As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

Way back in the dim and distant year of 1992, I started my first paying job in the world of graphic arts, working for a small graphic arts studio in Tampa, Florida called Printgraphics.

My job involved using this newfangled software called “Photoshop” from this obscure company called Adobe to do desktop image editing. Printgraphics had this really fancy gizmo called a “color laser copier” that could make—get this—full color photocopies, one of the first such devices in all of Florida, and it let us charge extortionate rates for something almost nobody else could do: not only could we make color photocopies of something, we could even make printouts from a computer in full color by means of a PostScript interpreter that connected a computer to the CLC, for which we charged $16 a page (if you wanted letter-sized printouts) and almost double that (if you wanted larger printouts).

The CLC also acted as a color scanner, allowing us to do scans at considerably less expense (and considerably less quality) than a drum scanner. We could even scan slides and transparencies!

We also had contracts with print shops to do offset printing and posters and things like that…heady stuff in the early days of desktop publishing that seemed miraculous at the time. This equipment was rare, expensive, and cutting-edge, and people who could use it were rather thin on the ground.

About a year or so after I started working there, a polite, well-dressed man came into the shop asking if we could produce some placards and advertising posters for him. He was cagy about what he wanted, except to say that he was looking for prices on laminated full color materials that could be used for “promotional purposes.” They needed to be weatherproof, he said, and full color.

I told him I’d put together prices for him and he left. He came back a day or so later with a bunch of 35mm slides that, he said, he wated us to scan to make the posters from.

The slides all showed horrific, gruesome images of aborted fetuses, usually late-term abortions of fetuses with grotesque physical defects.

That’s when he came clean about who he was. He said he worked for a “pro-life” group called the Center for Bioethical Reform, a shock group that got a ton of media coverage for picketing women’s health clinics with grotesque, gruesome signs and banners showing the horrors of “infant genocide.”

He offered quite a lot of money if we would make these signs for him, a lot more than I’d quoted.

I told him I wouldn’t do the work for him, and asked him to leave.