Origins & History

The story goes that my father, George Bull Young, started the print shop that became The Tagalong Press sometime during 1947. That's the date he claimed in his application to the Amalgamated Printers' Association, sometime around 1976. The only problem with that is the erstwhile existence of a single copy of The Tagalong, which Dad published sometime during 1946, probably after my birth.
     The original game was for the press to be the publication point of a little arts & crafts magazine, Hobby Shopper, which was published in a few issues between 1947 and around 1949, when we moved from Amarillo, Texas to Indianapolis, Indiana.
     A photograph of me standing at Dad's 7x11 Golding Pearl Old Style when I was about two years old gives a hint of what the shop looked like in Texas. I suspect that the same press and other accouterments made their way to Indianapolis, since I remember distinctly standing in the basement one day staring at the treadle.
     When we moved from the house on Denny Street to the house on Dequense Avenue in Indianapolis, Dad traded up to a 8x10 Chandler & Price NS and tried running the shop in the garage. At some point my mother, Audrey Young, asked Dad to relinquish enough space for her car, which brought on a fit of spinning tires and other huffing and puffing to prove that the car would never fit.
     When I was in the fourth grade, we moved from Indianapolis to Dayton, Ohio, where we lived for a while in an apartment complex. In that setting I don't remember much more than that Dad had a small Kelsey 5x8 press and did some occasional printing for friends and others needing business cards & whatever else. A year or so later we ended up in what would become suburban Kettering, Ohio.
     At some point Dad took me out of school to go with him to Chillicothe, Ohio, where he had heard there was a press for sale. We visited the shop, saw the Linotype machine and Dad came to an agreement with the sellers. A few weeks later a truck backed into the driveway with a C&P OS 12x18 with a feeder.
     It took four men nearly all day and part of the night to get that press disassembled and wrestled into the basement. It took another week or so before all the feeder parts had been removed and the press completely reassembled and ready for use.
     It was about here that Dad took on the truly overpowering job of printing up the weekly "hit list" for the radio station where he worked as news director. Between his regular job and the demands of producing a weekly newsletter with appropriate listing of the most popular rock & roll of the day, Dad was up at least three days a week, late into the evening and early morning setting type or printing what was really a small, four-page newspaper.
     At some point sanity prevailed and he was released from that servitude. He never forgot the experience and the few times after that when he deluded himself into trying to make money with the print shop were in printing stationary and business cards for friends and government officials with whom he had contact.
     By 1967 Dad had left the radio news business and gone back to what he enjoyed most. He became a city beat reporter for a locally-owned weekly newspaper. It was then that the print shop became truly a hobby set up. It was about then that he joined the Amalgamated Printers' Association. His membership with that outfit lasted only a few years. Dad had slowed down considerably and Mom's health began to deteriorate.
     A few months before he died, Dad asked me to take his print shop. I had neither the room nor the interest so he ended up giving it to a professor in the art department of a local university. After Dad death a few days before Christmas of 1982, the professor handed me a few pieces of Dad's shop and the printery was shortly thereafter resurrected in a tiny corner of a small garage on the edge of New Carlisle, Ohio.