The Way We Were

A year ago, when I retired from Fahy-Williams Publishing, the company was kind enough to offer me an office in the building. Thus, I have a nice space from which to conduct personal business, or write the occasional column.

My new office is much smaller than my old one, as it should be, but that has left me with a problem. What do I do with all the stuff I have accumulated over the past 40 years?

It seemed to me that the first logical step was to figure out what was there, so I took a sort of mental inventory. Nearly everything fit into one of four categories: paperwork, books, photographs and what I’ll call “merchandise.”

By merchandise I mean all the small gifts and awards that people and organizations have given me over the years, including plaques, pens, paperweights, ashtrays, coffee cups, etc. I don’t care much for knick-knacks, but of course they meant something to me due to the source, so I kept most of them.

Books were the biggest category by weight, as there were more than a hundred of them in my office. I’m not quite sure how they had all gotten there, or what I had ever intended to do with them, but they made up a very eclectic little library. There were some textbooks, histories, biographies, children’s books, novels, you name it. Some I had probably purchased myself, some had been gifts and many were mysteries (so to speak). Many of them had been published long before I was born.

Now, I love books, which is why I got into publishing in the first place, and I firmly believe that books are a big part of what makes a house a home. You would think I’d be happy to simply pack up the books in my office and take them to my house.

The problem with that is the 500 or so books that I already have at home, which have gradually overflowed my bookcases and spilled out onto the floors. The fact that I’ve read most of them might cause some people to question my priorities.

Anyway, I couldn’t see adding several cartons of books to the collection. I decided to keep the ones that had been signed by someone close to me, or the author, and donate the rest. It was like saying goodbye to a group of old friends.

The paperwork included around 30 file folders, which contained all the billing, estimates and receipts for work done to houses (seven) and cars (20) that I have owned, plus records for banking, taxes, insurance, healthcare and so forth. I shredded the whole lot, so I’m hoping some contractor doesn’t suddenly decide to dispute a payment I made for something a couple of decades ago.

There was also a sub-category of paperwork, which was correspondence on paper. Mostly it was made up of business letters about issues that seemed vitally important at the time but are long since forgotten. More interesting were the personal letters, several of which were from people who are no longer with us. I’ll hang onto those.

The fourth category of stuff was photographs, which was by far the most time-consuming. While you don’t have to read a whole book or tax return or whatever before you toss it, you pretty much do have to look at every photograph.

Most of the photos were taken by me, on company time with a company camera, somewhere from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. Although there are a few shots of our employees clowning around in the office, the vast majority were taken at trade shows, almost entirely in exhibit halls. There are hundreds of them, which makes me wonder how much of my life I spent at those things.

From an artistic standpoint, the photos are generally terrible, as I apparently have no sense of composition, but the subjects are fascinating. Most were business acquaintances, some were good friends in the industry and others don’t ring a bell with me at all.

Whether I remember the people or not, there were a number of things that struck me about the group as a whole, from my perspective 40 years later. One is just the sheer number of them. Some trade shows drew thousands of people, and we had several shows a year.

Another is how young they were, and by that I don’t just mean that we all looked younger than we do now. That’s not really a surprise. What I mean is that both the exhibitors and the buyers were generally the owners of businesses, and as such, they weren’t very old. That tells me that the school supply industry was extraordinarily entrepreneurial back then, and also that the bar for entry wasn’t set very high.

Judging from their clothes and the general sophistication of the booth displays, they were doing very well with their young enterprises. A sense of optimism virtually leaps from the photos.

Another quality I can feel reaching to me across time is simply friendliness. People obviously welcomed me into their booths, even though I was not a customer, and I noticed that they also welcomed each other. In numerous photographs, exhibitors could be seen hanging out in one another’s booths, even among competitors.

I remember those days fondly. People weren’t just trade show friends; we kept in touch, visited each other’s homes, even vacationed together. It’s hard to imagine that happening today.

There was one other thing I saw in the pictures. Now, you may think I am reading way too much into a bunch of static images, and I’ll admit to being far from objective about this, but the people in the pictures looked happy to me.

Well, you may ask, why wouldn’t they be? They were young, smart, prosperous and they worked in an industry that was both lucrative and rewarding. They were, after all, trying to improve the education of our children.

On the other hand, perhaps people were just happier back then. America was at peace, the economy was humming, terrorism was somebody else’s problem and global warming was just a theory. Baby Boomers ruled the earth, and it felt pretty good. Something I did not see in those photographs was any inkling that any of that was about to change.

They didn’t see it coming. Somehow there was no premonition of 9/11, Afghanistan, smart phones, social media, the financial crisis, the Great Recession, Amazon, COVID, polarization, artificial intelligence or the rest. Not a clue.

It makes me wonder what we’re missing now. I don’t get to a lot of trade shows these days, but if I were to make the next one, and photograph all the faces, what do you suppose we would see in them?