Within 10 minutes of arriving at The National Provisioner office (on Huron Street in Chicago) for my first day of work as an assistant editor with the publication in August 1985, I had my first assignment: Page through the weekly USPTO patents book, find those that were related to the meat industry, type them up word-for-word on my manual typewriter and submit them to my chief editor Betty Stevens for review.
I did this while sitting at my desk, which was a large damaged wooden desk that sat in the back room of the building’s second floor. My room was also filled with office supplies, and many steel filing cabinets loaded with hard copies of old NP magazines, tear sheets and tons of B&W photos.