Beckett DuBell

Modern World History

December 18, 2019
How Apple Changed The World
Once the first Macintosh computer was released in 1984, many printing companies,
including my grandfather’s company Van Dyck Printing, were negatively affected, since new
technology was taking over. The desktop was a more efficient piece of equipment, both for
production and for use. Basically, the desktop was able to hold more information than the printer,
and could do more than just print. You could send emails, search the internet, compose
documents, share and edit materials, to name a few. By 2005, my grandfather’s company was
officially closed, and after the Mac caused all of its chaos, he was completely torn apart and
broken down. The stress of keeping his business alive all came back to him after he retired, and
the advent of the Mac caused all of it.
The reason why I chose to learn about my grandfather and the family business is because
back when the business was running I was only a year old. This gave me an opportunity to learn
about my family history and what really caused my grandfather’s sickness and his death. My
grandfather, Leonard Drabkin, was a hard worker and when it came to running his business he
loved what he was doing. Lenny worked with his father and two cousins, Erving and Lester.
Their printing company was Columbia Printing, and after Lenny’s father passed away, Erving
and Lester did not give Lenny his fair share of the company because they wanted to give the
company to their sons when they died. So Lenny decided to leave and create his own company,
with the help from a friend from the University of Michigan. Lenny found a company in North
Haven, CT on Olive Street called Van Dyck, and the owner was looking to sell the company. Jay
Grant, Lenny’s friend, was asked to buy the place but he got cold feet. Lenny immediately asked
for a loan, bought the company, and then ran the company by himself. Van Dyck Printing is
what Lenny changed the name to, and immediately the business took off. One difference that
stood out from all of the other printing businesses in town is that Lenny’s company did not have
a union. During the interview with my grandmother and my mother, my mother brought up,
“Unions are organizations that workers formed because they didn’t have certain rights. They
had to work long hours, they didn’t get good pay, they didn’t get any health care. They were
formed to give workers representation and benefits.” The union in town did not like Lenny for
what he was doing, but he took the risk and it worked out perfectly for him. And when he made
the decision to make his company a non-union company, Lenny moved his company from Olive
Street to North Haven. After he did this, my grandmother said in the interview, “But in the end
he won *Bangs on table again*. He had non-union people move the equipment over to North
Haven, it was a big deal but he finally *Bangs on table again* did it, and it was very
successfully handled. And then the union just sorta disappeared.” He had family members
working in the business, and in a couple of years they passed Columbia in sales and became the
big dog in town.
 My mother brought up a part of the business that was the main reason for the growth of
the company, “All through the 1970’s, he became, the company became known for printing
color, there were not a lot of commercial color printing companies, it was very expensive. He
was able to build the company because they were good at printing color.” Lenny filled a void for
printing, he worked around the unions, and he also was the first company to start using color for
printing. Once he did that, Van Dyck Printing really took off and skyrocketed. At this time, it
was during the 1980’s. Lenny and his family received a lot of recognition and popularity. My
grandparents were part of many food and wine groups too, and a well-known magazine, Bon
Apetit, came to their house and talked to them about their wine collection, food, the family, and
the business. It was an exciting time for the family. As I mentioned earlier, Lenny gave the
people in his family jobs in the business, and my grandmother went on to say during the
interview,
“His mother worked there, he gave her a job, she answered the telephone, “Hello
Van Dyck Printing.” His aunt did bookkeeping, his mother answered the phones, and
she had two sisters that he also employed. Aunt Lil and then she passed away after
working there for a couple years, so Ida and Rivy Drabkin were working in the company
till they became too old and had to retire. I did work there I could type, I could take
shorthand.”
The whole family got involved and everyone in the family was able to make a living.
Then once it hit the mid to late 1980’s, that is when Lenny hit his first of many major
bumps for the company. The first was the Recession. The stock market was hurt and sales
dropped. Then for the second bump that made it worse was the advent of the Mac. My
grandmother discussed this with my mother and I, as well as my sister, “Yes but also what really
started bothering the printing company is the computer. Because that could do things in a much
cheaper way.” Then my mother added, “At about 1985 Steve Jobs came with his Apple computer
and over the next couple of years that began to alter the printing process. It still till this day
continues to affect the printing industry.”
After the advent of the Mac, printing sales for every company dropped drastically.
According to Statista.com, 3.1 million Macs were sold for the first model1. For the next couple of
years, a lot of huge printing companies that people didn't think would go out of business went
out of business. At this point it was around the 1990’s, and my mother remembered, “In the 90’s
an interesting thing occurred to bring it full circle. Columbia Printing was starting to… he
started hearing rumors that they were going to be closing the business.” So Lenny decided to
merge the two companies. Everyone involved in the business was very surprised that he did this
because the two cousins did him dirty in the past. But Lenny thought of it as a family thing and
that sales would increase a little. That is what occurred, the sales increased! Columbia closed and
they merged the companies.
Years passed, and the stress of business and money distribution for the company really
got to Lenny. My grandmother went on to say, “I think that the emotional ya know survival, ya

