Thank you for your enlightening post Aaron ... and for posing some interesting commentary. I would like to share with some of you a personal experience for the benefit of the new-comers (and some veteran members who I'm certain are not aware) some of the early measures that Brenda and I were forced to take on when the club had little to no money in the Club Treasury.

In addition to haveing the honor of being the club's founding President, I became the first magazine editor following publishing the crudely published club's newsletters which originals were printed on a Magnavox word processor (that I affectionately referred to as "Maggie") and copies were run off at Staples and assembled and mailed out by Brenda and me.

The first commercially bound copies of the Magazine were printed professionally by a local printer here in Barnegat NJ and paid for from the club treasury.

To save the club money ... I would travel the 25 miles to Barnegat to pick up the printed and perfect bound magazines from the printer (about a thousand or so at the time) and bring them back to Brick, NJ to insert into brown paper grocery bags made into mailing sleeves with the bottoms cut out. A rubber stamp was purchased for stamping the return address and another rubber stamp was purchased for our bulk mailing permit that was hand stamped on the brown paper mailing sleeve for the first couple of issues. As more copies of the magazine were being printed as a result of increasing membership ... we ordered pre-printed envelopes from our local printer. What a big labor-saving measure that was, because the printer was now inserting the magazine into the mailing envelopes that he was also printing... but was not preparing the mailing.

When the magazines were brought from the printer to our small home in Brick, NJ ... Brenda and I would be up all night affixing mailing labels and sorting by Zip Codes on our living room floor and rubber banding groups of 10 or more magazines going to the first three digits of the Zip code and putting them into large canvas mail sacks that were routed by the USPS to sorting centers around the country.

As the number of magazines increased, we recruited the volunteer services of Tom Duffy and his wife Kathy to help with the preparation of the mailing at his larger home in Toms River, NJ. Tom would then take the dozen or more pre-sorted mail sacks in his station wagon to the post office the following morning in Toms River.

It wasn't until the club switched commercial printers to the printer now being used that the club magazine was prepared and shipped via a mailing service instead of by volunteer helpers.

I only offer this tid-bit as historical information to those who don't have a handle on where the club came from and where we are today.

I'm now regarded as some "old fart" (at age 67) according to one bb club critic.