Remembering Kalmbach’s Jim King

I suspect that many of you reading this were, like me, devoted readers of Trains magazine back in the 1960s. Devoted might be putting it mildly. As a teenager, I got to where I was so enthralled by the magazine that I made a point of trying to read every last word in every last issue.

That even meant the editorial masthead on page 3, including the list of Kalmbach’s corporate staff, way down at the bottom in tiny agate type. I knew all the names, including that of the second guy on the list: James J. King, president. (The top spot, of course, was reserved for the founder and chairman, Al Kalmbach.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jim King over the past few days. Our distinguished former boss died July 20 at age 95, leaving a legacy at Kalmbach eclipsed only by the founder himself.

Jim’s impact on the company is enduring, and that’s especially true of its two railroad titles, Trains and Classic Trains. Jim found a way to embrace all the things Kalmbach was involved in over the years, but he reserved a special passion for railroading.

That might be obvious when you look at the accompanying Ted Benson photo of a beaming Jim, standing with Editor David P. Morgan and Margaret Morgan during an encounter with Southern Pacific Daylight 4-8-4 No. 4449 at Winnemucca, Nev., on June 24, 1975. The 4449 recently had been restored for the American Freedom Train, and Jim was delighted to see it.

Jim was very close to Dave Morgan, and the two made a number of business trips together over the years on behalf of Trains. In the mid-1970s, when I briefly worked at the company during DPM’s tenure, it was common to see the Editor bop into the president’s office simply to talk trains.

That interest in railroads was partly a family thing with Jim. His dad, Robert King, was a Milwaukee Road locomotive engineer in Jim’s hometown of Green Bay, and as he grew up the son must have caught admiring glimpses of the father at the throttle of the Copper Country Limited.

Several plot twists preceded Jim King’s arrival at Kalmbach. First was his service in World War II and his experience in one of its most harrowing moments. On Christmas Eve 1944, Jim joined approximately 2,000 other soldiers who were shipped out of Southampton, England, to join the Battle of the Bulge. They were crowded aboard the Belgian liner Leopoldville, chartered to serve as a troop transport.

They never got there. Just five miles short of Cherbourg, France, a German U-boat sank the Leopoldville. Hundreds of men went into the frigid waters of the channel, and as many as 763 ultimately perished. Somehow, Jim managed to be rescued. Years later he recounted that all he remembered was jumping into the water and waking up in a French hospital.

After he recovered and was discharged, Jim used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend Lake Forest College, in Lake Forest, Ill., where he also met Betty, his wife of 69 years. He decided to pursue a career as an accountant and ended up getting a job at the Milwaukee office of Arthur Andersen. One thing led to another, and in 1954 he was hired to be the controller of Andersen client Kalmbach.

Hiring Jim was one of Al Kalmbach’s best decisions. Over the ensuing 58 years with the company, including 22 as president 1965-1987 and many more on the board of directors, Jim took the organization forward with a leadership style that was a rare blend of positive reinforcement and tough decision-making.

Jim came to genuinely love the hobby and special-interest publishing business. He took delight in all the various markets Kalmbach served, often stopping by to chat with editors in their offices or greet readers at special events. His was the classic open-door policy: anyone was welcome to go talk to Jim, anytime, even if you might not always like the answer you were going to get.

One thing about Jim — he didn’t take himself too seriously. He gladly posed in a number of promotional ads over the years, as evidenced in the photo here, showing Jim playing the mature businessman proving you were never too old to “play with trains.”

Jim also tolerated a fair amount of good-natured abuse from the characters that populated 1027 N. Seventh St., including the traditional editor’s transposition of his last name to say “King Jim” on just about every memo he ever posted. I’m told the perpetrator was usually the impish Model Railroader staffer Gordon Odegard. But Gordy knew he had nothing to fear.

Jim’s tenure as president is marked by countless examples of great leadership, but two stand out for me. One was Kalmbach’s shutdown of its printing business in 1973. The company had printed its own magazines since the beginning and had a large contingent of press people on the payroll. Moreover, the founder loved that part of the business. But the capital required for long-run web printing was prohibitive

Jim led management to the difficult decision to close the press, and it likely saved the company.

Another watershed moment came in 1985, when Jim spearheaded the acquisition of AstroMedia Inc., the Milwaukee-based publisher of Astronomy magazine, a bold, exciting title that in a few short years had pulled ahead of the hobby’s legacy publication, Sky & Telescope. The addition of Astronomy was a dramatic expansion of Kalmbach’s magazine portfolio and added fresh energy to its corporate culture.

I could go on and on about Jim King. At his funeral on Monday, friends and family — including his surviving wife Betty — celebrated this very rich, full life. One of the recurring themes was that Jim personified the word “gentleman,” with an emphasis on “gentle.” He was a guy with a big heart who truly cared about his employees, even when he had to make the tough call. I think the admiration for Jim among all of us in the Kalmbach family was unanimous.