A Fascination with Print
As a child, Charles Kerr moved around a lot. A real lot.
"By the time I was 13, I'd lived in 26 different states," says Kerr, Copy Center supervisor for the City of Hollywood, Fla.
His father was a forester whose specialized skills led to frequent relocation. By his teenage years, though, the roving had mostly ceased and Kerr found himself back in his birth state of Texas, contemplating his future. Convinced he wanted to repair airplanes for a living, he started taking courses at a magnate school to become an aircraft mechanic. After school, to make a few bucks, he helped out in the print shop his social sciences teacher ran out of his garage. There, he discovered a previously unknown passion.
"I found the whole process fascinating," Kerr recalls. "Someone would have an idea, and I got to make it a reality."
Despite this enthusiasm, once he graduated he followed his training and took a job with Continental Airlines as a mechanic. He quickly began having second thoughts.
"This is not as exciting as I thought it would be," he recalls thinking. So at age 19, he went back to his old teacher's print shop.
"It was awesome. I loved it," Kerr says. He shot negatives, stripped film and ran the Multi 1250. "This whole process, from an idea to a product off the end of a press—I was hooked," he says.
Kerr worked for "Mr. C" for a year and a half, then took jobs with other small printers. When friends suggested a road trip to California, Kerr eagerly signed on. Perhaps because of his itinerant upbringing, though, he hatched a secret plan to stay in California once they arrived and seek his future there. To fund the trip, he took a job in the copy room of a legal support company. There he met his girlfriend and future wife Andy, who agreed to join him on his West Coast adventure.
In 1991 the two of them got an apartment in the San Francisco area, and he found work in a city print shop, where he ran a Multi 1250 and a one-color Ryobi.
"I figured out how to do four-color process on the single-color Ryobi," he boasts. "If you had the patience, it turned out really awesome."
After this, Kerr went into sales for AlphaGraphics. He enjoyed meeting people and hearing their ideas for printed projects. But he didn't like handing those ideas off to someone else to print.
"I wanted to make stuff," he admits.
From Coast to Coast
By 2000, the realization that he and Andy would never be able to afford a house in the expensive Bay Area led them to consider moving. Florida seemed a nice location, near the ocean and not far from his wife's mother. So they took a road trip around the Sunshine State and decided to put down stakes in Hollywood. Kerr applied for several job openings, and in February 2001 was hired to supervise the City of Hollywood's Copy Center.
The previous manager had started to transition it from offset to digital. He had sold all the presses and added a Xerox DocuTech 6135. Unfortunately that was all he added.
"I was handed a digital shop with one digital printer," says Kerr. Fortunately, he was excited by the opportunity to build a digital shop from scratch. After evaluating the type of work people were requesting, he found a big demand for color. So he ended the lease on the 6135 and brought in some Ikon color equipment. Color printing took off.
"You know the adage, 'If you build it they will come?' I started building it and they started coming," he says.
As demand increased, he continually upgraded to faster equipment over the next decade to keep pace. He implemented EFI's Digital StoreFront (though he admits it never caught on). He restructured the in-plant's pricing after researching competitors' price lists. And he did whatever he could to keep customers happy. His efforts were recognized by the City of Hollywood, which gave him a Diamond Service Award, its most prestigious individual employee award. Kerr is very pleased to have transformed the in-plant from a place people used to avoid to a resource people call on to discuss how their ideas can be turned into reality.
"That's what I'm most proud of," Kerr says—though he quickly adds that his "greatest accomplishment" is his assistant Thea Gordon, whom he hired as a part-timer years ago and trained to become just as skillful as he is.
In the future, Kerr (known in-house as "C.K.") hopes to get his in-plant moved to another building where he can improve the workflow and upgrade equipment yet again.
When he's not printing in the Copy Center, Kerr enjoys…printing at home.
"My hobby is printing," he laughs. He has a silk screen press at home and works with his wife on her fashion design projects.
- People:
- Andy
- Charles Kerr
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
