The man behind the press.

Tony Baltes did not set out to make buttons. He had been a school teacher and a juvenile parole officer, and he had gone west to Wyoming to study geology. What came back east with him was photography — a darkroom he built himself, black-and-white film he developed himself, and a one-person company that would shoot anything: weddings, portraits, whatever work was going.

The buttons found him. Local teams wanted their kids' pictures pinned to a jersey, so he bought a machine. The first serious order — a thousand buttons for a beer company, made one at a time across a single night — settled the question of what he was going to do with his life.

Then came the idea that built the business: the whole team on one button. That took a bigger press and it took him on the road, through five or six hundred high schools in what he reckons was every state in the country — the Belfry Bats, the Frankfort Hot Dogs, the Running Orphans, the Polka Dots. He kept one or two of nearly every button he ever made.

In 1980 he made his first political buttons in Toledo. In 1984 he hitchhiked to Washington with a thousand of them, set up by the Reflecting Pool, and sold out. He spent that night on the ground watching the fireworks with a borrowed army jacket full of cash, and decided he was a button maker. He has been one ever since — running a compressor-rigged truck on the convention floor in San Francisco, fifty people inside the hall in Atlanta, thirty feet from a sitting president in Dallas while Lee Greenwood sang.

In 1994 he brought his family home from Toledo, into the old Baltes family restaurant, and started TigerEye Design. It began with two or three employees and grew into a full shop — buttons, embroidery, printed shirts, mugs — with his son Ross as the artist who could take a half-formed idea out of a client's head and put it on paper. Buttons were the way in; Tony called them the camel's nose in the tent. 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.

The biggest of them came in 2008. The Obama campaign wanted TigerEye to run its merchandise, and the shop built the official online store — six warehouses, crews around the clock, more than a million packages shipped — while running John McCain's merchandise from the same building at the same time. Both sides of the aisle, the way it had been since Toledo in 1980.

After decades of feast or famine every two years, Tony stepped back from the business. He did not stop being a button maker. TigerEye Design is his again, and this is the next chapter of it.