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Thursday, October 14, 2021

Neon colors to A&B (Heinrich Envelopes)


Thank you notes to my grandkids because they sent me some Taste of Chicago as a thank you for visiting them in August. Chicago has so.many.great.places.to.eat. Little by little, they are all figuring out ways to send the food to the hinterlands. Yum.

These are neon envelopes off the rack from the office/max/depot.  Ooops. I forgot. I actually found them at Walmart. The white is a PITT white marker and it is time for me to invest in a new one. Instead of something from the folder, today we have something that popped up in the morning obituaries.

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Over the years as I was involved in various projects involving printing and envelopes, I was very aware of the Heinrich Envelope Company - but didn't pay any attention to where exactly they were located. Today as I scanned through the obits rather quickly, one caught my eye. When I scan, I only see the first couple lines. The photo caught my eye, because the guy was 91 when he died, but the photo was a young man in his Air Force uniform. Duluth, MN always catches my eye and that was his birthplace. So I clicked on the full obit and discovered that after 20 years as a pilot, he spent 30 years in the family business, Heinrich Envelopes. The combination of those two careers is ironic because the expression to *push the envelope* comes from test pilots. (Blurb at the end gives full story)

Of course, that led me to the website where I found a long and interesting (to me) story of the company and how it had grown and split off at times and Jack Nelson ended up with the company in Boone, Iowa. And they sell envelopes by the carton. I checked some prices and they are very reasonable. They are an envelope converter. So if we ever need 5,000 envelopes made out of our favorite paper, that's where we can go. I can save the shipping charge by driving up to Boone. It's only about an hour.

So, if anyone wants to peruse the Heinrich envelope website, here it is. 

I even like their logo. It's old school. I like the vintage image, but it would be fine with me if they updated the font.


The details on *pushing the envelope* if you are interested:

When tracing the phrase’s origin, etymologists typically credit Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book about the U.S. space program, The Right Stuff, with popularizing it. Describing the work of test pilots, Wolfe wrote:

“One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was ‘pushing the outside of the envelope.’ The ‘envelope’ was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. ‘Pushing the outside,’ probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test.”

As Wolfe noted, aviators use the term “flight envelope” to refer to a plane’s capabilities for a safe flight ― it’s calculated by examining conditions like speed, altitude, engine power and more. Within this “envelope,” it is theoretically safe to fly. 







 

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