He became a button maker in 1984.

The first serious order was a thousand buttons for a beer company. He stayed up all night and made them one at a time, and when the last one came off the press he knew what he was going to do with his life.

He put the money into equipment, took a partnership in a colour photo lab, and then had the idea that built the business: not one player per button, but the whole team on a single three-and-a-half-inch button. That took a bigger press, and it took him on the road — through five or six hundred high schools, basketball and football and marching band, in what he reckons was every state in the country.

He still remembers the names. The Belfry Bats. The Frankfort Hot Dogs. An Illinois town's Running Orphans. The Polka Dots. He kept one or two of nearly every button he ever made.

In San Francisco he ran a truck rigged with an air compressor and manufactured buttons on site, on demand, as the floor called for them — Mondale and Ferraro, with Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart still in the race. In Dallas he stood maybe thirty feet from a sitting president and a sitting vice president while Lee Greenwood sang "God Bless the U.S.A." and the hall came up out of its seats.

What he didn't know yet was that it would be feast or famine, every two years, for the rest of his working life.

Through the same stretch he held licences to make buttons for Major League Baseball, the NFL and the NBA — Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan — printed on the photographic backgrounds that had become his signature. By 1990 he had moved into Senate and congressional races as well.

Buttons were the way in. He called them the camel's nose in the tent — somebody comes to you for a button and leaves with shirts, hats and a banner. Central to all of it was his son Ross, a master artist who could take a half-formed idea out of a client's head and put it on paper.

The marketing was the road: something like a hundred and fifty events a year across forty-eight states, selling on site and turning business cards into orders. TigerEye became an official vendor at national conventions — Boston in 2004 among them — often running a full factory on site, making buttons and shirts for the hall and the hotels overnight.