In 1981, Bob Christensen, the owner of 15 Thrifty Nickels, offered to buy out Ad Beat and they turned him down. He made the offer to David and after making a 50/50 ownership deal, Town Crier became Thrifty Nickel. Bob brought a truckload of stands, a camera and helped build layout tables. They taught the threesome about accounting, how to layout a paper and how to manage a Thrifty Nickel. They hired 2 salespeople, an office girl and installed 4 new phone lines. The circulation increased to 20,000 and expanded to out of town. Within three months Thrifty Nickel took off!
In 1984, David decided to start a telephone directory called The Panhandler. He left Thrifty Nickel to be ran by his sister, Debby. When it was time to put the phone book together David was at a loss and had Debby come over and teach his 15 girls how to typeset and run the office. Debby did so well he wanted her to stay on and run the phone book. The Thrifty Nickel staff was unhappy with management so David asked his mother, Pat Spring to step in and take over. Anita Shelton started in 1985 and her husband Jimmy Shelton followed in 1986. Jimmy remembers the days of taking camera shots in the dark room (instead of scanning photos like today), pasting up individual classifieds on layout paper, drawing what he wanted in color on tissue paper and writing down all of his customers on runsheets and sales reports. (We call him our “caveman!).
The Panhandler was an excellent phone book with alot of innovative ideas. David's passion was for his whole family to do well and they all did. The Panhandler expanded too fast and the phone book and the whole family went bankrupt. David moved to Dallas to start another paper, they called Ad Beat. Debby later joined David after having a Quick Quarter in College Station put out of business by a Thrifty Nickel. The Dallas market was alot different than Amarillo and it took a while to take off. Once the paper was doing well the office caught on fire, later to be determined arson, and they lost everything. Pat sent computers from Thrifty Nickel and they continued to put a paper out of David’s house.
Debby trained her daughter, Cristi who was 18 at the time, how to typeset to take over her position so she could move back to Amarillo in 1990 to work at Thrifty Nickel. Blaine Burnett had been a salesman at The Panhandler and Debby his boss, they got married and he came back to Amarillo to sell for Thrifty Nickel in 1991. Laura Wertz came from The Panhandler to fill in for a sick typesetter and never left! Cristi followed her family back to Amarillo and started at Thrifty Nickel in 1992 as a part-time typesetter and doing a route.
In 1993 to spice things up, Thrifty Nickel went to the magazine format and soon went full color. Candy Davis also came back to work at Thrifty Nickel in 1993 after working at the Tulsa paper. Pat Spring retired in 1996 and Debby took over as Office Manager. Thrifty Nickel moved from 10th street to our present location in 1996. In 1998, Cristi got into computer programming and set the salespeople, billing and route sheets up on a computerized system.
We decided to go back to our original tabloid size because we were tired of being called "cute". So January 2000 was a year none of us could forget! When we came back from Christmas break, Cristi has ripped out all of the layout tables, remodeled the production department, changed the paper back to tabloid size and set the paper up to be paginated on the computer instead of pasting up. (We were one of the first few Thrifty Nickels in the Nation to paginate). Debby and Cristi were working 24 hours straight trying to work out the pagination kinks. Cristi hallucinated and Debby woke up with Egg McMuffin on her face...the paper came out a day late and everything was black and white!
We expanded our new location on Washington in 2001, adding sales offices, a new kitchen and a tanning and workout room. In October 2003, Kim Jenkins came on as our new Sales Manager. She cleaned house and steered our sales force into “butt kickin’” mode! In January 2004 we changed our name to American Classifieds to recognize our national growth.
Deneen, Debby’s younger daughter, came back from Washington in 2004. She wanted to increase her sales and asked if she could start a new dining and entertainment publication...Debby said "sure, whatever". And that is how The Scene was born. On her own, Deneen has made The Scene boom, which has pushed us to a whole new level and The Scene has gone from 8 pages to 28 and has impressive national customers.
Debby's youngest son, Ryan (who has a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology) came on from Cellular One in 2006, as our Distribution Manager. Ryan has become a huge asset. He has reorganized and cleaned up our routes, brought in any new stops and deals with the ever changing delivery team with style and grace. Jimmy Shelton was made Promotions Director in 2007. Jimmy is the head of our "Cook Team" and has partnered up with KGNC to promote both medias and give back to the community.
With the combination of everyone working as a team, Debby's management and motivational skills, Cristi constantly forcing us into new technology (sometimes kicking and screaming), Kim organizing and motivating the sales team, Jimmy getting our name out there and getting us involved in the community, Ryan making our distribution department strong, Deneen bringing us into a new future with The Scene and of course the rest of our wonderful staff (that we consider to be our family)...American Classifieds has become a smooth operating force to be reckoned with!