In the old days paper industry conferences were a little strange. Metso and Beloit used to give away shotguns at CPPA and TAPPI annual meetings, respectively. You had to be a paper company person and present during the drawings to win one, and be willing to have your picture taken with the gun.
You could have a caricature sketch done in some suites, and get a different colored Black Clawson yo-yo every day of the exhibit. A good TAPPI show had at least 10 magicians and a dozen or so costumed models. When I was with Pulp & Paper magazine, I remember our booth being next to a company that had a female contortionist appearing every hour.
A crowd, mainly guys from other supplier booths, would build in the isle 15-20 minutes before every show, creating a feast for our advertising sales staff. Normally locked away in the exhibits of a lesser god section, this was a year of retributive pickings for P&P sales people. The contortionist could shape herself into any letter of the Arabic alphabet.
Pulp & Paper used to host a beer and sandwich lunch at some TAPPI conferences, until it was totally overrun by students who had no interest in buying ad pages. Drawings for a free Lockwood-Post's Directory were terminated for the same reason. Years later, Paperloop (evolved parent of Pulp & Paper) would send clown jugglers on stilts into the Cyber Café exhibit section of AF&PA's annual meeting in New York.
In the old days, DuPont and others hosted starlight dinner and dance cruises in San Francisco Bay as well as to islands offshore of Seattle. Omya once took a large group of TAPPI Coating Conference attendees to Sea World in Orlando. The entire park was reserved for this lengthy evening event, including its largest and best restaurant.
In prior years, BE&K took TAPPI Engineering Conference groups to special dinners and entertainment at exotic locations from west coast wineries to the JFK Museum in Boston. A few years back, our own PaperAge hosted a renowned deep sea fishing excursion during a PIMA conference in San Diego.
Creative Truck
I once wrote a column claiming there's a correlation between the type and quality of exhibit booth truck and the general health of an industry. I've never been able to prove that assertion scientifically, but I still believe it's true.
There was some very creative booth truck in the old days. I recently found a Measurex MXOpen pin-on button with six red LEDs that still flash on the original battery. It seems that was at least a decade ago. I also have a collection of metal pocket combo-opener/knife/scissors gadgets guaranteed to draw attention from today's airport security.
There are no balloons at paper industry conferences anymore, but in the old days you could take home pockets full with names/logos on them such as American Defibrator, Scanpro, Huyck, Georgia Kaolin, Thermo Electron, Durametallic, S.W. Hooper, Leeds & Northrup, Rauma Repola, Miltronics, Wartsila, Tampella, Kamyr, JWI, Dorr-Oliver, Goslin Envirotech, Bird Machine, Conbraco Industries, Bolton-Emerson, etc., as well as the aforementioned Beloit, Black Clawson, and Measurex.
Ball caps are returning. There were at least 10 exhibits at Summit that offered ball caps. I've compared a few of these upstarts with vintage caps from my collection that goes back almost three decades. They don't stack up quality wise.
Puzzles were popular in the old days, especially the twisted metal wire ones that could be separated and re-joined, if you had the patience and time to work it out. Rubik's Cubes were also big. If you solved one, the supplier's name and logo were together on one of the six sides.
Something in the Air
Today's paper industry conferences are not only scaled down but highly sanitized versions of those of just a few years ago. I saw only one yo-yo at the recent Paper Summit exhibit, and that was a vintage relic from a quarter century ago. There were a few coffee mugs here and there, but no balloons, puzzles, or contortionists. The few suites offered only booze and bland finger snacks.
But at the TAPPI Coating Conference in Baltimore last month, something in the air seemed a little like the old days. It wasn't the shuffling of feet in the three exhibit isles, though attendance wasn't all that bad. There was the usual one paper company person per eight or ten exhibitors.
Maybe it was laughter that I haven't heard at a TAPPI event in years. It might have been the smell of popcorn that fortunately is making a return to paper industry exhibit floors. Booth truck was definitely an improvement over even Paper Summit a couple of weeks earlier. TAPPI, for example, was giving away 2.6 oz Hershey almond bars from its booth, complements of Ryeco.
I collected several decent quality pens, including the Solutions! “yellow boy” pen, in the shape of an exclamation mark that's part of the magazine logo. It's impossible to actually write with this pen but I found that, inserted into an electric drill, it makes a good paint stirrer.
There weren't any caricaturists in the suites or models in glitter suites at Coating, and no jugglers on stilts. No shotguns were given away. But there were a few more suites at this conference than would be expected. They all took a step or two back in time, with noticeable upgrades in the snack and booze offerings. They also stayed open much later.
Perhaps in the near future we will again see magicians at pulp and paper exhibitions. The industry could certainly use a few good ones right now.
