Photo by O’Neil Printing

Tony Narducci is planning a party for O’Neil Printing in Downtown Phoenix. This is a tricky thing. You see, in a city where companies and their buildings rarely survive the 40-year mark, Narducci wants to invite everyone who played a role in the company’s success over the past 100 years: employees, clients, politicians and more.

They’ll be noshing on chicken satay, prime-rib sandwiches and scalloped rumaki while sipping cocktails and listening to live music – a far cry from the early days when the company’s founder, William Dalton O’Neil, was brown-bagging it just to survive.

The significance of that history isn’t lost on Narducci, 49. In fact, his crew is dragging out the old presses for a display.

“It’s unique, to be sure. There’s a comforting feeling about it,” he says. “It’s part and parcel to who we are, and we don’t hide from it.”

W.D. O’Neil – or “Bucky” to his friends – was a veteran of the Spanish-American War who first came to Arizona from New York in 1908. He was selling manual typewriters at a time when lawless Arizona was still a territory.

He saw an opportunity in the Valley and opened O’Neil Letter Shop in the basement of an old drug store near First Avenue and Washington Street. He hired two typists and boasted that his print operation was one of the most modern ones in the West.

“I can also furnish you the names of and addresses of all the people in Arizona, or elsewhere for that matter,” read one advertisement in the local newspaper. And, it added, everything was on the up and up.

“In the language of Daniel Boone, we have our coonskins under the counter.”

In 1911, the company moved to an office in the lobby of the Hotel Adams. Bucky needed more staff, so he called the principal of Phoenix Union High School and hired the most talented typist at the school. He also upgraded to a multigraph, which used handset metallic letters for printing.

By 1925, he added mimeographs, which used hand-stenciled pages to print one page at a time. He also married that talented typist from Phoenix Union, Mary Shrader. The couple had their first child, Mary Louise, the following year.

By 1931, Mary Louise had learned to type and the business had moved to 17 N. Second Avenue across from the Westward Ho Hotel. The O’Neils had a second daughter, Estelle, who eventually joined her sister in the family business.

Years later, the girls would talk about their experiences growing up in Phoenix. They rode horses along the canal. During the summers, their parents would chill their car’s interior by setting blocks of dry ice on the floorboards so the vents would blow cool air.

By 1960, the business was firmly established. Mary Louise had married Gem Pennington, who would become president of Staggs Built Homes and Continental Homes while Estelle had married Harry Findor, an acquaintance of her dad’s from the advertising industry.

The company had also survived a fire that wiped out its offices near Fillmore and First streets, where the First Fridays art walk takes place today. When firefighters arrived and hooked up to a nearby water hydrant, the stem broke off. Meanwhile, the manager of the Westward Ho Hotel let television news crews onto the rooftop to film the blaze.

The building was a total loss, but Findor says the fire was a milestone of sorts. First, it was one of the first breaking news events on local TV. It’s the reason fire departments now periodically grease the stems of hydrants around town. And finally, the blaze forced the company to buy its current facilities at 366 N. Second Avenue.

The changes that modern equipment wrought on the company over the following 40 years have turned O’Neil into a $16 million company.

Executives added more shifts, more printing colors, more modern equipment and finally an employee stock-option plan that has completely turned ownership of O’Neil over to its workers.

After decades of printing social club newsletters, political fliers and Arizona State University football tickets, O’Neil now has 400 customers, none of which represent more than 5 percent of its business.

It prints 700,000 pieces every year and spends $1 million on postage. It has printed election ballots for every Arizona county outside of the Phoenix and Tucson areas since 1992.

“We’ve come a long way,” says Findor, now 77 and a member of the company’s board of directors. “We’ve got a lot of water under the bridge.”