Tribute to Geraldine and Allan

In 2008, Allan and Geraldine moved into Churchill.

A chance hello and how are you settling in, revealed that they had both worked in printing, Allan more recently than Geraldine.

With little persuasion, they joined our Churchill & District News team.

To start with they helped with proof reading. From there the involvement grew.

Geraldine gave suggestions about advertising. Then she took on the task of producing all the goody bags for our primary school writing competition entrants, which were in the hundreds. She also continued to do proofreading.

Allan took on producing some of the ads, then after we moved into the church office, all the advertising production that was not presented in JPG form. He also did the layout of the pages.

Allan also introduced us to In Design publishing program and nurtured us along the way.

COVID lockdowns prevented us from being at the office, so we learnt to work at home using the programs uploaded onto home computers and with the aid of Dropbox.

This also happened during their visits to family in NSW.

Tracey then held the fort in Churchill and was able to solve our problems. Then Tracey went north to Queensland. There was division of all Tracey’s jobs, the majority of which Allan picked up.

He prepared the layouts and ads before production, putting all the information on our server. Then participated in production, making sure all the necessary parts were intact before emailing them to the Express Printery. This meant contacting the Express Printery to see what the print run numbers would be, if there were any changes, then emailing the number of pages; the ones that were colour or black and white. The pages had a final check by Allan who has a high standard of work.

There were the posters for Shop Local, the Shop Local logo, the Writing Competition poster, certificates and much, much more. We have a lot to live up to.

Editorial files were placed in Dropbox for the Facebook and Web Site folks to use. A disc was burnt of the issue. A copy was sent to the State Library.

During the last twelve months, Allan has been tutoring two team members in how to do the layouts and position the ads and colour pages. Thank goodness for that, for out of the blue, Allan and Geraldine have decided to make NSW their forever home with some of their family.

They will be truly missed as their input was valuable and commendable. Allan particularly has been supportive, encouraging, patient with those not quite so computer literate and made sure our standard was maintained.

Allan and Geraldine have been an important and valued part of our team and we thank them wholeheartedly.