Excerpt from Quaker Square story:
Just east of Cascade Plaza, in the heart of downtown
Akron, stands a colossal historical landmark. Contained on one city
block, six red brick factory buildings and over 100 white concrete grain
silos mark the birthplace of the breakfast cereal industry. Until
recently, they remained a ghostly reminder of an American Cinderella story
which began 121 years ago and transformed the ingenuity of German immigrant
Ferdinand Schumacher into one of Akron's most productive enterprises, second
only to rubber.
By 1886, Schumacher was the foremost miller in
the world, the undisputed oatmeal king. He brought new entrees to
American breakfast tables like oatmeal, pearl barley, "Rolled Avena" and
"Farina." Through growth and merger, his mills became the Quaker
Oats Company. They gave the world "cereal shot from guns." This invention,
shooting grain out of steam-heated Civil War cannons to increase its size,
was done only at the Akron mill.
During the early 1900s, this Quaker mill was the
most efficient in the country. But more sophisticated milling technology
and increasing demands for cereal marked it for extinction. In January
1971, Quaker Oats closed the doors of its Mill Street operation.
For almost two years it stood vacant, Akron's most
conspicuous white elephant. Keeping pace with the times, it could
have been demolished, the evidence trucked away and something more suitable
constructed in its place, like a parking garage or gas station. But
the mill's Cinderella story was not over. A handful of enterprising
men from the Akron area were about to write another chapter.
Ted Curtis and his partner Harry Rasmussen, architects
and planners from Cuyahoga Falls, believed that some antiquated buildings
could indeed by "recycled.": Curtis had seen an ugly 80-year-old
chocolate factory near San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf become the now
famous Ghirardelli Square, a multilevel complex of fashionable shops and
restaurants and one of the city's most popular attractions. He had
seen the same thing happen at Salt Lake City's Trolley Square and Atlanta's
Underground. Curtis wanted to do something like that in the midwest.
But he needed the right place.
Acutely aware that a visible part of the city's
past was in jeopardy, Jim Alkire, Akron's Director of planning and Urban
Renewal and Dick Stanson, real estate agent for the Quaker Oats property,
met with Curtis and told him, "You ought to do something with the Quaker
facilities." This was the "something" Curtis was looking for because
it had two essential prerequisites: the right location and the right
price. .......
Client:
ADDC
Magazine:
Oil & Gal Journal
Distribution: Quarterly
Pages:
26
Size:
8 x 11
Editor/Writer: Prudence Kohl,
"From the Sands of Athabasca"
Contributing Writers:
Sally Kohonoski, Cindy Vrsansky, Jean Harper, Frances Brad
Designer:
Richard Whittaker
Photos:
Courtesy of Sunmark Industries. Berea, Ohio
Challenge:
How to create a professional magazine with 5000 copy run on a budget of
less than $1500.
Overview: The Oil & Gal journal is published
by the Association of Desk and Derrick Clubs, an international not-for-profit
organization for professional women employed in the petroleum, natural
gas and allied industries. KohlQuest was presented the challenge
of turning what was previously a collection of individual “newsy" corner-stapled
sheets into a magazine that would reflect the professionalism of ADDC and
play an active part in the Association's mission "to promote among its
members, through informative and educational programs, a clearer understanding
of the industries they serve."
The Journal was transformed into a 26-page magazine
with rotating contributing writers and active industry collaboration.
KohlQuest was responsible for establishing the design, layout and editorial
direction for the magazine, as well as editing and occasionally offering
an article such as the one below.
Excerpts from "From the Sands of Athabasca:"
In the early 1960s, few people ever heard of Prudhoe
Bay, Valdez Harbor, Ship Shoal 246 or Hassi R'Mel. Today, few people would
not recognize these names as principal geographic areas in the development
of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and importation
of liquefied natural gas from Algeria. But this list of the world's energy
hot spots would not be complete without adding another name . . . the Athabasca
River.
Before 1964, Athabasca was just another river in
the western Canadian province of Alberta, flowing north of Edmonton through
a remote, undisturbed land of muskeg bogs, spruce and tamarack forests.
In a brief ten years, this obscure wilderness became a place of great excitement
as energy companies stood ready to invest more than $3 billion to tap the
potential 350 billion barrels of recoverable oil locked in the sands of
the Athabasca River and other areas of Northern Alberta.
The credit for the first commercial production
of Canadian oil sands rests with Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited (GCOS),
a unit of Sun Oil Company of Canada Limited. GCOS produces nearly 50,000
barrels of synthetic crude daily from its lease in the Athabasca deposit,
250 miles north of Edmonton, near the town of Fort McMurray.
What are the oil sands? What is their potential
in filling the needs of an energy-hungry world? And what are the operating
problems which make production of oil sands such a challenge?
In the McMurray formation, the oil sands' bitumen,
a molasses-thick, high sulfur crude oil, lies mixed with quartz, sand and
clay. There are four major deposits: the Athabasca sands, the Wabasca sands,
the Peace River sands and the Cold Lake deposits. Except for localized
outcrop areas along the Athabasca River, all are covered by overburden
that reaches a thickness of 2,000 feet. These four deposits total approximately
30,000 square miles, an area slightly larger than the state of Maine.
The oil sands strata are up to 220 feet thick and
contain enough recoverable synthetic crude oil to supply the entire United
States for almost 75 years. Unfortunately, less than ten percent of this
volume can be retrieved using open-pit mining techniques. Current technical
knowledge indicates that the remaining reserves can be recovered only by
using In-Situ methods — introducing heat into the sand to liquefy the bitumen
in place so it can be raised to the surface through recovery wells. One
such method is injecting steam and chemicals into the strata; another is
to pump oxygen into the formation and ignite the bitumen. In both methods,
the object is to reduce the viscosity of the surrounding bitumen so it
is easier to pump to the surface. In either case, one thing is clear: commercial
production from 90 percent of the Canadian oil sands must wait for substantial
improvements in technology before it can become economically feasible.
For the remaining 10 percent, open-pit mining is the answer ...
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