Teaching The Trade

"Nobody wanted to hire me because they figured I'd just be drafted," he says.

To solve that problem, Ruprecht enlisted, and was soon sent to Germany to work as a lithographic cameraman for the Army Corps of Engineers. He landed a high-security post printing maps for the U.S. military.

After leaving the service, Ruprecht survived the volatile economy of the mid-1970s plying his trade at a number of union shops until, in 1978, he answered an ad in a local newspaper seeking a teacher for a position at what was then known as the Wisconsin State Reformatory.