Well, it looks as though our 15th year in business sneaked by us without any fanfare on our part, since we’ve been so busy running our day-to-day operation and selling advertising into the Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association’s soon-to-be-released directory, not to mention, concentrating on the upcoming Signal Hill City Council election, which, by the way, is Tuesday.
Realizing that some of our readers do not know about the beginnings of our paper, I decided to write about our history today. While deciding how the story should be told, I realized that I had pretty much done so in a column that I wrote back in February 2009. Now, after finding that document saved on my old computer, I decided to elaborate and update the piece and share it with you now. I don’t think it counts as plagiarism, since I created the original text in the first place.
Tuesday of this week, Feb. 24, was the 15-year anniversary of our first issue. Then called The Signal, that first issue was conceived in my dining room with help from a handful of staff members sharing one table and one phone. By the time we moved into our offices on Myrtle Avenue, we were struggling to find equipment at a reasonable cost. Goodwill, Out of the Closet and donations of office equipment from friends and family were our salvation. Our budget was nearly non-existent. We started the business on a shoestring, and, unfortunately, due to a downturn in the economy, at times we found ourselves dealing with the fraying of that shoestring. Our original camera was a 110 model held together with duct tape, and our photo lab was the one-hour counter at Costco. There was no money for a copy machine, so we made our copies on our inexpensive fax machine. We had one computer— used for layout— with no Internet. I had to run home several times a day to check my own computer and put any email messages we received on floppy disks. It was nuts.
Besides the recession, we faced two major challenges a few years back. In October of 2009 I contracted H1N1 (swine flu) and pneumonia at the same time. After spending a couple of weeks in the hospital and four weeks recovering at home, I went back to work to find that my husband and our staff did a beautiful job of running things in my absence.
Just as I was beginning to feel like my old self, in January of 2010 the roof of our office building collapsed. It started in my office with a trickle of water dripping from the ceiling. Moments later we heard a huge noise that sounded like thunder immediately followed by a loud crack. At that point the entire structure began to shake as a deluge of water began pouring from every ceiling of our suite of offices. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Just a few days later we were able to move across the street to our current location.
That my friends, is a small part of the saga of the Signal Tribune. There are so many details that I could share, but, alas, I have neither the time nor the space to elaborate— nor, I’m sure, do you want to read about the minutiae of our beginnings. If you do— just give me a call.
As always, we distribute 25,000 papers per week, mostly door-to-door to the Long Beach neighborhoods of Bixby Knolls, California Heights, Los Cerritos and Wrigley Heights. That area accounts for approximately 20,000 of those papers, which is equivalent to about 80 percent of our readership. The other 5,000 issues make up the remaining 20 percent of our distribution and goes to the homes and businesses in the city of Signal Hill.
We enjoy bringing you what I call our weekly miracle and hope that you folks continue to be loyal readers and patrons of our amazing advertisers.
