Noteworthy graduates: Thad Kubis, marketing executive

When he was growing up in Brooklyn, Thaddeus Kubis had a rather unusual interest for a teenage boy: newspapers. Where does a newspaper come from? How is it made? How does it get to where it’s going?

He wound up attending the New York School of Printing (now HS of Graphic Communication Arts) in Manhattan. It was destiny, written on newsprint.

Today, as the founder of NAK Integrated Marketing in Manhattan, Kubis is an internationally acknowledged expert in converting analog marketing efforts into lower-cost, higher-profit, digitally based programs, including both print and online media. He counts Blue Cross Blue Shield, Air France, the New York Knicks and JP Morgan Chase among his clients.

But printer’s ink still flows in his veins when he talks about his bookbinding and production teachers from his school days. “What wonderful days they were,” he says.

I was born into a very structured, first-generation Polish family in Greenpoint and went to a Catholic elementary school. There was a great distrust of anything outside of the neighborhood. It was a serious issue when I announced I was going to a public high school in the city.

But my parents were good parents and once they got over the shock, they supported my decision.

Going to the New York School of Printing on the GG train to Queens Plaza and then on the E into the city was like going into the bar in Star Wars: all the different creatures, that’s what it was like to me — oh, my gosh, there’s a whole world out here that I didn’t know about!

In school, I was now being told about life from a non-family source, from a whole other level I never experienced before. There were four teachers there who changed my life.

Harry Hunter and Henry Lazar were production teachers; Hunter was a bookbinding teacher and Lazar taught typesetting.

They taught me about doing a diligent job, the best you can, that everything you did was a reflection of your abilities. Those were eye-opening, life-changing issues for a 14-year-old kid.

Then there was a teacher who I still keep in touch with today, Tony Gentile, an arts teacher and also my track coach. He always passed on the concept that you should treat people the way you want to be treated.

The teacher who made the biggest difference to me was a guy named Benjamin Greenwald, who ran the journalism department and he saw something in me that no one else saw. After my second year in school, he asked me to get involved in the design of the school newspaper and magazine.

Then he made me the design editor and during the two-and-a-half years that I was, we won a couple of Columbia University School of Journalism design awards for high school papers.

Ben always used to say he was the kind of guy who could see a shiny coin in a dull pocket. He picked out a bunch of us and he really worked with us.

I went to his funeral 15 years ago. He died in his 80s. I am the businessman I am today in part because of the foundation that he established in me.

Because of my vocational education, I am one of the few people who know the different stages of the marketing chain. I know production. I know that the way the ink is laid down is different than what you see on the screen. Whether it’s with traditional printing or digital printing, I’ll know the problems and how to get around them because of my training.

It has come back to me as a great reward. It gets me business. It gets me public speaking engagements. All because I know how to get the job done. And it will help me reach my goal of teaching at one of the city colleges to pass on the manner in which I was taught.

When you think of the training I had in high school, and then in community college, it was like one foundation building on another. It was right. It was karma. I owe it my very existence.

— as told to reporter Ellie Spielberg