Half a century of journalism

The O’Leary family creates newspaper tradition in central Wisconsin

For a half century, the O’Leary family, first under J.A. and his wife Carol, and now his daughter Kris O’Leary and sonin- law Kevin Flink, have steered the TP Printing Company into the 21st century.

The story of how the O’Learys arrived in Abbotsford, and how they’ve ushered and navigated a company through the decades is a fascinating tale.

It’s a story that has seen three generations of O’Learys invest their time and work with the company, a story of Wisconsin Newspaper Hall of Fame careers and numerous local and statewide awards. It’s a story of overcoming loss to continue to produce stories and keep a readership informed.

The story begins in early January of 1971 when J.A. O’Leary of Savanna, Ill., purchased The Tribune-Phonograph and The Record-Review from publisher Louis Janda. As Carol O’Leary tells it, she was blindsided when her husband told her he had purchased two Wisconsin newspapers.

“I didn’t know about the sale, and that the paper was being bought until my husband came home and told me we were moving to Wisconsin,” Carol O’Leary said. “That’s the way he worked. He tried to tell me it was an exciting new opportunity, and then we pulled up in Colby, next to the feed mill.”

The O’Leary family had prior experience in the newspaper industry, having run the semi-weekly Savanna Times Journal and a local shopping guide. However, Carol instantly knew this endeavor would be a challenge, and she was still irate at her husband for making a big decision without her knowledge.

“At that time, you didn’t need to have your spouse sign for things, that’s how long ago that was,” she said. Carol also added with a chuckle “With all the changes of rules for mar r i e d business couples, I kept telling Jay, ‘This is the last time you can get out of this. You’ll have to divorce me right now if you try to pull this again.”

Purchasing the papers meant uprooting her children — Kimberly, Jeff and youngest daughter Kristine — from their home in Illinois and journeying to a new place, with its own history, background and culture.

“The first two years were tough, but we had a wonderful staff,” Carol remarked.

Carol has maintained contact with many of those reporters and employees, with one of them living in California, and she still sends cards out and receives Christmas letters in return.

It’s a sign of the personal touch the O’Learys have cultivated. Their employees sometimes come and go, but they still remember each of them and the contributions they have made over the years.

Always on the move

In that first year of operation, the O’Learys split their time between the offices in Colby and Abbotsford. It was in Colby, in the old Colby Cafe, now Thiago’s, that the printing press was located.

Eventually, the O’Learys resolved to have everything in one place, and the office and printing press was soon on the move. The O’Learys moved the TP Printing Company to its current location on 103 West Spruce Street in Abbotsford about three years after they arrived in the area.

Prior to being the TP Printing Company, the building was originally the White House Dairy, which produced powdered milk. It was later used to pulverize wood and create it into press wood.

By the time the O’Learys acquired the building in late December of 1971, it hardly resembled much of anything, and was in need of massive renovations.

“This building was an empty shell,” O’Leary said about the company’s current location. “The windows were all broken out. It had sawdust all over it. In fact, it still does have some sawdust in the storage room upstairs.”

Thankfully, the O’Learys got a great deal for the derelict structure, paying the city of Abbotsford the princely sum of one dollar. Though some might say that was still too much.

The Tribune-Phonograph closed down for a week as the whole staff spent the week cleaning out sawdust and getting the press and offices set up.

“Cathy Hull, she and I cleaned that whole room— what is now the conference room,” longtime employee Gale Schreiber remembers with a laugh and slight shudder.

The interior of the TP Printing building has also changed dramatically. Where an upstairs bathroom sits now was once the dark room where computer film was developed. New offices were added in 2001.

Innovation and adaptation

The process of creating a weekly newspaper has undergone massive changes. When the O’Learys purchased the papers, Janda was still publishing using archaic typsetting methods.

The O’Learys transformed film and words into a paper through a complex and convoluted multi-step process that involved typing, hot wax, grid paper, developing chemicals, printing, addressing and mailing. Occasionally a few choice words were said when things didn’t go well.

