IN A WAY, Pete Hoekema’s career has been book-ended by In-Plant Graphics magazine. In a 1975 article, we caught him at the beginning of his career, when he was a printing manager at the Foremost Insurance in-plant, overseeing 14 employees and dreaming of expanding into color printing. Today, after 30+ years as graphics manager at Muskegon Community College, Hoekema is looking forward to his retirement in December. “It’s been great,” he says of his career, almost all of which has been spent in the former logging community of Muskegon, Mich., along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Hoekema was born not far
Pete Hoekema
Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 170 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
Pete Hoekema was just one month into his job as graphics manager at Muskegon Community College when his pink slip arrived. It was 1976 and the western Michigan college had decided its graphics program was too expensive. At the time, the school had separate print shops for instruction and production. To help preserve them both, Hoekema huddled with the instructors and proposed a merger. "I said, if we want to keep this thing going, we really ought to join forces," Hoekema recalls. So they did. The in-plant was rearranged to let students work on live jobs—with real deadlines. The school saved money, and
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