guitar player and composer and was working on a recording on his Teak 4 track reel to reel. By the way, I eventually bought that four track from George and just a few years ago, finally sold it at a garage sale. Anyway, Catherine wanted to produce, manage, direct bands and we talked about doing some production work together.

The people who owned and worked at FastFlow were all members of the Church of Scientology including Catherine. I took a communication course through the Church of Scientology and there was this other guy there that I used to do some communication exercises with and I remember that he was a Boiler Maker which is a special kind of welder as they even had their own special union, The Boiler Maker Union. I always thought this was such a cool name for a rock band. I did end up using part of that name for the label that I later released Hot Java and Need to Feel on Boiler Records.