The employees of our longtime printer, Ripon Printers of Ripon, Wisconsin, sent us a signed megaposter the other day congratulating us on our 20th anniversary issue. Many of Ripon’s 300 plus employees signed it. In the center of the poster is a photo of the employees gathered outside their Wisconsin plant. They also sent us a framed copy of our 20th issue cover.

Super nice! That’s why I’ve done business with Ripon for more than a decade. Not only is Ripon and its employees very good at what they do, but it’s a family owned company in a small town and they’ve treated us over the years like we’re part of their family. My wife and I recognize quite a few of the names on the poster.

Just this past summer Annie and I visited the Ripon plant and got a tour from Tom Welk and Joe Putzer, two of our principal contacts there. Huge plant with state-of-the-art equipment. They are very conscious of quality control and have worked with us over the years saving a little money here, a little there without sacrificing the quality of the magazine. I’ve always felt like they are an extension of my own staff.

Thank you Ripon! You’ve made Backwoods Home Magazine look good for years, you’ve helped us control costs, and you’ve minimized all the printing, sorting, and mailing mistakes that inevitably creep into the magazine publication process. May we continue to prosper together.

My brother, Hugh, is visiting from Maryland. He’s on the right. That’s John Silveira on the left. Lenie and I are in the background. Hugh and I play golf every day when he visits. Since he’s as bad as I am, I at last have a chance to beat someone.

Been thinking a lot about the H1N1 virus lately, doing research on whether or not my kids should get the vaccine when it becomes available in two weeks. Annie just announced she’s pregnant, which puts her in the highest risk category for swine flu so I’m particularly interested in whether or not she should get it. The CDC says of the 700 pregnant women who have confirmed H1N1, 27 have died. That’s a very frightening statistic.

Coincidentally I’m rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says European diseases killed 95% of native peoples in the Americas within about a hundred years of Columbus’s arrival. The Indians had no resistance to Eurasian diseases like smallpox, flu, cholera, measles, and a host of others, so they died in droves. H1N1 is fairly mild now but it has the potential to mutate and become more deadly, and modern humans, just like the Indians back in 1492, have no defense.

I’ve asked Silveira to help me with the research. I’ll let you know what I decide.

My daughter, Annie, is getting a good taste of what it means to be the managing editor of BHM. Her husband, Erik, is home on a two-week leave from the Marine Corps, but she has already spent the first week on deadline, working many, many hours trying to get this issue ready for print. We should finish up late tonight.

This is the 132-page issue I wrote about last post. It’s very good. Although I wasn’t involved much with the work of deadline, I did write a 12-page article about the history of BHM. It came out pretty good, and we’ve lead the issue with it. Long-time readers will especially like the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the first few years.

It also looks like this special anniversary issue will be in Borders bookstores for the first time in several issues. An agent of Borders has been calling me for about a month in an effort to get BHM back into their stores. I had cancelled BHM’s contract with Source Interlink, which has the sole right to supply magazines to Borders, after Source filed for bankruptcy. Borders got a reorganized Source to offer me a real nice contract, with better payment terms and a lot more security, so I signed for one year, rather than the usual two or three years. Part of the deal is that Borders offered to give BHM a free “pocket” for this issue,  which is a special display in their stores’ newsracks that will highlight our magazine. I thought it was an exceptional offer, so I signed.

Lenie in Fort Collins for a Show

Lenie missed this last day of deadline by flying to Fort Collins, Colorado, early this morning to display the magazine at a Sustainable Living Fair this weekend. If you’re in the area, drop by and say hi and tell her we’re working hard here. I just got her “safe arrival” phone call from the motel. The Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Association has been doing this show for 10 years, and we’ve always meant to go but it always seemed to confict with deadline. It should be pretty busy since a lot of folks there probably never heard of BHM.

Golf in Klamath Falls

I’m going to celebrate finishing this deadline by taking three members of the Backwoods Home Youth Golf Team over to Klamath Falls tomorrow and treating them to a round of golf at the Running Y, which may be the prettiest golf course in Oregon. We’ll stay at the Olympic Inn, a motel that costs $119 but includes a big free breakfast, soup and sandwiches in the late afternoon, and fresh cookies in the evening. That pays for the motel room for these big eaters.

I got a couple of new Bobby Jones wedges in the mail the other day. My first shot with the sand wedge (56 degrees) put the ball within two feet of the pin from 50 yards.

Back to work!