They instead built the business by copying and printing for students and churches, who would “come in every Friday to get their church bulletin printed,” she said.

“Immediately, we had to go a different direction,” Sherry Erb said. When the couple first bought the business, they intended to focus on making plastic signs while having copy services be “just a part of it,” but they quickly realized “there was absolutely no money to be made in plastic signing, and no repeat business.” The competition was tough, but Nite Owl persevered. It didn’t help, she said, that at one point there were four copy centers all operating on the same block between Haywood Avenue and Welch Avenue. “It was really scary, and I was so worried there wasn’t enough money coming in to really make a go of it.”

… I was leaving my kids every day, which was really hard for me, and trying to learn all of these machines when I am not mechanical.” “We had sunk all of our savings into buying it, and we were trying to support children. “It was scarier than scary, it really was,” Sherry Erb said. Steve, who taught industrial arts in Winterset, had to stay and finish out the school year while Sherry, with two babies in tow, moved in with her parents in Ames and started learning the ropes. “We started out with a huge blueprint machine that was 6 feet long and 6 feet wide, and a line of ISU students out the door wanting their projects to be blueprinted,” Sherry Erb said. 1, 1982, in what Steve Erb called the “pre-internet days.” Everything about the business, the Erbs said, was different from what it is today. They found Nite Owl, and “saw it was in dad’s old building,” and bought it on Feb. According to Sherry Erb, they began scanning the Des Moines Register for job postings and businesses for sale. The Erbs, who met in third grade at United Community School and attended Iowa State University together, were working as teachers in Winterset in 1981, but felt it was time for a change. They were looking to sell after just a few years, and that is when Sherry and Steve Erb decided to make the business their own. Nite Owl, at the time, was owned by two men in the community, but neither had time to operate the business. When they moved to a larger location, Sherry’s father, Don, bought the Hayward Avenue building and turned it into an office and retail space, “with a whole bunch of different businesses in it, and Nite Owl was in the front of that building,” she said. His three sons - Vern, Don and Murl, who invested in the business after returning from military service in World War II - eventually changed the business to sell cars instead of gas, but outgrew the building Sherry’s grandfather built. He built another building, identical to the first, on Hayward Avenue, and reopened his gas station there. Then, during the Great Depression, he lost the property to the bank, but wasn’t willing to give up.

He later built his own full-service gas station in Campustown, and raised his three sons while running it.

In some ways, Sherry Erb said, it all started when her grandfather, Joe Wattoff, moved to the Ames area from Sweden to help build the Memorial Union at Iowa State University, which was completed in 1928. That doesn’t make letting go any easier, the Erbs said - especially since the history behind the business spans three generations. “We’re leaving it in good hands, and they’re really excited,” she said. She said she and her husband have sold the business to a couple who recently moved to the area to be closer to family. It was our goal to work until we were 70,” said Sherry Erb. “We decided it was time to retire because (Steve) is 70 and I am almost 70. However, the couple said, it will be continuing without them. Ames’ Main Street’s Nite Owl Print and Copy has come a long way over the past 38 years.Īnd if you ask its owners, Steve and Sherry Erb, of rural Boone, there is still a long road ahead for the business, which has offered a range of printing services in the community since the early 1980s.

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