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Statista.com
know, the strain of running a company and worrying about money to pay your workers, I think it
really did a job on your grandfather.” My grandmother added,, “I think all the pressure of
business brought a lot of sickness to him.” The graph on Statista.com clearly shows that the
computer sales kept increasing and they never had a big drop. The good thing about the Mac
sales were that they were very consistent. But that really hurt the company.
Another important fact that my grandmother and my mother discussed was his physical
well-being, my mother said, “Right after 9/11, so that was 2001, we started noticing a physical
change of how he was walking, how he had a tremor to his hands, so that was in 2001 and they
thought he had developed something like Parkinson's disease.” Then my grandmother said, “The
anesthesia did not have a good effect on him, so when he awakened from his operation, I could
see that he lost a lot of what he really was.” The stress really changed who he really was, and for
the people who knew him before the stress, it was heartbreaking. Lenny went from being this
warm, curious, brave, funny, kind man, to someone who could not speak and could not take care
of himself. My grandmother had to get a caretaker for him, and he had to live in the apartment
complex near Hamden Hall. Once the sickness started he was able to live for an additional
eleven years. The sad part is he was not able to live with my grandmother. She sold the family
house to my parents and we moved in. She moved to a condo complex nearby. She would visit
him daily. It was a very sad time. Apple was a key reason for all of this. It was basically a cause
and effect situation. Investopedia.com states that Apple really took off in 1977, which was right
when the majority of printing companies broke down. The mac was able to do the same thing the
printer could do but a whole lot more, also it could do it way faster. Lenny actually had the
choice to invest a lot in Apple stocks but he did not. When it first came on the scene, no one
would have thought it would be where it is now. When it first started, the products were not
reliable, and it did not look like they held a lot of potential. If Lenny were to have invested in
Apple, he could have started a connection with them and the family would have made a lot of
money.
The main reason why Lenny did not purchase the stock was because when Apple released
its first computer, the Apple 1 it was a “Do it yourself” kinda thing, says Business Insider. They
sold it for $666.66. He was worried that they would just go out of business because who the hell
wants to build their own computer in the 70’s? Also according to Mental Floss.com, if you were
to invest in Apple stocks in the 90’s you could be $21 million richer right now! 2So if Lenny
were to have invested, technically he would have enough money to pay everyone that was
involved in the business and he would not have been as stressed about that part of things. It’s not
clear if the stress made him have physical symptoms, but it may have contributed to his poor
health, since stress is so destructive. I wish I could have had the chance to really know the real
Lenny, not the sick Lenny.
My grandmother goes on to say, “Don’t count him out, he had a wonderful life most of
the time, you know how much he loved wine and food, he chaired all these gourmet society
things. We traveled to Europe and went through different wineries and we met wonderful people

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Mentalfloss.com
so all was not bad…. Yeah.” And she is absolutely right! Before Lenny got sick he had an
amazing life and family. They owned a house on the water in Nantucket that the whole family
would go to every summer. They knew everyone in town and everyone knew them, Lenny and
our family were loved and he loved everyone no matter what. He had a love for his animals,
especially dogs! His life was filled with excitement and joyful memories.
In conclusion, the creation of the Mac played a part in the closing of my family’s
company. The Mac destroyed multiple printing companies and caused my grandfather to become
over ran with stress and anxiety. Apple did not just hurt Van Dyck Printing, it hurt a lot of other
companies, the green card industries, and the calculator business was deprived of sales as well.
Apple took over, and they are not close to being done. They already have started to make
multiple appliances like an Apple tv and they have not took a breather on their phones. They
even have eleven models and there is no sense of stopping. Apple has the chance to take over the
business industry. They already have many of their appliances in schools, business companies,
houses, and even sport-related things like baseball clubhouses and basketball locker rooms.
Thank you for listening to my story, this helped me learn a lot about my family and what really
happened to my grandfather.

Annotated Bibliography
Beattie, Andrew. "Steve Jobs and the Apple Story." Investopedia.com,
Investopedia, 30 June 2019, www.investopedia.com/articles/
 fundamental-analysis/12/steve-jobs-apple-story.asp. Accessed 8 Jan. 2020.
This was another website that just gave me really strong facts that
were easy to find with no confusion.

"The Story Behind Apple's Success." Investopedia.com, Investopedia, 22

Sept. 2019, www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/042815/
story-behind-apples-success.asp. Accessed 8 Jan. 2020. This website gave me
plenty of strong facts and helped me support my claims. It was easy to find
and read all of the facts as well, since it was well-constructed.

Ferro, Shaunacy. "How Rich Could You Be If You Bought '90s Apple Stock Instead
of Having Kids?" Mentalfloss.com, Mental Floss, 17 Aug. 2016,
www.mentalfloss.com/article/84820/
how-rich-could-you-be-if-you-bought-90s-apple-stock-instead-having-kids.
Accessed 8 Jan. 2020. I used this website for my curiosity, my grandfather
had the chance to invest in Apple when it was not a big brand so I just
wanted to know how much money he could have made.

"History of Computers Hardware, Software Internet." Historycomputer.com, 26 Mar.

2019, history-computer.com/. Accessed 8 Jan. 2020. This is a great website
to find basic information about the mac computer. It was easy to read and
interoperate. It also shows from where they received all of their information
and facts.

Liu, Shanghong. "Global Apple Mac sales in the fiscal years from 2002 to 2018."
Statista, Statista.com, 5 Nov. 2019, www.statista.com/statistics/
276308/global-apple-mac-sales-since-fiscal-year-2002/. Accessed 8 Jan.
2020. This is a great website, it helped me pinpoint the exact point in
time when the sales of the Mac computer were booming. It showed me a
complete graph as well. Once again, it just gave me basic but very helpful
information.