Standard Publishing office move: Remembering the Hamilton Avenue legacy
As Standard Publishing closes the doors on its longtime Hamilton Avenue address, Mark A. Taylor reflects on decades of memories, relationships, and editorial work formed in that building. The move marks an ending, but also a fresh opportunity to carry forward a legacy of careful, faithful Bible teaching materials.
- A familiar address and building sparked decades of personal and professional memories.
- Editors and staff worked to produce materials meant to be correct in doctrine and method.
- The move signals both gratitude for the past and resolve to continue the legacy in a new place.
By Mark A. Taylor
I smiled when I read the e mail from Victor Knowles. He couldn’t resist commenting on Standard Publishing’s office move after he received our March 18 issue with the announcement of our new address. “I can’t even count the times I’ve addressed letters to 8121 Hamilton Avenue,” he wrote. “You could wake me at 3 a.m. during a typhoon in India and I could instantly give you 8121 Hamilton Ave., if anyone asked!”
Closing the doors at Hamilton Avenue
By the time you see this issue, we will have settled into our new surroundings after closing the doors at Hamilton Avenue for the last time March 16. But I’m writing this column during our last week at the old address.
It’s a time for remembering.
I remember taking a tour of this building as a Bible college student sometime around 1971 or 1972. I strained to get a glimpse of the editor and his office where The Lookout was produced. A few years later when I was that editor, it seemed to me like a dream too good to be true.
Today I’m sitting close to the spot where I was first interviewed to serve here as an intern during graduate school. And one of the battleship gray desks where I sat during that first assignment is among the pile of discards sold at auction a few weeks ago.
“This is our last Monday here,” Debby Eichenberger said to me in the lunchroom this week. She began here one year after I did, almost 30 years ago. Now she serves as the president’s assistant. We mused on all the days and nights we’ve driven up the entrance to our plant adjacent to Mount Healthy Christian Home.
Extending a publishing legacy
Of course, the most important memories surround what we produced inside this building. It was decades ago, but I can still see John Carter and Marjorie Reeves bent over a large piece of original Bible art with an open Bible beside them. They decided the painting wasn’t true to the details in the Bible story; the illustrator would need to correct it.
Correcting is what editors do: they correct grammar; they make manuscripts the correct length for the format chosen; they talk to customers about the correct products to offer. And at Standard Publishing for the 31 years I’ve served here, and for 11 decades before that editors have worked to publish Bible teaching materials that are correct in every way: correct in doctrine, correct in educational methodology, correct for the times.
It’s great to remember that legacy. Even better to extend it from a new office in these days so full of opportunity and challenge. I’ll savor the memories as I drive away from this building for the last time and vow to create more of them in the place we’re working next.
Author: Mark A. Taylor
Mark A. Taylor, who served as Christian Standard editor from 2003 to 2017, retired in June 2017 after almost 41 years with Standard Publishing (Christian Standard Media).
