In 1958, with encouragement from Gloria, then pregnant with their son Steven, Jack decided to take the leap and risk going into business for himself. He had no income and no customers, so he had to collect unemployment insurance for a time. While waiting for his business to grow, Jack freelanced as a hydraulic and electrical engineer. His new company's first customer was the F.J. Barnard Company of Boston, later acquired by Acme Bookbinding of Boston. Jack was encouraged to invent automated equipment that would increase production and reduce costs in the labor-intensive binding industry. Leo Robbins, who had been working for the firm that developed the Polaris missile launcher, was working part-time for Printing Industries Equipment Company and Jack was his assistant. While continuing with his full-time job with the Polaris Project at Cape Canaveral, Leo helped Jack with circuitry problems. Eventually, Jack invited him to become a partner in the new business and after a year, Leo became a full partner in the new company, Robbins and Bendror Associates.

Shortly after they became partners, Jack and Leo formed a machine shop called Precision Machines Shop, Inc., a company Jack still owns. In 1960, they also formed a new company, Mekatronics, to provide mechanical and electronic services to other companies. They built some equipment for Consolidated Edison, the giant utility company in New York City, as well as working on projects involving electronic controls. In the early days, Robbins and Bendror Associates handled sales, while their other companies did the manufacturing.

The two men worked together for eight years, until Leo died in 1966. Jack has managed the companies alone since then. In 1977, Jack merged his assets under the umbrella of Mekatronics and consolidated manufacturing and sales under one roof. In 1982 Jack purchased The Oversewing Machine Company of America and in 1983 he purchased the Printing Indus-tries Equipment Company. The company is now located in a large and attractive brick building in Port Washington, New York, on the north shore of Long Island, not far from Manhattan. The manufact-uring facility is full of machines under construction as well as prototypes of new ones.

AN ASTONISHING ARRAY OF AUTOMATED BINDERY MACHINES

Since the 1950s, an amazing stream of new automated machines from Mekatronics has revolutionized the library binding industry in the United States, Canada and worldwide. The first product was the SPEED-NIP™. In 1960, the sleek new HYDROPRESS™ was introduced. This machine was a twin building-in machine that replaced the slow traditional standing press with a high-speed semi-automated process. The next year, it was the new VERSAMATIC™ machine, which automated the gluing of books into their cases. In 1963, a completely new type of Rounder & Backer-almost twice as fast as the first one-speeded up the binding of periodicals and other library materials. A very advanced high-speed optical book-measuring unit with no moving parts was introduced in 1969. This was the 1180- BSC, which used printed circuit boards, an important new innovation. Jack's contribution for 1970 was a machine that reduced the number of operations required for oversewn volumes. This was the Quantum IV™, a thread trimming, endpaper folding, tipping and nipping machine.