Some time in the early to mid 1970’s I got a Kelsey 5×8 straight from the factory. The Dancing Rainbow Press was born, unfortunately getting its name from a terrible poem I had written that had its own cartoon character as well. It was located in a small unfinished room behind the bathroom at my apartment in Reamstown. It moved back home to my parent’s house in Mount Airy (2.0) when I did. There my wife to be and I printed our wedding invitations and moved it with us (3.0) to our first house on Walnut Street in Ephrata.

When we moved to Old Mill Road (4.0) it was set up in the basement. Our son, Ben is shown printing on it above. Use of it, however, languished and the press and most everything else was sold a decade or two later. Though I hadn’t printed for so long I soon missed having a press and as a replacement started volunteering at the print shop at the Historical Society and at the Ephrata Cloister. Some years passed and while volunteering at the Cloister I met a guy who said he had some printing equipment to sell. I had already bought a couple small presses for use at the historical society, but wound up sharing a large acquisition that outfitted a new shop at my training center in the old Recreation Center building on Cloister Avenue (5.0) in Ephrata.

Due mostly to the COVID19 pandemic the center was closed and I moved the shop (6.0) into an undisclosed location in a small rental space in Ephrata. The Dancing Rainbow shines albeit underground again as pictured at the top of this article.