Greater Buffalo Press was founded by Walter Koessler (b. 1901, d. 1969), and his brother Kenneth, in Buffalo, New York in 1926 with the support of Everett M. "Busy" Arnold. The Koessler brothers were children of German immigrants who owned a mattress-stuffing business. Walter was a gifted athlete who graduated from Canisius College in 1922 after earning nine varsity letters in football, basketball and baseball. He was a major contributor to the sports programs at his alma mater in the 1960s, and the J. W. Koessler Athletic Center (completed in 1968) was named in his honor. Greater Buffalo Press (GBP) developed and improved web-fed four color rotogravure technology, which was used to print color comic supplements inserted in Sunday newspapers, and color advertising inserts for daily and weekend newspapers. In four-color rotogravure printing, long rolls of newsprint are fed to the press four separate times, one for each color. The ability to align the feeds longitudinally and laterally is critical to quality control, as any misalignment results in color gaps, or colors bleeding to spaces they were not intended to cover. Its principal competitor was Waterbury, Connecticut's Eastern Color Printing. In 1942 GBP established a sales office in New York City, at the recently completed Lincoln Building at 60 E 42nd Street, and hired Bob Lalor as Vice President for Sales. By the 1950s, GBP had established a dominant position in the market for Sunday comic and color supplement printing, with several facilities in western New York State, and printing plants in Wilkes-Barre, PA, Sylacauga, AL and Lufkin, TX. One of the sales representatives was Leonard Hershiser, father of future Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Orel Hershiser. Following its acquisition in 1955 of International Color Printing Co., which brought its market share to 75% nationally and over 90% for the east coast market, it was charged by the United States Department of Justice with violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act. GBP actively opposed the Justice Department, claiming the "failing company defense", which allows a competitor to acquire a firm that is facing grave financial difficulties even if the acquisition will reduce competition. This defense is generally tolerated as an antitrust law anomaly that sacrifices economic goals. The case finally reached the US District Court for the Western District of NY in 1970, one year after Walter Koessler's death and three years after Bob Lalor's, and after a full trial