Issue 01 Published October 1, 1985

Missed deadlines, a few typos and a million delays, but the first issues of the Fairbanks Music and Entertainment Weekly finally made it to press.

Bob Comments:
We didn't know what we were doing in those days. The M&E Magazine actually started off with the intent of creating a musicians newsletter and kind of grew from there.
Aldus had just come out with Pagemaker 1.0 which came on six Macintosh 400K disks. Pagemaker was the first program available that gave the average person the ability to typeset pages. This was revolutionary at the time as even a simple flyer had to be typeset at a print shop prior to printing, at a cost of around $40 per hour. The ability to bypass this step was huge, not only for the cost savings, but in time savings.
We had a new Macintosh 512K computer purchased from Matt Barkdull when he worked at the computer store on Airport way.
We couldn't afford the $5,000 laserwriter, so we would proof the copies using an Apple dot matrix printer called the Imagewriter.
We would than take the copy of the publication on a 400K floppy disk to the computer store where they would let us print out the masters on the Laserwriter.
Photos were another huge problem. In those days, 50 minute photo stores were everywhere, so we thought great, we can take photos right up to the last minute, have them developed in an hour and paste them into the masters before having them copied. Turns out the copiers of the day (and offset printers we learned later) could not deal with color photos. When we asked them how long to do the photos in black and white, they told us THREE WEEKS!
Knowing that would never work for a weekly publication, we ended up buying an enlarger and a photo development kit to develop our own photos. Since I was busy with the writing, editing, page layout and selling advertising, Michelle Perry (now Peck), my girlfriend at the time, became the photographer and photo developer. I would lay out the magazine with blank placeholders where the photos were to be placed and she would develop them to the exact size needed. Our first issue barely made it to the distributor on time. We were up for 2 1/2 days straight and made it with 10 minutes to spare.
Back to the M&E Homepage.

Please be patient while the magazine loads for the first time below.
The magazine was scanned at a higher quality setting and consequently, the file size is somewhat large.