As written in a letter to Bertha Ferguson

You mentioned in your letter something about the Corning News that we had when I lived in good old Corning....To give you a little bit of the history- about that I will go back to when I went to the Old Methodist Church in Corning..the old one they tore down on North Valley Street and our teacher was the manager of the Kroger Store there in Corning and he had a printing press and some type cabinets and some printing equipment in his basement up on east hill where they lived. Seems like he had more work than he could take care of at that time, along with managing the store, so he asked me if I wanted to come up and help him by setting type, by hand, of course and running the old CP Press he had. So being still in school and any job was a big thing with me at that time I jumped at the chance.

That is where I started on my line of work that was to be what I was to do for a living the rest of my life! Of course he himself knew very little about printing so I started off with a teacher who was easy for me to catch up with and also pass in the printing business.

His business soon outgrew the basement in his house so he rented the building across from what was then Parsons Filling Station on the corner, (Place now occupied by John Hashman) and we moved the equipment in that house. I do not remember who owned the house,. but they lived up stairs.

Skipping along a little bit in time, about this time I fell in love and Edith and I were married, which of course was right in the middle of the depression but we thought it was like this all the time and the depression did not mean much I guess when one is in love but I always say we just did not know any better!

Very shortly after that Mr Ginley who was manager of the Kroger store was not able to pay some of the paper and ink bills so he offered to sell me the place with the printing equipment if I would assume the bills he owed. So Leo Radkoski, The Bank of Corning and Edith and I ended up owning The Corning Print Shop.

Our business grew there as I was learning more and more about the printing business so we moved the business to South Valley Street across from the movie theater where Mr. Stember used to have his grocery store, if you remember him. Mr. Ginley and I had already started the Corning News and were having our type set by a printer up in Crooksville, but after we moved to South Valley Street, Edith and I decided to buy a Linotype machine and set our own type which we did.

I had watched them run a Linotype machine but had never sat down to run one myself. So the machine was moved in on Monday and we had a newspaper to get out on Thursday so you can understand that I worked some pretty long hours getting that done and learning or teaching myself to run the machine.

I always thought that we put out a better newspaper than Corning appreciated as we had a paper with eight pages and a lot of news, both local and out of the county news. We also did job printing which kept us busy the other days of the week after we had the news paper printed. We moved and lived over the shop. We did pretty good and managed three meals a day, went to the movies because we had free passes, Ha..and bought used cars, which we still do, so we were getting along pretty good for a newly married couple and ...THEN ...Kroger Company took away the sales bills we printed every week for their stores all around our area. -Also we lost the Kroger ad they ran every week!!

This concluded the part of the letter dealing with the Corning News. Mr Dunlap sold his equipment to a man from, Gahanna and went to work for this man until he was drafted in World War Two. He was later wounded in Italy and I remember writing him one of those patriotic letters we home folks were supposed to write to our soldiers as consolation for getting shot in the rump and other places.