From "The Memoirs, Chapter Ten" -

           Then our friend Cara Landry, up at the Napa Valley Theater Company, bought herself a Getstetner machine (!), the latest technology in cheap printing for small organizations like, well, theaters.  And she was going to print her posters and programs and such.  Well, I think it was a bit of a hassle and kept making a big mess and wasting lots of paper and getting everybody inky, so she said, Hey Bill, I got this great new Getstetner machine, and like, I'll give it to you if you'll, well, print some posters and such for me, how's that?

           I thought it was wonderful!  My own Getstetner machine!

           Well, we went right to work printing all kinds of important announcements.

           And I started trying to figure out how it worked.  Seems I could take a color photograph to a place in San Francisco and have it "color-separated," into cyan, magenta, yellow and black and then take the four separations to another place and have a Getstetner stencil cut for each color and then bring them back to the studio and with the Getstetner machine we could push cyan ink through the cyan stencil, and then change the stencil and run the paper again and push magenta ink through the magenta stencil and then change the stencil and, well you get it.  And I could print my own full color art works.  I quickly did an improved "garage sale" with one of my favorites, Sofia Loren, IN LIVING COLOR!  That kind of thing.

            I was doing a lot of Pat Nixon images at that time so it was a natural to print a lovely black and white of the First Lady.

            Russell's friend Chester Howard was then working at the S.F. Chronicle and would bring me photos off the wire services.  Many came over the wires in four-color separations, ready for the newspaper to print.  I was especially pleased with all the colorful flowers Pat had planted in the White House gardens.

            And I did one of Richard Nixon and the two Nixon daughters entering the hospital to visit Pat, who was there with some sort of ailment.  It would later be a mural on the side of our AAA Studios on Fourteenth Street.

            Perfect timing for Queen Elizabeth's 25th Jubilee!

            I used the Getstetner to pay homage to all my favorite artists, like, below, Chirsto's "Running Fence," Sonoma County, California, 1976.

            Artist Kevin Rooney's "Bookends," Santa Cruz, California, 1982.

            And our other famous artist, Billy King, came by and loved the Getstetner machine, of course,  and said, Hey, let me do one!  I said, sure, Billy, what do you want to print?

            Here, this'll knock 'em dead, he said.

            That's him on top.

            Of course, it made a big mess and wasted lots of paper and got everybody all inky, but hell, we loved it and would print lots of stuff for many years on that old Getstetner machine.

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   ...NEXT:  WORLD PREMIER OF "ROCKET TO MARS"