Corporate Press President Ken Kaufman, 2011 printing industry hall of fame inductee, is profiled.

By Erik Cagle

Work Ethic

Ken Kaufman has a clear-cut hero: his grandfather, Myer Loeb. He operated a pair of ladies' "ready to wear" clothing stores in Washington, DC, and was fairly successful at it. But Loeb became stricken with a disease that left him blind. He spent months in a hospital, and while he was being treated, the clothing stores began to struggle mightily. There was only one thing for Loeb to do.

Go back to work.

"Those stores were in desperate shape financially," Kaufman explains. "He got out of bed and went back to work. He was there every single day. I thought it was the most incredible thing, the perseverance. How he continued to operate those businesses as a blind man...it's just remarkable."

When Kaufman moved into a new house in Maryland, he took his grandfather for a tour to get him acclimated to how things were situated. Kaufman would only do it one time, for Loeb was determined to find his way around without any help.

Clearly, Loeb was a product of a different time, someone who experienced The Great Depression and world wars. It was a period when life could be cruel and unrelenting, pushing people to the very limits of what they could handle. And for that generation, they realized that there was nothing that they couldn't do, because sometimes you have no other choice but to try. It's the stuff heroes are made of.

"He's a fantastic man, and I always think about him, to this day," Kaufman says. "He was my hero, and he's always been my hero."

The path taken to the printing industry can often be a fascinating journey. For some, it is steeped in family tradition, a passing of the torch. And for others, the love of printing was first kindled by an elective course taken in high school. Then there are those for whom a career in printing was more of an accident than a predestined fate; a random, detoured route to success as opposed to a paved path to a preordained promised land.

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2011 Hall of Fame: Ken Kaufman - From Publisher to Printer