Story by Colette Levesque
Photos by Mason Trinca
Multimedia by Ariane Kunze
Located three hours south of Eugene, Oregon, is a very small place: White City. It didn’t exist until World War II when a large deployment of men to nearby Camp White developed into a community that’s now home to less than 10,000 people. In the decades since, outcroppings of office buildings and fast food restaurants have sprouted up alongside the single highway that cuts through town and heads toward the surrounding dusty hills.
It looks like anyplace USA, I think upon first seeing the city. I, along with three other Ethos staff members, are driving along Crater Lake Highway, heading toward what is arguably the most notable place in town: Ram Offset Lithographers, printers of Ethos Magazine. The four of us—photographer Mason Trinca, videographer Ariane Kunze, editor Elisabeth Kramer, and myself—have driven from Eugene to see where Ethos comes from.
Ram Offset is not an easy place to find, tucked away between a medical building and a golf course. As we pull into the parking lot, a petite woman greets us. She introduces herself as the wife of one of the employees, there to usher us inside to a quaint lobby overflowing with examples of Ram’s work. Like White City itself, we could be anywhere; Ram Offset feels like your standard office. Well, except for the strong smell of chemicals and background sounds of heavy machinery at work. A metallic clunk clunk echoes off the building’s walls.
Waiting in the lobby, the four of us chat excitedly about what we’ll see on our tour when suddenly, the drab colors of the room change. A tall man wearing gold chains and a vibrant Hawaiian t-shirt enters from a back door. He booms, “What did you guys do to my wife? Did you guys scare her?” Meet Joe Milder, our tour guide for the day.
In 1980, two brothers and a friend started Ram Offset. (“Ram” stands for the initials of the three founders: Richard, Alan, and Monty). Eight years after the company began, Peter Dale, a temporary employee then living out in Utah, received a call asking if he wanted to buy into the business.
“It was 1988,” Dale recalls. “I bought a third of the company, moved myself and [wife] Joanne back, started a family, and slowly bought out the rest.” When it first opened, Ram Offset had one printer that ran one piece of paper and one color at a time. In 24 years, Dale and his wife have expanded Ram Offset into a company of 26 employees and millions of dollars worth of equipment. Some of their more notable pieces include  “the guillotine,” which easily cuts hundreds of sheets of paper with one menacing chop, and a $1.5 million machine capable of spitting out 15,000 to 18,000 pages an hour.
Currently, Ram Offset prints for approximately 1,000 clients including Les Schwab, Ms. Fitness magazine, and Blackstone Audio. One mistake could cost the company thousands of dollars. To avoid errors, Ram follows a strict recipe when fulfilling any order, including making Ethos.
First: Get paper.
The process starts when Ram Offset purchases paper from a mill in West Linn, Oregon. Each roll of paper weighs hundreds of pounds and must be ferried around the facility with a forklift.
Second: Load and ink the 640 Machine.
This machine looks like a range of jagged mountain peaks. Each peak has one color that it applies to the pages: blue, red, yellow, or black. Paper runs through the machine twice, laying down eight pages on one side, eight on the other. An extremely hot UV light instantly dries the ink, giving one end of the machine a glowing yellow mouth.
Third: Head to Eugene.
Once a test run is cut and stapled, Joe Milder hand-delivers a copy of the magazine to the Ethos staff in Eugene, waiting on approval before printing the final order.
Fourth: Start the presses.
Once every page is approved and ready to go, Ram runs 2,400 copies of Ethos. It takes three different machines and approximately 12 hours to complete the order.
All told, the process isn’t as easy as it may seem. “These aren’t home printers,” Dale says. Each machine is like its own science experiment, needing meticulous attention to maintain the correct balance of ink to water. Add too much water, the color fades. Don’t add enough, the page is solid ink.
“It’s a lost art,” Dale says of printing. “People nowadays can start machines but they cannot fix them. Here we can fix our own problems.” The company’s two head printers, Ralph Tinsley and Marc Panter, are “key to my organization,” he adds.
The science behind printing is a difficult but rewarding task Dale feels should be handled with as little impact to the environment as possible. Six years ago, Ram Offset was the first printing company on the West Coast to join the Environmental Protection Agency’s Corporate Climate Leadership program. As a member of the program, Ram Offset aims to significantly reduce its waste output every year. The program doesn’t focus on saving money or attracting customers, but rather on taking care of the environment and reducing the organization’s total carbon footprint.
Ram reduces its waste by choosing local suppliers (like the paper mill in West Linn) and using eco-friendly materials. Ethos, for example, is printed on 70 percent post-consumer recycled paper, one of the most common materials offered by the company. Ram also stocks 100 percent recycled paper but, as Dale points out, “the higher up [the percentage] the harder it is to print on” because of the lower grade quality of the fibers in the paper.
