Ken Whitmore hands Blyth Printing legacy to long-time righthand man Steve Dawe
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
On Oct. 1, one of the oldest businesses in Blyth quietly experienced a historic changing of the guard. Since 1938, Blyth Printing has been owned and operated by members of the Whitmore family, but this week, Ken Whitmore ushered in a brand new era by handing the keys to his paper kingdom over to his longtime employee, Steve Dawe. To immortalize this momentous occasion, The Citizen twice took an extremely short sojourn to this beloved local institution in order to record both men’s thoughts on the transition.
The moment Dawe first set foot in the Whitmore family printshop two decades ago, he fell in love with the place. “I walked in to get band posters printed,” he explained. “I needed a rush job, and nobody else could do them. I remember just walking in here, and the smell, and the machines - I basically asked Ken to let me sweep the floors, on the spot. Like, I don’t care what I have to do, I just want to be in this building. And I remember the quality of the posters was beyond what I was expecting.”
One of Whitmore’s earliest memories is being two or three years old, sitting at the end of a printing press. For generations, the Whitmore children were expected to do their part to help the business by doing tasks like collating paper and cleaning the shop. Sweeping the floors was one of Ken’s first responsibilities when he started helping out. “Any time I wanted something, it’d be like ‘well, the floor needs swept - do that and we’ll give you a dime,’” he recalled being told. “If you were born on a farm, you were doing chores when you were small. When we were here, it was just expected that if something needed done, you did it.” Upon completion of the shop’s most-pressing tasks and chores, he would often take his hard-earned dime down to the corner store to buy some candy.
Whitmore has vivid memories of the times when his father, Doug, was tasked with creating eye-catching promotional materials for the town’s burgeoning theatre festival. “He was printing really difficult posters for the Blyth Festival, years ago, on a one-colour press. You had to put them through, sometimes six, seven, eight, or nine times, in perfect registration. Today, with a laser printer, it just comes out beautiful, right off the bat. We’d be starting with putting black down, then cyan, then magenta, then yellow, then sometimes a special PMS (Pantone Matching System) colour or two, then a varnish coat. It was a completely different thing,” he recalled. “There were times when I’d be working on the same job for two months, sometimes. I would say that back in those days it was more of an artform than mass production. It’s very fun and satisfying to just start with a white piece of paper and put it through so many times, and just make a masterpiece out of it.”
For Dawe, securing a position at Blyth Printing wasn’t as simple as trading manual labour for dimes to spend on candy. “We went back and forth for a while, and I kept getting my stuff printed here, and every once in a while I would ask if he was looking for somebody.” Ken wasn’t sure about the idea at first. “Steve asked me if I’d be interested in hiring him,” he explained. “But at the time, I didn’t really know. After a couple months of thinking about it, I approached him.”
Dawe remembers the day that he finally got the job offer for which he’d been waiting. “Ken called and said, ‘Hey, do you want to come in?’” But I said, ‘No, sorry, I just got a raise at my other job.’ I said, ‘No’ to him!” However, the pull of the printing life proved too strong for Dawe - it was only a few months later when he found himself calling Ken back and asking if his offer of employment still stood, and Ken told him it did.
Even though it’s such a big part of his family history, Ken wasn’t always sure that he had a future in the printing industry. “My grandfather came here in 1938 and bought the newspaper from J.H.R. Elliott, and he ran it until he passed away. Then my dad took over and did it until [1971], and switched to completely doing commercial printing after that. I came here after college, and I was just going to help for five or six years, until they were ready to retire, but once it gets in your blood, you kind of make changes; you stick with it…. The production end of it was definitely my forte. I did take Business Finance at Fanshawe College, so I knew bookkeeping and all that, but I’d much rather be running high-end machinery where you can adjust stuff by 1/1000 of an inch. There’s something about running a real quality piece of equipment that’s very satisfying to me.”
While he may have been hesitant to bring Dawe aboard at first, Ken’s new ward quickly proved himself to be a worthy hire. “Within a month, I couldn’t believe I ever ran the place without him,” Ken admitted. “Steve’s a great guy. He’s been with me close to 20 years now. He’s super capable, a super great guy. He’s learned a lot of the trade from me, and he’s brought a lot of his own stuff in. Everything he picks up, he can do... I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been running it since 1988, so it’s time to let some fresh blood have a go at it.”
