After all the headaches and ulcers it seemed almost too good to be true
as we delivered the finished layouts to the printers, to be converted overnight
into the first edition of our new child, DRAGSTER Australia magazine.
Following all the stress of the previous few weeks it seemed as if Ayers Rock
(sorry, Uluru) had been lifted from our chests, and my wife, Jan, and I walked
down the road from our poky little office to celebrate the occasion with a
good meal at a restaurant.
If only we knew what lay ahead we may not have been quite so easy going
with our money.
Ahead lay days when with each issue we were convinced it was our last,
when we dug into our own bank account to pay the print bills, when we worked
into the small hours struggling to meet deadlines, when postal strikes stopped
the lifeline of our mail, when everything seemed to conspire to prevent our
progress. Yet somehow we did.
There are many strange stories from those days. Our first office was
chosen because it was cheap -- $36 a week. Today that amount seems laughable.
It got us two rooms at the back of what had once been an old block of flats,
on the Pacific Highway, North Sydney, just up the road from the Harbour Bridge.
It also got us a share of the entry hall and bathroom with the tenants of the
front half of the flat. The building was partly owned by a well known football
player, and from the front office they ran a call girl service. We didn't know
for several weeks until a few of the girls dropped in with the night's takings.
It didn't bother us, because we hardly ever saw them, but we had the occasional
night visitor. There would be a knock on our joint entry door and to Jan's
enquiry as to what the 18 year old kid wanted, hands in pockets and staring
at his feet he'd mumble something like, "Aw shucks, I haven't ever done this
before but . . ." Jan would yell for me and I'd have to chase him off.
One night we were finishing layouts and there was a noise in the foyer
outside our entry. I went to check and there was a policeman with handgun
drawn flattened against the wall. " Who are you ?" he demanded as he pushed
me back through our door. Apparently there was a madman upstairs with a shotgun
threatening to blow off someone's head. Half an hour later the SWAT team lead
this character down the stairs and out of our lives.
On another occasion a typesetter we were using complained that she was
worried the tax department was checking typesetting businesses and none of her
records were up to date. I laughingly suggested that maybe she ought to have
a fire and could then claim all her records had been accidentally burnt. I
arrived the next morning to pick up my typesetting to find the top half burnt
off the building she was in. There were police everywhere. I pulled the girl
aside and began to ask, " You seriously didn't . . ." but she gave me a glare
that would have started a fire in galvanised iron and told me to get the hell
out of the place. Somehow my smoke blackened original copy had survived, and
she shoved it into my hand and told me to clear off for a while. I did.
It all seems seedy now, but these were the things we lived with as we
fought to establish our magazine. The work was hectic, the days often long and
it was all a one-man job for the first six months. Aside from me there was
just a lady who came in to pack and hand type all the subscription envelopes
until we could afford a machine to print the addresses onto them, and Jan,
who came in after her day job as a school teacher.
It wasn't quite the glamorous life we'd expected when we planned it,
coming from a job editing the well established Drag News magazine,
where all the systems and files were in order and the whole deal rolled along
steadily. But somehow we survived the first couple of years, which were the
worst, living hand to mouth.
Eventually they wanted to pull our building down and we had to move.
This was a step up in terms of facilities, as we moved into an air-conditioned
office in Lane Cove, a few miles up the road, with under cover parking and
three rooms. We also took on our first employee, Jon Van Daal in 1983,
then a public servant with a hankering to try the real world.
Things rolled along well through the early 80's, and we launched the
first edition of an off-shoot magazine, Drag Racing News (we'd bought
the title when that magazine went into liquidation). It was designed as a
quarterly, using personality and car feature stories, plus other less news-specific
articles, with gloss paper and plenty of colour. It was very different to the
newsprint tabloid style of Dragster.
In 1986, after the bad news of the Castlereagh (Sydney) track
closure, and facing an apparently bleaker future as the sport tapered down in
the mid-80's, I once made an off-hand comment to another publisher who'd moved
his business into the same building as us, that " for two bob (that's 20 cents
for the younger generation) I'd sell the business."
He took me up on the offer. I was a little dumbfounded that someone
might really want to buy it, but put a price on it, and when he asked how much
I'd want as wages to run that section of his business I nominated a figure and
he agreed. For the first time in nine years I was working for someone else
again.
This company never fully paid the purchase price, and I soon saw that
its future was limited. I enjoyed two years with much of the responsiblity
lifted from my shoulders and when the debt collectors moved in I covered myself
legally and hung on to what I'd started.
By then John Van Daal had moved on, and a young New Zealander by the
name of Mark Fleming had replaced him. And we'd picked up a quiet
pensioner by the name of Warren Sharp to pack the subscriptions every
fortnight, and 10 years later he's still there. We struggled through the
liquidation, moving to a newer and bigger office in Epping, in Sydney's north,
acquiring one of the expired company's ex-employees, Gerard Norsa, and
then in mid-1990 we took on a full time layout designer, Karen Mulvihill,
as we moved to an A4 magazine format. It was a traumatic switch, but we did
it at one of the worst times on record for the Australian publishing industry
and made a substantial difference to sales.
The following November Mark Fleming left to take up more of his round-world
tour which we'd interrupted, and in late 1990 added the postion of advertising
manager, with Peter McRay at the new desk. In 92 we added a marketing
manager, Nancy Dasilva, who shortly after switched to the position of
advertising manager on a temporary basis after McRay left, but was so good at
it that we left her there, and in her place hired a young girl by the name of
Mary Houndelesis, girlfriend of racer Maurice Fabietti. It was
just for a few months initially, but she fitted in so well and did such a good
job that we couldn't let her go, and she's still the one most likely to answer
the phone if you ring.
In 1993 we hired Nancy Dasilva's boyfriend, John Baremans as
assistant editor, though he's now moved on to the positions of marketing manager
and Nancy's husband. Karen left at the end of 1995 to begin a family and was
replaced by South Australian David Thwaites who we'd asked to fill the
job back in 90. He saw out a year before moving on to a position at Rocket
Industries and a girl with little experience but a burning ambition to
try, Simone Hulbert took up the reins and hasn't looked back.
In 1995 we were running out of room at Epping, and bought a property
at Castle Hill, in Sydney's north west. We have three times the room and plenty
of parking, so everyone's happy.
Life should be peaceful, but rarely is. There is always a rush. DRAGSTER
still comes out every fortnight. I figure that in the past 500 issues, over
nearly 20 years, we've published 50,000 photos, 1800 race reports on 18,000
pages, along with 30,000 classifieds. It's been a long road, a tough road at
times, an inspiring road often, but a rewarding road all the time.
We doubt we'll personally make it to the next 500, but I sure hope the
magazine does.
