The Editor's Desk

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By Newsweek Editors

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The year was 1977, and NEWSWEEK needed help. Our Midwestern printing plant was in the middle of a labor strike and couldn't handle a late-breaking cover. So our director of printing, Angelo Rivello, called a young entrepreneur from Wisconsin who had started a small printing firm called Quad/Graphics. His name was Harry Quadracci, and he took the order. Relieved, we shipped our layouts, but a huge snowstorm forced the plane to land in Chicago. We couldn't find the parcel, and called Harry in distress. Not to worry, he said: he had sent a car through the blizzard to pick up the film. The magazine was already on press.

It was, as they say, the start of a beautiful friendship. We were so impressed by the quality and reliability of Quadracci's operation that we gave him all our Midwest business a year later. It was his first big account, and he ran with it. During the next two decades Quadracci kept investing in the best new technology--and the best people--and built Quad/Graphics into the largest privately owned printing company in the world, with 11,000 employees, 35 facilities around the globe and annual revenues of $1.8 billion. The company now prints more than 2 million copies of NEWSWEEK every week, as well as Time, Playboy, National Geographic and a majority of America's shopping catalogs.

But when Harry Quadracci died last week at 66, of accidental drowning while swimming near his lakeside home, the crowds who attended his funeral in Milwaukee came to honor the man as much as the businessman. Unlike some CEOs in the headlines today, Quadracci was a pioneer in sharing his success with his workers: from an employee stock-ownership plan, to on-site child- and health-care facilities, to the company planes, trains and houses that he made available to his people. He and his wife, Betty, gave generously to Milwaukee, funding a theater, a new wing of the art museum and many other good works. "And he was just as generous when he wasn't rich," recalls Rivello, now our vice president for manufacturing and distribution. "If a pressman was going to lose his house, Harry was there with the mortgage payment." As Chairman Rick Smith put it in a memo to our staff last week, "NEWSWEEK and NEWSWEEK's readers have lost a great friend." Perhaps it's fitting that our cover subject this week is heaven. We're sure that's where Harry Quadracci is now.

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