His father installed printing presses. He dismantles them.

When Joel Birket was a child, his family moved to new cities for a year at a time so his father, William, could install printing presses at the major daily newspapers in Seattle and Minneapolis. "I saw all the different trades and effort that was put into making these presses work," Birket says. "It was just fascinating." Later, Birket – who entered the same line of work in 1994, and who now oversees his own shop specializing in machinery moving and press installations – opened drawers at printing plants and spotted his dad's handwriting on old drawings detailing the operations of a press.

Recently, Birket, who is 44, stood in the press room of the Nashville-based Tennessean for a different sort of job than the one his father so often performed. In 1989, Birket's dad had installed the Tennessean's printing press. Nearly three decades later, Birket had returned to take it apart.

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