Type was set on a JustoWriter, an automatic composing machine that looked like an electric typewriter. It offered 8 different sizes and font styles of type. The printed type was cut into columns, put through a waxer and rolled onto graphed paper designed for newspapers. Then pictures were taken of these pages on a huge camera, about 7’ tall, that connected two rooms. The inside of the camera was part of the darkroom, as the film could not be exposed to white light. Film sheets were then chemically developed into negatives, just like your old fashion cameras’ photo negatives.

From the negatives, another process transferred the image to aluminum plates that were used on the printing press. Once the pages were printed, they were gathered together on another machine, folded, manually addressed on an Addressograph machine, tied into bundles and mailed.

There was very little automation, with almost everything done by hand -- though by the standards of the time, it was cutting edge stuff. “This was radically modern, because before all this, it was some guy putting lead type on a line,” Carol said.

To get color was an even more intricate process that involved more steps and expert precision. Each color is made up of various amounts of four colors: black, cyan, magenta and yellow. So artwork was printed out in four different color separations and pasted on clear film, preciously lining up the pictures. You also had to make sure to keep things clean as dust would show as marks on the negatives. All those marks had to be manually colored in so that they won’t show on the printed pages.

“It was labor intensive to say the least,” Carol says, describing those early years.

But with the advent of computers, big changes would be coming into the newspaper industry, and TP Printing under J.A. O’Leary was at the forefront, with The Tribune-Phonograph and The Record-Review often ahead of their competitors in the technology race.

“As all the changes came, we went through all these stages of improving and improving,” Carol said. “It was slow, but every time something came up, it was better than what had come before.”

That included understanding programming and coding to make computers do the billing, composing and streamlining the creation of newspapers. Not that there weren’t bumps along the road.

“When things wouldn’t work, Jay’s favorite saying was ‘It’s not the computer, it’s the computer operator’,” Gale said. “But he was right. It was usually something we were doing wrong. We had to get better at understanding how the new things worked.”

Using this new technology came with some amount of trepidation, and there was a learning curve along the way.

“Everyone in composing was afraid of the new computer,” said longtime employee Martha Ried. “I remember being the first one to try and get an ad to print. The computer program had what they called ticks and tildas, and you had to put them in certain places in order to get exactly what you wanted.”

Learning the correct commands was only half the battle. The screens were small, and worse, you couldn’t save your progress.

“You had to place the commands correctly, and hope to God it was right,” Ried said with a wry laugh.” If you spelled something wrong and needed to fix it, you had to retype the information from the very beginning.”

Under J.A.’s watch, the TP Printing Company’s publications switched from letterpress to offset printing, and changed to electronic text editing and management systems.

J.A. was also responsible for an even bigger change — adapting microcomputer systems to bundle everything from typesetting and accounting to subscription and mailing lists. This streamlined access to centralized information and lowered costs.

J.A. would eventually be posthumously inducted into the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s Hall of Fame in 2005 for his innovations and forward thinking.

A great place to work

The story of the O’Leary’s success would not be complete without the hard work and dedication of their employees, many of whom have spent decades working alongside Carol, Kris, J.A. and Kevin to craft editions that were informative and pleasing to the eye.

Gale Schreiber, Martha Ried and Peter Weinschenk are three of the longest tenured staff members.

In May of 1974, J.A. went to the Abbotsford High School to see if the Office Skills teacher had anyone to recommend for a typing job. “Since I was graduating and planning on getting married in the next year, I went to apply”, said Schreiber. “My interview was nothing that my teacher had taught us about. Apparently I applied on press day. J.A. was in his work clothes, covered with ink, which I now know is normal for press operators. He said accuracy was his biggest concern. Speed would eventually come with time. I started the day after Memorial Day in 1974.” said Gale. With a smile she adds “Little did I know that starting on a short holiday week, that ‘speed’ and ‘accuracy’ were both important. The faster I tried to keep up, the more mistakes I made and the farther behind I got. But the O’Learys were patient with me and I’m still here.”

