The pressroom shakes you up. Not just because of its size—printing plants are huge, to stage all the unprinted paper at the beginning, store the finished product at the end and carry all the equipment in the middle. And then there’s the decibel level of the place: printing presses are turbojets that manufacture words.

But, back then, large printers were different from other factories. On entering, a wall of chemical vapor would overwhelm your senses. It began with the high notes: volatile press-cleaning compounds; then the inks, heavy and greasy like a pit in the local garage; then the ozone of a dozen motors driving their varied beats. There were blowers and dryers and heaters adding a toasted caramel note, and all this layered over by the illicit cigarettes the pressmen smoked in the doorways.

How do you start a career fixing companies? In my case, it’s like greatness. A lousy situation was thrust upon me. And on your first day after life in a quiet office, you wondered if you’d suffocate by noon. Then after a year or two, you hardly noticed the funny air; and looking back over forty years, you miss the atmosphere associated with a sense of purpose and learning a craft.

This all came at the request of the owner of Bentley Offset (a factory improbably located in mid-town Manhattan) who happened to be my father. He was part of the greatest generation, men who were eager to make up for time lost in the war. He had set up in sales and eventually set up a company based on what was then a new technology: roll-fed offset printing. He had the technology, the personality and the shoe-leather that predicted success.

And in shoe-leather, I mean literally. New York in the 1960s was the center of printing and publishing, as well as banking, entertainment and fashion. The streets were full of men carrying samples of their products of paper, fabric or metal which they could show, unimpeded and unannounced, to prospects in all the office buildings in the city. Manhattan was also a factory town—and not only in what we now call SoHo–so trucks, messengers, carts, taxis were part of the busy street life. (There were almost no tourists. New York had a certain number of high-end hotels, but air travel was expensive and aside from the white-gloved ladies at the Broadway matinees, the streets belonged to business.) The city’s activity balanced a certain formality. Everyone wore suits, ties and fedora hats.

But now, years later, the city seemed somehow diminished. The older generation was off the streets. My dad’s company was struggling, and his eyes were shutting down from a hereditary condition, which is why he couldn’t visit clients.  I thought he might need a CPA, but he dismissed the idea. To him, accounting was a waste of time.

But just maybe I, as a trained financial analyst could help: I’d find the expenses that were inevitably out of line, cobble together a budget and scurry back to my old job.  I hoped I would learn enough about the real world in the meantime to help my finance career get to the next level.

Because I was also at a crossroads. I had studied something seemingly impractical at school—French– and had zigged and zagged my way to the notoriously difficult training program at Chase Bank. On arriving, I was equipped with a Hewlett-Packard 38C calculator, which required a completely new way of entering data. The result was not auspicious. On day one, I had to learn a new way to add and subtract.

But, hey, I was also interested in the world. Even after seven years on Wall Street, I woke up early each morning to read narrative history. I also had a fascination with art prints, and I was taking a printing course downtown. I imagined that someday I’d pull fine lithographs in a SOHO loft.

Would I go the creative route, or stay in banking? When this turnaround opportunity came up, I grabbed it. Because let’s face it: I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

Then I read Confessions of an Advertising Man, by David Ogilvie. Ogilvie did not hit his career stride until later in life. But as a young man in Paris, he worked under an imperious and hard-driving chef—an experience that Ogilvie relished. Ogilvie brought that demanding sense of purpose—and perhaps a bit of the French imperiousness—to his later drive to dominate advertising.  Reading his business stories renewed my own ambitions, in part because Ogilvie talked in terms of admiration: he admired people who worked hard; who had first class brains; who worked with gusto; who built up their subordinates and who treated other people as human beings. He admonished the reader: keep your promises and provide great value. The standard was: be indispensable.

I didn’t know where my career was going.

But I knew this: I wanted to be indispensable.