Published in the December 25, 2013-January 7, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
Not a week goes by when someone doesn’t ask me what company does the printing for Morgan Hill Life. I proudly tell them that we use Casey Printing.
When we started our enterprise early this year, editor Robert Airoldi spent a lot of time searching for a good quality and affordable printer to produce our newspaper for our community. Ultimately, we came to Casey Printing. Several people highly recommended this King City-based printing company, so we took a field trip from Morgan Hill to the heart of the Salinas Valley to meet with Rich Casey, a co-owner of the family business with his brother Bill Casey.
Airoldi and I were very impressed with the courtesy we were shown by the Casey Printing staff. As Casey gave us a tour of the clean and well-run facility, we were impressed by the massive computer-controlled printing machines that every other week have come to produce more than 17,000 copies of Morgan Hill Life for the last 14 issues including the one you’re now reading.
Casey Printing was founded in 1901 by Fred Vivian, the great grandfather to the Casey brothers. Vivian came that year to the tiny farm village of King City with an old Washington Hand Press and the proverbial “shirt tail full of type.” His weekly newspaper was called “The Rustler” and it focused on local news and opinion for the people of the region. Vivian would ride in his horse and buggy through the Monterey County farm country, gathering print orders and selling residents subscriptions to his newspaper.
Photo courtesy Casey Printing
Casey Printing founder Fred Vivian in an old press room.
I asked Casey if, being in the newspaper business 100 years ago, Vivian might have had some interaction with the young John Steinbeck who spent many of his youthful days in the King City region. Casey told me he didn’t know if any of his family members knew the future Nobel Prize-winning author personally, but they were friends with the Hamiltons, who were Steinbeck’s family on his mother’s side and a prominent Irish family in the Salinas Valley at that time.
No doubt, Vivian would be very impressed by how the company he started at the turn of the last century has evolved over the years as high-tech media evolved. Casey Printing offers its customers a modern production facility that includes digital pre-press for ink on paper publishing as well as website services for publishing on the Internet.
An important reason Airoldi and I chose Casey Printing is because it is an environmentally-responsible business. The Casey brothers have set up an extensive recycling program for the printing company, as well as a variety of energy-reduction control systems to cut down on its electricity and fuel usage. It also incorporates recycled paper into its operation. In 2008, the company was certified “Green” by the Monterey Bay Area Green Business program.
I’d like to think that Morgan Hill Life carries in its pages a bit of the spirit of Vivian’s Rustler newspaper. We believe customer service and the way we interact with the people of our community is a key to our business success. Airoldi and I saw how the South Valley over the years has lost the “community” element in its community newspapers. That’s a big reason why we started our publishing enterprise.
People often tell us that they love reading our publication. They frequently say they read it from cover to cover. Many of our readers understand that Morgan Hill Life wants to reflect the spirit of Morgan Hill and strives to preserve and enhance the quality of life for our city’s residents. We believe that this philosophy should be a basic business model for every media source that provides local news and opinion for the people of a region.