Dawe, for his part, is taking his new role seriously. “It’s an honour, really. It’s exciting, it’s nerve-wracking - I obviously want to carry on that legacy,” he explained. “I guess there’s pressure to carry on the business and keep it going. But Ken’s not going anywhere, so he’ll be around to help.” Despite the change in ownership, Ken intends to continue working at the shop for the foreseeable future.
During his lengthy career at Blyth Printing, Ken has experienced some huge changes in the industry. “I’ve seen it go from old, old technology right through to the most current,” he pointed out. “When I was a small kid, they were still doing hand-set lead type. It’s gone computer to plate, and now completely digital, for the most part.”
And it’s not just the printing industry that’s changed over the years - Ken has seen Blyth transform as well. “Business-wise, there’s not many businesses on the main street that were here any longer than us. Howson’s Mill and Hubbard’s and that sort of thing are still going with the original families, but there’s not a lot of other ones that are still there.”
There is one thing that didn’t change in all the years that Ken was manning the helm at Blyth Printing. “Right from the time I took over I had people saying that paper is on the way out, and that sort of thing, but I think there’s more paper now than there was 35 years ago. There’s something about holding something in your hand, for my generation anyway. I don’t want an e-book, I want the book. There’s something tactile about it, you know?”
As the new owner, Dawe is also unphased by the naysayers who perennially declare the death of print. “People have been saying that print is going to die for the last 50 years at least, but it still seems to be going good,” he pointed out. “People are always going to still need flyers and stuff. People are still going to need signs, and posters... in this day of social media and digital everything being fake, it’s nice to have something real, that you can hold, and touch, and smell, and see. I still like going downtown in Toronto or London and seeing ratty old band posters on the posts. There’s just something about it.”
For the most part, Dawe plans to keep on with business as usual at Blyth Printing, but there is one big change he’s excited about making: Possibly offering custom t-shirt designs, a service he’s become known for offering outside of the shop. “Eventually, I’d like to get a silkscreen press... I just like that it’s one-on-one. It’s old school. I’m literally pulling ink through a screen to get it onto a t-shirt. If somebody orders 100 shirts, I’m pressing every one by hand, and I can see it as it goes through.”
While the enduring power of the printed page is not to be underestimated, the continued success of this printshop is about much more than paper products. Blyth Printing has never been afraid to invest in state-of-the-art equipment. “We always wanted to have the largest equipment around,” Ken declared. “I put in a four-colour press in the late [1990s], and it was the only machine between London and Owen Sound like it.” That same machine later made a real impression on Dawe when he arrived on the scene. “When I first started, Ken had a four-colour press that took up the entire front of the shop. It was huge. You literally had to walk on it to run it. Now that’s all been replaced by digital stuff. I think that’s the biggest change: going from analog to digital for almost everything. He still has some of those old presses, though. The smaller ones. That’s one cool thing about Ken - he can run all that old stuff, so he’s a pretty valuable guy to have around.”
Many years of working long, hard hours have also gone into earning Blyth Printing a reputation for getting the job done where other printers feared to tread. Ken told the tale of one particularly grueling weekend in the 1990s that he spent printing materials for a plowing match in Dashwood. “I had to work about 32 hours straight to get all the work done for the county that we needed to have ready for that Monday morning. In my family, it was instilled in me that if you had work to do, you got it done.”
Ken’s decision to scale back his role at Blyth Printing was spurred on by a recent health scare that’s given him new perspective. “Last year, when I got the prostate cancer diagnosis, I just said, ‘I don’t know how bad this is going to be.’ I was thinking of phasing out at 60, but I kind of made a decision to move it up a couple years. I’m just ready for another chapter of my life.
“My mantra right now is to live cleaner, be less stressed, take care of my health, and hopefully have as long of a life as I can manage.”
But Ken doesn’t just have a new mantra, he also has a new mission: to spread an important message to men like him. “Any male over 45 years old - get a PSA (Prostate-specific antigen) test. The sooner the better. I never saw cancer on my horizon - it was never even on my radar. I was just lucky that my doctor recommended getting this test done, that I’d never even heard of before. Your health is worth more than any amount of wealth or fame. For myself, I went through the whole spiel of having my prostate removed. I’m at zero now, but it was touch and go. I never felt anything or knew anything was wrong prior to that. So that’s kind of what I would preach. Anyone can get a PSA test and find out early.”