In 1974, Star owner/publisher Bob Erlam decided to separate the commercial printing department and the newspaper. He arranged for Howard Patterson from Yellowknife to move to Whitehorse and buy it. I was working for Howard as a pressman in Yellowknife at the time, and at 22 years of age, I was looking for excitement and agreed to move to Whitehorse with howard and set up this new business.

We started out in the same building as the newspaper and decided for continuity we would call it Star Printing.

After several months of every phone call being about a news story or placing an ad we changed our name to Arctic Star Printing to get us as far away from the Star in the phone book.

We started out with one letter press, a paper cutter, a small offset press and the Star’s pressman (at the time) Vince Fedoroff.

Over several years we grew and moved to bigger premises but I maintained an association with the Star for 20 years.

For most of those years I was “Mister Fix-It” and was on call if the Whitehorse Star needed my help. Everything from the darkroom to the pressroom to handling suppliers. I don’t know how many times I would get a call to figure out a mechanical problem.

For several years I wasn’t an employee but I got invites to staff parties, and I always got a Christmas bonus.

In the 1970s and early 1980s there was never a lack of good times and laughs. We would send a new employee to the Star to borrow a bucket of “dots” from the old newswire ticker tape. Every new pressman had to undergo the “solar heat ink test” (editor’s note: this was a trick played on new hires that involves ink, solar heat and then slamming the new hire’s hand into said ink).

I remember the day Rick Van-Sickle, we called him Inky in those days, got too close to the rollers on the press without a hair net and the static electricity almost lifted him off the ground by his hair.

I remember the original mixed media slow pitch league and the fact that Sunday night was ball night and if it was raining you just sat in your car and drank beer.

I remember the beer fridge in the middle of the production room that never got opened until the paper was finished ... unless you were thirsty.

I remember waxing large sheets of type and cutting columns out with an Exacto knife and laying out pages one column at a time.

By GARY HEWITT