An hour into our tour, we’ve seen dozens of miscellaneous machines that do everything from chop and drill to wrap and mail. It feels like a never-ending maze with each door leading to another large, brightly lit warehouse. And here I thought it was all file, select print, I think. Hardly, according to our tour guide. With more than two decades of experience in the printing industry, Joe Milder worked as a head printer before becoming Ram’s current sales manager.
Imagine Milder as a less aggressive, more colorful version of Mr. T. He wears a gold chain around his neck, multiple rings on his fingers, and his Hawaiian t-shirt is unbuttoned just enough to reveal a few strands of chest hair. Milder grew up in southern Los Angeles where he began his career of service jobs. One of his first customers was Guess Jeans, a client he landed by showing Guess earlier work his company had done with famous photographer Ansel Adams. Milder is an old school guy who wishes we could go back to the decades of film photography with sepia tones and black and white.
“In those days people didn’t care about spending money on print pieces. It was about making the final product look good,” he says. “Now it’s gone the other way. Everything is about the almighty dollar.”
Milder’s laughter punctuates our tour; he’s constantly cracking jokes and telling stories. “Sometimes everything is a battle, but when you go out and see one of your favorite customers it makes the world good again,” he says. Milder feels it’s important to work with customers face-to-face.
“I’ve driven up I-5 so many times I’ve lost count,” he says of his journeys to meet with clients. Along the way, he’s learned the best places for gas, rest stops, and food including a travel tip about exit 99 where a new, improved rest stop sits right next to Seven Feathers Casino. “It’s a vortex,” Milder says of the way the rest stop lures in tourists.
Sometimes, he makes trips up and down I-5 in costume, dressed in the uniform of his other profession: clowning.
Milder, a.k.a. Sweet-Hearts the Clown, first began performing 35 years ago while still living in California. Although business is slower in White City, Milder often performs at local events. He donates every dollar earned to Shriners Hospitals for Children, a national network of 22 hospitals that provides free medical service to children.
“It’s what I do. It’s the other side of Joe,” he says.
On Halloween, he likes to share that other side with clients, attending meetings dressed as Sweet-Hearts. “It’s what makes me stand out. It’s what people recognize,” he says.
“They say they hire the character first, then the salesman,” adds Ram Offset co-owner Joanne Dale, who has known Milder for more than two decades. “Talking to Joe is like talking to a true salesman.” Milder agrees, saying the clients he works with are what make his job interesting: “I don’t ever want to give [customers] up because I love people.”
Ram Offset’s second owner couldn’t be more different from the company’s clowning sales manager. Peter Dale is the opposite of Milder in most everything. Where Milder drives a yellow Corvette to work, Dale cruises over on his bike. Where Milder wears Hawaiian print t-shirts, Dale dresses in standard business casual with his shirt tucked in. Where Milder’s voice carries easily over the grind of presses, you’ve got to step in closer to hear Dale.
Dale is an outdoorsman who started out as a ski bum at the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon in Salt Lake City, Utah. He’s a certified river guide on six rivers and every summer he leads an 18-day tour along the Grand Canyon. At work, Dale tries to incorporate his love for the outdoors by being eco-friendly, recycling ink and spearheading the company’s membership in the EPA Climate Leadership program. Dale also cares about the quality of his work. “Without great art, photography, and typography, we wouldn’t exist,” he says.
Ethos stands out in the publications Ram prints, Dale adds. “I think what’s unique about Ethos is the articles. The stories think outside the box and end up being really different,” he says. “It fits into the University of Oregon and it’s very distinctive.”
Milder enjoys the magazine too. After reading a recent Ethos article about Eugene manufacturer Babu Shoes, Milder decided to stop by the store. He bought a pair of shoes he wears religiously, including on the tour. “Man, these are the most comfortable shoes!” he says more than once.
Our tour of Ram Offset was a blur of fluorescent lights and clunking machinery. A constant buzz of activity echoed throughout the whole facility. Things only grew quiet when, after almost two hours, we made it to the top of the building. In Ram’s headquarters money was taped to the ceiling. Each dollar represented a mistake, explained our tour guides. They’re a constant reminder (and a bit of a joke) that every time you mess up there truly is a price to pay.
With that our tour ended. More than ready for lunch, we joined the Dales, Milder, and his wife (who’d waited patiently in the lobby with our bags) at a local pizza joint where the clatter of printing presses became the clatter of trays. There we sat talking about our trip from Eugene, post-graduation plans, and experiences on Ethos. Once done with lunch, we said our goodbyes to a group of people we rely on so much to get this magazine into your hands. As we turned on to I-5 and left White City behind, we joked about maybe even stopping at exit 99.

Gallery • 5 Photos

Mason Trinca

How Ethos is Made