After two years of kindergarten at the Sacré-Cœur nun’s school in Aley, my parents decided I had to be enrolled at a good school in Beirut. This turned out to be a missionary school called the English School for Boys on Justinian Street in Al Sanayeh district. My parents brought me down from Aley at the age of seven and on the first day the teacher in the second elementary class took my hand and asked me to hold the hand of a boy my age. He introduced him as Rafic Najjar, saying: “This is going to be you friend from this day on.” For the following 11 years I was to be surrounded by caring missionary teachers, a growing circle of nature-loving friends and blessed parents who were always there for me.
Amongst the friends that I made in elementary school was a boy named Spirou Sarrouf, who lived very close to our school. During my first year I was invited to Spirou’s birthday party at the Sarroufs’ residence on Spears Street.
This meant a great deal then. My parents drove me down to Beirut on a Saturday and we went looking for a birthday present at the well-known Cesar Amer toy shop, which was the Hamleys of Beirut during the early Fifties. The party was a fascinating experience for a young boy who had just come down from the mountains, with its snacks, the decorated birthday cake, the blowing of candles, the unwrapping of presents, then the noisy games that lasted until early evening.
A seemingly ordinary game of hide-and-seek provided the kindling for a flame that had already begun to manifest itself in the form of my love for illustrations. While all my friends found places to hide in the house, I ended up in the Sarroufs’ kitchen attic. There, I saw piles of wooden blocks covered with sheets of engraved metal carrying smudges of a dark substance that I was later told was the ink used for printing newspapers.
When the other invitees all expressed interest in learning more about my discovery, Spirou’s father, Theodore Sarrouf, explained that these were the printing blocks of ads for products that his advertising agency, Sarrouf Advertising, promoted.
At the agency, he explained, they designed ads that usually consisted of a photo (often of the product itself) and some writing which explained why the product in question was good to use.
For it to be printed in a newspaper, they engraved the ad – in reverse – on a block of lead, which was then glued to a flat piece of wood cut to the exact size and sent to the newspaper, which would then assemble all these blocks and spread ink across them before printing.
The drive back to Aley that night echoed with my relentless questions to my parents about printing blocks, advertising, and the fun that Spirou’s father seemed to derive from his job.