by Doug Weaver Publisher of the Kansas City Star Quilts

Every now and then I jump in the car and head up the road to Marceline, Mo., to visit our friends at Walsworth Publishing Co., which prints our quilting books.

Unlike most of our competitors, we like to print our books right here in the USA.

Walsworth ... where our books are born. Marceline is about 2 ½ hours northeast of us. It’s a nice trip. From Kansas City, you head up Interstate 35 to Cameron, Mo. (I usually grab a coffee at the McDonald’s there.) Then you turn east on Highway 36 and travel along vast, rolling hills of rich Missouri farmland, past the towns of Utica, Chillicothe, and Meadville. Finally, you turn south on Highway 5, which passes through Marceline. Walsworth is on the left.

I should get up there soon and bring a cake. Because Walsworth is enjoying a birthday this year – 40 years in the commercial printing business.

Forty years is quite a milestone. But not a surprise, given the history of the town.

If you’re a fan of Walt Disney, you know that Marceline was his boyhood home before he moved here to Kansas City.

Walt gathered some of his best ideas for his theme parks from his life in Marceline. Drive down Marceline’s main street today, for example, and it bears a striking resemblance to the Disney parks’ Mainstreet USA.

The town was created as the halfway stopping point between Chicago and Kansas City on the then-new Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. It’s no surprise that Walt’s love of trains developed here.

Walt would later move with his family to Kansas City, where he eventually set up a studio and befriended a mouse in his office. (Yep … and so was born the idea of Mickey!) Oh … and Walt tried to get on the art staff here at The Kansas City Star. We turned him down. Silly us.

But I digress. Walsworth is the main topic today … though some of that Disney magic does seem to have rubbed off on the company.

Founded in 1937 by Walsworth brothers Don, Ed, and Bill, the company started as a printer of theater playbills. Its big move came a decade later, though, when it ventured into publishing high school yearbooks.

Yearbook publishing is a great business, but it’s highly seasonal – a big spring rush! So Walsworth would have to hire up in the spring, then lay off folks at slower times. It was tough to keep a skilled workforce in place.

So, in 1970, Walsworth expanded into commercial printing, turning out textbooks, trade books, and other publications as a way to balance its activities.

And that’s where we come in. We’re pleased to say that for the last 10 years, we’ve helped keep Walsworth’s presses pretty active.

Although we publish other kinds of books here at The Kansas City Star, our quilting business is dominant. We’re just now wrapping up four new book titles – you’ll be hearing more from Diane about those soon. And they are only the first of more than 25 quilting books that we’ll publish this year.

We take pride in publishing our books up the road rather than across the ocean at some foreign printing press like most of our competitors do. It helps keep good-paying jobs right here in Missouri.

It also keeps a rural community strong and vibrant. After all, we owe a lot to the rural network of Midwestern quilters who sent in their quilt-pattern ideas to The Kansas City Star and our old sister publication, the Weekly Star Farmer, in the late 1920s through the early 1960s.

You see, we like to think that Kansas City is a quilting Mecca. The Star holds, arguably, the largest single collection of quilt patterns in the country. Some of the best-known pattern and fabric designers in the world are in our area. And we’re centrally located in a part of the country teeming with quilters.

What makes the deal even sweeter? It’s comforting to know that our books, in which we take so much pride, are printed at Walsworth, just a heartbeat away.

Doug Weaver is the publisher of Kansas City Star Quilts.