Remembering Alpha Communications

It has been a harrowing week, so Scrunchieback Saturday is going to hide out in the basement and leaf through old papers with no political, sociological, or sexual significance whatsoever.

Not long ago, I stumbled across a folder of stuff from a job I had in the mid-1980s. Alpha Communications was a little start-up that didn't last long at all. We had a goal of handling radio dispatch, desktop publishing, and film production. We operated in tandem with a security firm, enabling us to meet the first of those goals; but the other two were always just beyond our grasp.

For a time, we operated out of a drab little building on Sheridan Road a mile south of Racine. The copier on which we produced this mock newsletter didn't print photographs particularly well, so I was asked to make a pen and ink sketch of the building instead.

Our copier did have two-color capability, as an either-or function; the default was black-and-white, but one could define an section of the print area as being red-and-white (or blue-and-white, or brown-and-white, although we never splurged on having the other color toners on hand).

The above first and only edition of The Alpha Communicator was my project. I drew the word "Alpha" in the flag by hand since we had no Greek-style fonts available; the rest of the flag and the headlines and cutlines were Letraset transfers. The body of the articles, unfortunately, was made on a dot matrix printer and was just not attractive at all.

This collage of Racine and Kenosha landmarks with the flags of the then separate Milwaukee Sentinel and Journal was drawn and printed ledger size — too large for my present-day scanner — and I haven't been able to stitch this graphic together as seamlessly as I would like. It took up pages 2 and 5 of the six-page newsletter; articles by the president and vice president of the company about, respectively, in-house corporate newsletters and the Spanish Civil War took up most of the rest of the Alpha Communicator.

The Alpha Communicator was just one of many one-off projects I was given as the Creative Director, or whatever my title was. But it was one of a half dozen or so times I was tasked with drawing buildings to accompany service proposals. I'll save those drawings for some other day.

As for the Sentinel and Journal flags, I have no recollection why they had to be part of the collage rather than, say, the Racine Journal Times and Kenosha News. Nothing in the rest of the drawing has anything to do with Milwaukee, and I can't recall pursuit of any service arrangement with the Journal-Sentinel Company.

My cover for the 1987 annual report of the company was another one-off; I don't believe we ever produced a second annual report, either. Other than the C-Thru Graphics sheet, everything else is hand-drawn and was meant to showcase the creative end of the business.

An issue of the local Sierra Club chapter newsletter is included in the drawing, but I don't have any copies of it that we produced. Perhaps my parents do, since they have been active in chapter leadership for a long time, and still handle mailing of their newsletter.

I wouldn't be surprised if Alpha's production of their newsletter was another one-time deal. For one thing, the accent color for that newsletter has always been green, and Alpha never had any green toner. I know we weren't still involved with it when the company hit the skids.

I drew this map for one of the company brochures. It's a very optimistic depiction of Alpha's service area. We did have a radio antenna capable of reaching from Milwaukee to Cook Counties, and I vaguely recall that the security company had an account somewhere in Oak Creek.

The only Illinois client I remember was a company that provided corporate computer systems. Owned by a friend of our vice president, they contracted with us to produce an instructional video for the companies that bought their computer systems. An English professor from Northwestern University was supposed to narrate the video on how to set up and network the computers, which was brand new stuff for many firms in those days. I had some input on the project, but it was our vice president's baby.

To my horror, our veep produced an introductory montage that was half an hour long. It pirated footage of the Chicago skyline and the "L" from various Hollywood films, plus about every second of video of a sunrise over Lake Michigan two of our employees had gotten up very early to film. It chopped up and spliced together copyrighted recordings of classical and ambient music and movie sound tracks as if three people were fighting for control of a car radio.

When the computer networking company canceled the project, I was told that that it was because the instructions the English professor gave would have caused their clients' computers to crash. I never believed that for a second. Whether our veep's friend was being kind, or our veep was trying to save face, I'll never know.

In the end, Alpha Communications was quietly merged into the security company, which was, after all, the field from which most of leadership had come before founding the company. I was asked to come up with a bear mascot for one of the advertising brochures. He needed to be cartoon-y, but not cute, strong, but not threatening, so this is what I came up with.

The company was in dire financial straits when I left, which was after an extended period of temporary lay-offs, no creative work whatsoever, and the knowledge that the shares of stock making up a good fraction of my salary were never going to be worth a cent. They were bankrupt and out of business within a year, and I've completely lost touch with everyone involved.