WASHINGTON POST INTERVIEWS BEP EMPLOYEE

William Bolden makes more money in eight hours than Donald Trump.

Combined with Oprah Winfrey.

Combined with Beyonce and Jay-Z.

Bolden, a soft-spoken man who grew up on a Virginia farm, does the math one recent afternoon. If 40,000 sheets of paper travel through the machine he mans each night at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and each one carries 32 $20 bills, that's $25,600,000. All in a single shift.

In a year, that means more than $6.6 billion will pass before his eyes. Last year, Trump, Winfrey and the expecting couple earned, according to Forbes, a combined total of about $422 million.

At the bureau, each weekday, around the clock, men and women like Bolden swipe security badges and walk into the rumbling belly of the C Street building to print what the rest of us are laboring for: Greenbacks.

"I don't think of it as money. Right now, it's just paper," says Bolden, 50, standing in front of a yellow, groaning machine that is spitting out stacks of crisp, untouched bills. His eyes scan for tiny details most people wouldn't notice, such as whether every word on the seal is readable. "Here, we're producing a commodity that the country needs and it has to be correct."

Bolden, a Navy veteran who worked for 16 years in the CIA's print shop before coming to the bureau, speaks of printing with reverence. There is a thrill in that moment of creation, he says, in starting with a blank sheet and ending up with something important. "I'm proud," he says, "that I print something that is used around the world."

To read the complete article, see: The new alchemists: Blank paper to greenbacks (www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-new-alchemists-blank
-paper-to-greenbacks/2011/08/31/gIQAoizSwJ_story.html)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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