Following his graduation from Aledo High School, Ralph became a linotype operator. The salesman for the linotype company had spread a white sheet on the floor of the composing room of the Times Record and told him to carefully take the linotype apart.

After it was spread all over the floor, the man told Ralph to put it back together again. He did and became a machinist on the linotype, working as an operator only when he was not fixing the linotypes in the plant. Following an argument with the Foreman of the composing room, sometime in the early 1930s, he went to Kewanee where he became a linotype operator for the Star Currier. He married in 1935 and they began to have children, two girls and a boy. After his third child was born, he requested that the newspaper pay him as an machinist, but they could not. He began to look around for other work and was soon hired by the Daily Republican Times in Ottawa, IL. He moved his family to the west side of Ottawa where all three children attended Lincoln Elementary school and were graduated from Ottawa Township High School. In 1963, after having had a stroke, he moved to the Union Typographical Home in Colorado Springs, CO. He is buried in the Evergreen City Cemetery in that city.

Ralph was very aware that he was the grandson of two Swedish immigrants, and he knew that his maternal grandmother was from Ulster Ireland, but he had no idea that he descended from the Mayflower passenger, Stephen Hopkins through his maternal grandfather, Joseph Wagner Lemon.

Ralph Gustafson