Schreiber has performed many duties through her many years at TP Printing: typsetting, pasting up pages, designing ads, developing photos in the darkroom, working on the press, circulation and postal forms, mail room, front office, customer service, administrative assistant and currently in sales. She said, “It is amazing how much has changed and transformed through all the years. I remember when they moved in the first web press, I watched in amazement and wondered how it would all work. 45 years later, I’m very proud to be a part of the history” Martha Ried started in 1980, when she answered an advertisement for a janitor position. “When I came in for the interview, Jay showed me around and within 5 minutes he asked ‘How soon can you start?’ It was nothing like an interview is supposed to be. But that was Jay, direct and right to the point!” From there, Martha worked her way up the ladder, so to speak. She went from cleaning to graphic design, working on the web press and the AB Dick job press, to graphic design supervisor and IT supervisor (self-taught), after which she became the proofreader and is now with customer service. “Being hired here became my perfect job. I learned that with hard work and determination, all things are possible!”

The Record-Review editor Peter Weinschenk is the longest editorial member, having joined the staff as a reporter in 1981. Originally from Fresno, Calif., Peter was working on his master’s degree in English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and living a less than glamorous lifestyle.

“I got my master’s degree, and then joined a PhD student in math and a master’s degree holder in biology, frying eggs at The Pantry Restaurant in Ann Arbor. So I started working a little bit freelancing for this weekly south of Ann Arbor. Then I kinda got into community journalism, which I never thought I would be doing.”

It was not long after these first forays into journalism when Peter heard about a job at The Record-Review in Editor and Publisher magazine. He applied and was offered the job, sight unseen. So, Peter piled his books, Polaroid camera and belongings into the back of his small Gremlin car, and headed for small-town, rural Abbotsford.

“The only impression I had of rural Wisconsin was basically through Garrison Keillor, and his Lake Woebegone stories,” Peter said. “It was a culture shock for me, absolutely.”

Of course, when Peter came to Abbotsford, it was a very different time from today’s modern world of high speed internet, smartphones, tablets and hundreds of channels on TV. But that wasn’t a bad thing. He found the quiet and close-knit communities appealing.

“There was really this totally integrated dairy community, and the local towns I was in at that time, like Marathon, Athens and Edgar, and later Stratford, there were lots of businesses on Main Street. Lots of kids in the school, lots of activities and events and traditions. It was this incredible adventure for a guy from California.”

Peter also sold ads along with writing stories and photography. This allowed him to get to know his communities better and to learn about the key issues they faced in their everyday lives, such as the recession of 1981 and the dairy crisis that came with it.

“The whole community was really in trouble, and that was a very turbulent time. There would not be a week that would go by where I wasn’t in someone’s dairy barn, and dancing around the manure, and talking to them about their difficulties and shedding light on it. . . I felt so proud to be a part of that.”

Weinschenk was hired at the same time as Tribune-Phonograph editor Chuck Runnoe, and together for nearly 30 years, they churned out story after story.

Weinschenk would go on to raise a family in Edgar, and continue to cover important and topical issues of the day, working first for Carol and J.A., and later their daughter, Kris, when she and her husband Kevin Flink purchased the company in 2009.

Even after 40 years in the industry, Weinschenk says he’s never felt the desire to go anywhere else.

“I was going here to see if I liked it, and if I like it, I think I’m going to stay. Time gets away on you, doesn’t it? We’re able to put out a good newspaper, and I think that’s valuable to people and they respect that.”

“The newspaper business is very humbling,” Peter says. “I’ve gotten into trouble many times. If you think you’re right, you’re wrong. There’s always more to learn. I work very hard to know what’s going on, and to understand the times.”

Over the years, Weinschenk has faced threats, angry readers and just about every other thing you can imagine. But he shrugs it off and says being a reporter is not for the faint of heart.

“That’s just part of being in the newspaper business. Everything is so local and personal and heartfelt. You have so many real issues to deal with, and you’re right in the thick of it. I guess that’s why I’m still here. Journalism matters.”

Remembering J.A.

The story of the O’Learys is also one of perseverance. In 1997 JA unexpectedly passed away, and his loss affected everyone at the company. In the aftermath of his passing, his family resolved to continue the legacy that he bad began in 1971.

“The important thing was to keep the newspapers going. That’s what we’ve

J.A.O’Leary

Carol O’Leary

THE CURRENT GENERATION -Kris O’Leary, center, and Kevin Flink, second from the right, have participated in TP Printing, the family business, for the past 25 years. Other Flink family members are, left to right, Lucinda, Warren, John, Hazel and Conrad.Photo courtesy by Adeline Henry.