R.S. Knapp at 80: Part 3, The O’Keefe Family and IRgA

Editor’s Note: Long-time IRgA member R.S. Knapp (aka Napco) turns 80 years old this year. In honor of that milestone, we are publishing a three-part first-person interview with Mike O’Keefe, president of the company. This part looks at the O’Keefe family and their involvement with IRgA. Click here to read Part 1, which lays out the basic business growth; and click here to read Part 2, which covers the technology that the company has succeeded with over the years.

My first memories of working in the shop were from when I was about six years old. I remember coming in on the weekends. My dad would take me and my brother Kevin, who would have been seven and a half or eight at the time, into work with him, and he would do a little bit of work and we would sweep the floors, get the garbage, that type of thing, not necessarily any reprographic stuff. My brother Jimmy, who was a little bit older, was doing other stuff.

One of the fun things about coming into work then was playing with the light trap door of the photo department. It was a circular canister that you step in and you spin the thing around and you step out. I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. I used to play in that thing for hours because it was like being on the Starship Enterprise, you know! It's a weird thing that you step through and you're stepping into another world.

When I was older I more or less always had a summer job here. My dad’s feeling was basically, if you’re not in school and you’re not playing a sport, you need a job. So I would work here every summer as soon as school stopped, or, if I was lucky enough to get into baseball playoffs, I might have a little bit of time off before I had to go work. That was true of all of my parents’ six children.

When I graduated from high school I went to college, but frankly, I wasn’t ready for college. Then the guy who ran the Gerber photo plotter had to be let go, and I was the only one who had ever run the photo plotter before because I had done it a couple of summers before I started college. So my dad woke me up one day when I was about 20 and said, “Come on, I need you to come to work because we have to get the photo plotter going.”

I really enjoyed what I was doing, and it kind of took my attention off school, so I never left. My dad put me in a position more or less where every time we were doing something new, I was somehow involved in it. I was too young to be put in charge of it, but I learned about it and it helped me keep pace with things as they changed.

I ran the Gerber photo plotter for a while, and then I started our plotting service with the pen plotter. Then in 1988, when Xerox came out with the 8836, I helped set that up. And I started our color graphics department when we bought a VersaTech 8900 in 1993 or 1994.

Things kept growing and my dad wanted somebody knowledgeable in the field to help the salespeople. So two or three days a week, I would spend a half a day out in the field with the salespeople helping them get customers to understand why they should shift to the new technology.

Eventually I moved into more of an operations position, just because I had kind of grown with everything we were doing.

All of my siblings have worked, or still do, here, too. My brother Kevin is still around – he’s the smartest, most ingenious person you could find. He runs our FBI – Forensic Building Information – division. He’s the one who got us into LiDAR scanning and other more advanced technology. My sister Kolleen is currently the director of customer service and is instrumental with our day to day activities, we’d be lost without her.

My sister Susie worked here for several years doing marketing stuff, and she still does from time to time. Her husband Keith McHugh currently does a great job managing our sales staff. Prior to Keith, my brother Jimmy was VP of sales for many years and helped us with our strong equipment focus and is now retired. My sister Karen also worked here for a little while. She married Gary Wilbur, who was the president after my dad and before me.

My dad retired – well, I'm not sure you can really say he retired! – but he was not coming to the office regularly as of about 2000. He passed away in 2005.

Gary became president in 2000. He is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. He was a partner at Arthur Andersen when my dad convinced him to come work for R.S. Knapp around 1989. My dad saw how smart he was and knew that he was mature enough and knowledgeable enough to take the reins when the time came.

I became president in 2018 when Gary retired.

We’ve had a lot of connection to the IRgA over the years. My dad went to virtually every convention, I think for his whole career. He really valued the opportunity to talk with other people in the field and learn about new technologies.

But I have a bone to pick with the IRgA! When I was a kid, the IRgA fall conference always fell around my birthday. So either my parents weren't home during my birthday or they would drag me to an IRgA conference.

But truthfully, it was staggering for me to go to the conventions and see the reverence people had for my dad. It kind of forced me to see my dad in a very different light, because he was so well respected and rightfully so.

The wonderful thing about my dad was that he would teach and help anybody in the industry. He loved this industry so much, and if somebody had a question or wanted to build a business, he would invite them out and show them what he was doing, talk about it, and help them any way he could.