Back in the nineties I was managing a neighborhood
recycling service and Jack Way would come by once in a while
to pick up any magazines people recycled. Usually there'd be
ten or twelve heavy boxes full of magazines and Jack would
huff and puff, sometimes with an assistant, loading his
magazines in a van. Jack wouls pause, and catch his breath,
and always in the most 'glad to see' manner be ready to tell
a story or two. Eventually I found as a manager of a retail
establishment, with customers waiting, it was easier, and
more polite if I just tossed the boxes into his van and got
him on his way. Jack was genuinely appreciative, but we were
always too rushed.
Jack invited me up to see his magazine service up in
North Seattle, off Stone Way and I regret never having had
gone up there to see his operation. You see Way's Magazine
service provided lost magazine articles to libraries all over
the World and Jack had, what was possibly the largest private
collection of magazines anywhere. Imagine the organization,
the structure, and Jack's love of information of all those
documents.
It's amazing how people love certain things, like books,
or cars, or antiques and Jack loved magazines. He collected
them, organized them, cataloged them and probably had a
fairly thorough knowledge of what kind of information could
be found in the periodical industry. Remember, this was
before the internet, and reliable information was found in
print media. Jack once told me that there were 572,000
magazines published in the World. This was around 1995, just
when the Internet was getting started. Jack probably made
all of two dollars a day providing lost magazines to
libraries, but his reputation, and listing in all the top
journals and directories validated his service while his love
for information transcended notoriety.
Toward the end, Jack had a pretty good promising protegee.
Unfortunately, even though the internet information age was
just getting started, and this extensive magazine collection
was turned over, and the internet was just starting to
demonstrate its hunger for information, Jack's protegee could
not carry Jack's system over to the network. With Jack's
passing, and the Seattle real estate speculation boom, Jack's
magazine business were lost. Another reason why the internet
does not precede 1995 or so.
