Article by Vila Gingerich, first published in the Tri-County Weekly on October 17, 2024. 

​In the room behind the office of the Tri-County Weekly is K-K Printing, where Tim Wahlers keeps the presses running. On occasion, Lee Pryor can be found there, feeding tickets into the 1905 Chandler & Price handpress or patiently making minute adjustments to the 1950s Heidelberg press. There’s very little, if anything, that Lee won’t tackle in a print shop. After all, he’s worked in the printing business for almost 70 years. 

Lee had a tough start in life. He was born at home on March 5, 1941, in Versailles, Missouri, and his parents separated when Lee was very young. He and his siblings, two older brothers, stayed with his mother, and he saw his father for the last time when he was around six years old. One brother died as a child, and the other brother died years ago. Though these events must have been extremely difficult, Lee takes a pragmatic view of the situation. “It is what it is,” he says. 

A life-changing event happened in 1955, when Lee was fifteen. A family friend from Braymer, Missouri contacted him about moving in with them. “They owned a newspaper there in Braymer,” Lee says, “and they talked me into coming up to learn the trade.” 

With that, Lee’s life in the printing business began. He attended high school in Braymer, working in the Braymer Bee newspaper office after school and on weekends. There, he ran a hand-fed Chandler & Price handpress, the easiest job and the quickest to learn. The Braymer Bee had a full-time printer who took care of everything else. When Lee was in his senior year, the printer moved on. Lee had enough credits to take half days off school, so he took over the printer’s job, setting type for ads and headlines, hand type-setting, and putting ads together. Though still just a teenager, Lee was now a pressman, responsible for printing the news for all of the readers in Braymer and beyond. 

After high school, Lee attended Trenton Junior College for two years, going back to his job at the Braymer Bee on the weekends. One evening in a laundromat he met a girl named Pat Hendrickson from Dawn, Missouri, and they got to talking over the washers and dryers. When Lee finished college, he continued to work at the Braymer Bee for two years, and Pat began working there, too. Lee and Pat were married in 1963. 

Later that year, Lee and his buddy got called in to take their physicals for Vietnam. “Then right after that, JFK said he wasn’t taking any more married people,” Lee says. “So we didn’t have to go.” 

On September 10, 1963, President Kennedy signed an executive order, effective immediately, that halted the draft of married men into the armed forces. The order affected the draft status of 340,000 men, including Lee and his friend. “We were about a month from going over there,” Lee says. 

Over the years, a son and a daughter were born to Lee and Pat, and Lee tried various jobs to support his family. They were always in his specialty area: the printing and/or newspaper business. He spent six months working in Odessa for the Odessan and a couple of years at the Chillicothe Tribune. Then he went to work for the Examiner in Independence. 

​While in Independence, the newspaper staff went on strike. “We walked the picket lines there for about six months to try to get a union in,” Lee says. “Which we didn’t get.” 

They may not have got the union, but Lee did get an interesting encounter out of the deal. Ed Ames, the actor known for playing Mingo in the television series Daniel Boone, played the lead role in the play Man of La Mancha, which did a two-week run at the Starlight Theater in Kansas City in 1970. Ames happened upon the picket line Lee was walking in and stopped to chat for a while, giving Lee a fun story to share for years after. 

The Independence union boss would occasionally send Lee down to the Kansas City Star, where he worked with linotype and type-setting machines. He also spent two hours a day correcting classifieds. “I didn’t enjoy that,” says Lee. 

That is one of the few negative comments Lee makes, and his general life view seems to be, “It is what it is.” 

From Independence, Lee moved on to the Daily Standard at Excelsior Springs. He worked in the commercial printing section, where three Kansas City magazines were printed: a lumber magazine, a bottling magazine, and a bank magazine. “They used some color printing there, and my job was to set up pages,” Lee says. “Jack the plates around to get them to match up.” 

In 1972, Lee and his wife bought the Braymer Bee, which they ran for eighteen years. Pat served as editor, Lee was the publisher and printer, and they hired one person to do the type-setting. 

“I did a little bit of writing there,” Lee says. “Wrote most of the sports. Writing didn’t interest me much. Basically, I love the mechanical part of it, the back end of it.” 

Besides running their own paper, Lee also drove to Jamesport a couple of days a week to help out at the Tri-County Weekly. At that time, Mary Ann Kimberling owned the Jamesport paper, and Lee’s job was to run the presses. 

​Then came the eighties, a tough time for many people, including those in the newspaper business. “When we took over in 1972, mailing out our subscriber list cost about $20,” Lee says. “It went up to almost $100 mailing cost by the time we sold it. The grocery store closed up in Braymer at the same time we sold the paper. The eighties were hard. People had to raise prices to cover their expenses. Advertisers cut their ads. We got tired of it and had a chance to sell.” 

The Hamilton newspaper bought the Braymer Bee and made it part of the Caldwell County News, a county newspaper that is still in print. 

Pat went to work as a teller at the Braymer bank, and Lee moved on to Gallatin Publishing Company, which initially was owned by Joe Snyder but was soon taken over by Daryl Wilkinson. Lee worked there as a pressman for thirty years, until the publishing company and newspaper office closed shop in 2021 and Lee retired. 

Though Lee worked at all those jobs in all those different towns over the years, he has always lived in Braymer and commuted back and forth. “You could afford to drive a long ways for work back then,” he says. “Gas was about ten cents a gallon.” 

Lee also did a lot of traveling while serving as high school basketball referee across Northwest Missouri for about thirty years. Having played basketball himself in both high school and college, he liked how the job kept him involved in the games. 

Today, Lee and Pat live in the same house they’ve lived in since 1981, and they celebrated their 61st anniversary last year. Their daughter also lives in Braymer, and their son lives in Minneapolis. They have a grandson in Hutchinson, Kansas, and a granddaughter in Portland, Oregon. 

Though the kids didn’t take an interest in the publishing world back when Lee and Pat owned the Braymer Bee, it may have gotten into their blood. Lee’s son worked for Vogue magazine for several years. His granddaughter attends college and hopes to become a fiction writer. “She sent us a story the other day,” Lee says. “Her teacher had her go to a bar and imagine the lives of all the customers, what they were saying and thinking. Her story was pretty good.” 

Back in Lee’s hometown of Versailles, his family members have passed away over the years. However, he still visits once or twice a year, especially on Memorial Day to decorate their graves. 

At 83 years old, life moves more slowly now. Pat recently retired from the bank, and though Lee is also retired, for the last several years he has helped out at the Tri-County Weekly as needed. He helps with big print jobs, operates the old handpress, and runs the 1952 Heidelberg press, which these days is mainly used to perforate. The old equipment still works well, and Lee knows how to keep it running like it should. 

Lee has seen a lot of changes in the printing business, beginning with hot type/hot lead and moving on to strike-on type and then to photo etching. “And now we’re into computers,” Lee says. “I didn’t resist the changes, but we were craftsmen, back in the day.” 

“What Lee really loves,” says Tim Wahlers, who runs K-K Printing, “is to get a new piece of old equipment and mess with it until he gets it to work. He has all kinds of patience to stand by a machine and make minor adjustments until it works like it should.” 

​It’s 2024, but Lee Pryor, with his wealth of knowledge and experience, is still an old fashioned craftsman. 


copyright 2024 Vila Gingerich 

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