Up Close and Purr-sonal
Shelly Borawski
Teresa Keiger
If you have ever submitted a grand or Distinguished Merit photo, ordered a Yearbook or placed an ad in it, or submitted photos for CFA’s awards banquet, then you have probably interacted with Shelly. You may have even seen her at the CFA booth at a CFA International Cat Show. But for a large number of fanciers, Shelly probably is a faceless entity who somehow is involved in everything.
Cat Talk is changing that in this issue we go “Up Close and PURR-sonal” with Shelly!
Shelly began working for CFA at its old headquarters in Ocean, NJ, in 1987. Allene Tartaglia (featured in a previous Cat Talk article) hired her to produce the CFA Almanac, the monthly magazine which was the precursor to Cat Talk. This was several years prior to the “desktop revolution” of digital design and layout. She remembers that:
“Files were generated on a typesetter and had to be pasted on to graphic boards using hot wax. I remember typing everything on the typesetter and then removing a canister where the files were stored; the paper from the canister was then fed through a machine where it was treated with chemicals to produce the actual text on the paper. I would paste the files onto a graphic board. Luckily, the magazine was only around 60 pages back then. I can’t image having to do that for a 400-page Yearbook – it would take forever! Actual photographs were used and had to be manually cropped with a blue pencil and sent to the printer to scan.”
Painstaking work indeed!
With the advance of the personal computer in the early ‘90s, Shelly and Central Office entered the digital world. Apple had led the way in terms of digital design and she swapped her wax tool for a Mac. “Everything then was designed on the computer and the pages were printed and snail mailed to the printer. Now, the files are converted to PDFs and emailed to the printer. The printer then emails me a proof for approval – no more snail mailing pages back and forth! Photos are mostly all digital, but if I do receive a printed photo I can scan it myself. It makes work so much easier.”
As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they remain the same. To reduce the costs of the print publication, the CFA Almanac became a bi-monthly publication in 2005 and ceased publication with the October/November 2007 issue.
However, Shelly’s work did not slow down! The CFA Yearbook had previously been produced offsite by Marna Fogarty and her daughter, Patty Decker. In 2003, layout was brought into Central Office and Shelly then began working on it along with other staff members. In 2011 when CFA moved its headquarters to Alliance, OH, Shelly remained in Manasquan and became the sole person producing the CFA Yearbook.
Fanciers may also know Shelly from her extensive work on the CFA Annual Meeting. She collects hundreds of photos of all the winning cats for use in both the awards presentation booklet and for the awards slide show featuring all of the winning cats. The awards presentations consist of hundreds of slides, and all have the names of the cats, their titles and awards, and their owners. She then integrates the voiceovers for EACH slide (one file per slide) into the slideshow and ensures that nothing goes wrong. If you have ever noticed someone off to the side of the banquet hall behind a computer and talking into a headset, that is Shelly hard at work. Shelly notes though that she enjoys attending the Annual. “It is where I can meet all the people I deal with on the phone and by email correspondence. It’s nice to put a face with the name.”
Shelly is also a key figure at the CFA International Show as she and several other members of the Central Office staff help prepare for, set up, and staff the CFA booth, then tear down after the show. The event requires a huge amount of work both before, during, and afterwards, and Shelly enjoys working closely (and in person!) with her CFA colleagues.
It might sound as if Shelly has no time for fun, right? But she has plenty of other activities outside of her work that she enjoys. No … she has no cats, but she does have a rescue dog named Bogey who she has been training to run canine agility for fun. “We both really enjoy it! Gets us out of the house and we get our exercise as we run the course. It’s a lot of fun, especially when he listens and does what he is supposed to do.” Shelly used to ride horseback for show, but nowadays, she rides strictly for fun.
Then there are her additional outdoor activities, such as snow skiing with her family. “We go to Camelback resorts in the Poconos the day after Christmas through New Year’s Day. The entire family goes and it’s a lot of fun.” She also has a weekly golf game (provided it doesn’t rain that weekend) from April to November. “I do not play if it’s cold outside, plus once the leaves fall, it’s difficult to find the ball.”
The next time you see Shelly Borawski at the Annual or the International Show, do take a moment to introduce yourself. I’m sure she’d like to meet you … Up Close and Purr-sonal.