Before Fred Graham ('57) became North Texas’ first sports information director in 1959, he was a student working at the campus Print Shop. Decades later he recalled in a UNT oral history that his friends nicknamed him “Trash Can."

"You always had an old pair of blue jeans and an old T-shirt hanging in a locker in the Print Shop,” he said. “It didn’t matter whether you were going to work for one hour or 10. You weren’t going to get anything but that ink all over you."

The shop was then in the Journalism Building (later known as Scoular Hall) and Graham remembered the first time he met J.D. Hall there. Hall (pictured), who served as the Print Shop manager for 44 years, told Graham, “Well now, son, if you’re going to learn how to put out a newspaper, you need to know something about the printing end of it.”

In those days, the shop was printing the Campus Chat student newspaper, the Avesta literary journal, catalogs, pamphlets, forms, letterhead and what the 1962 Yucca called one of the “more unpopular products,” failing slips. It even printed the yearbooks from 1937 to 1943.

Basement Beginnings

The Print Shop had gotten its start in 1925 in the Manual Arts Building basement. Linotype and typography were among the new vocational division’s electives for industrial education students beginning with the 1925-26 catalog. The goal was to train students to be linotype operators, pressmen, bookbinders, printers and proofreaders and to train teachers for “this rapidly growing and popular vocation in the schools and colleges of the state.”

The new lab equipment included two linotype machines, a self-feeding cylinder press, a 38-inch power paper cutter, a folder, a power stitcher, a power puncher, type and more. Students were required to work in the lab daily — as many as four hours a day for some.

O.J. Curry, who would become dean of the business college, taught in the same basement in the early 1940s and said you could not miss hearing it when work was underway in the Print Shop. “Man alive, you couldn’t hear yourself think,” he recalled.

And journalism head C.E. Shuford remembered in his own oral history that he shared an office with the paper cutter when he arrived on campus in 1937 as a “publicity man” — and wrote his press releases to its thumping.

It was thanks to the Print Shop and Shuford that its next home, the Journalism Building, even existed. In the late 1940s, construction money for state institutions was tied up due to a lawsuit, and only revenue-producing buildings, such as dorms, could be built. But Shuford had a bright idea.

“I went to the college business manager down here and said, ‘How’d you like to build another building?’ He looked up, you know, ‘Are you crazy?’ And I said, ‘Look, if you build a journalism building and put the Print Shop in it, the Print Shop produces revenue.’ That’s all I said, but he took off from there, and we got the Journalism Building.”

More Space, More Jobs

Randy Groves, who retired in December 2024 after 40 years of service, joined the Print Shop in 1984, the last year it was in the Journalism Building. His first job there was working in pre-press, helping to set type and make plates for what had become the North Texas Daily student newspaper. He remembers the schedule well.

“We worked from noon to 11 p.m. four days a week to get the Daily ready to hand off to the pressmen to print at 5 a.m. each day — unless it was an election night,” he says. “On those nights, we’d have to wait for results and sometimes it was 3 in the morning before we finished.”

Groves also recalls that paper was stored in the hallway for lack of warehouse space. In 1985, when the Print Shop settled into its current home in the University Services Building, it more than tripled its square footage.

After the shop stopped printing the Daily and expanded its offset press work, Groves helped in several different areas of the operation, running presses, working in the camera room, stripping negatives and then operating bindery equipment for the last 15 years.

Early Print Shop workers would hardly recognize what is today known as Printing and Distribution Solutions. It now also serves the public and offers digital and large-format printing, graphic design, branded promotional merchandise, banners, awards and apparel, as well as mail services.

The ink isn’t as disorderly these days — many of PDS’ 8,000 annual projects are printed digitally — but the century-long legacy of service continues.