The Magic Touch Massage Magazine Helps Keep Readers Loose, Workers Happy

The vice president of the company was standing in the hallway, giving one of her employees a serious working-over.

She was pounding on his back, digging her fist into his spine, and thumping him with the edges of her hands. The sound of flesh smacking flesh resounded through the halls.

No need to be alarmed. She was merely doling out one of the employee benefits.

Only at Massage Magazine, a glossy, bimonthly publication based in Spokane, would a regular massage be a company benefit, as well as an actual requirement of employment. If you join the Massage Magazine workforce, you’ll be spending plenty of time on the table. Nice work if you can get it.

This converted house in the shadow of the Spokane County Courthouse serves as the center of a virtual massage empire, the publishing office of the country’s premier massage publication, with a fat 204 pages and a circulation of 60,000.

With articles titled “The Art of Thai Massage,” “Marketing Techniques for Chair Massage in the Workplace” and “Ethical Considerations for Bodyworkers Who Counsel,” the magazine is aimed mostly at professional practitioners and massage students. It also attracts a “percentage of avid amateurs,” said publisher Joan Bertucci, along with a scattering of physicians, chiropractors, physical therapists and the just-plain-curious who pick it up at newsstands and bookstores all over North America. The magazine is available at stores like Auntie’s, Hastings and Barnes & Nobles right here in the magazine’s hometown.

How did Spokane, of all places, come to be the magazine’s hometown?

Because it also happens to be the hometown of the people who own it.

In the last 13 years, Robert and Judi Calvert have built Massage Magazine from a homemade 36-page pamphlet produced by volunteers to a major publishing operation with a staff of 15 full-time employees - 15 exceedingly relaxed employees.

Each staffer is entitled to two, three or four free massages a month, depending on seniority. Judi Calvert, 48, herself does many of them (she’s the V.P. mentioned above), although employees can choose from several massage practitioners. Staff members not only stay loose, but they stay current on the main subject.

Massage is also the main subject in the Calverts’ lives. Robert, 52, was among the first massage practitioners in Spokane back in the early ‘80s, when this kind of therapy was a new phenomenon.

Actually, Robert started his career on the opposite end of the touchy-feely scale: He was a steelworker with Spokane’s Ironworkers Local 14. But he wanted to get into the helping professions, so he launched a career as a marriage and family counselor.

Before long, he noticed that his clients were suffering physically as well as emotionally.

“I learned that the body indeed has a lot to do with people’s emotional angst,” he said. “I decided I wanted to learn how to tap into that.”

So he read up on the subject, took some training, and soon started doing “body work,” which encompasses many kinds of massage therapy and related therapies. In 1980, he opened a clinic and school on the Division Street Y called Bodyworks School of Muscle Therapy.

“So I went from steel to mind to body,” he said with a laugh. “Pretty much all the same thing.”

Judi Cosand, meanwhile, was a Gonzaga University student who one day found herself sore and aching from a martial arts class. She tried a massage for the first time, and was amazed at how good it made her feel. It made her wonder, “Can I do this for a living?”

Soon after, she was taking her grandmother for a drive, and she drove past Bodyworks.

“My car just kind of drove into the parking lot, and I said, `Hmm, I think I’m supposed to go in and sign up,”’ she said. “`Grandma, I’ll be right back.”’ She signed up for classes, and she ended up with a lifelong career and a marriage to boot. Judi Cosand became Judi Calvert.

Bodyworks burned down in 1984, and Robert Calvert took it as an opportunity to realize his goal of writing massage textbooks. The couple moved to Hawaii, and Robert began to write. He dropped the textbook idea and decided to launch a magazine. In 1985 Massage Magazine was born.

“We were in a borrowed house with $10,000 in cash, loaned to us by friends, in a brown paper bag in the pantry,” said Robert. “It was basically a labor of love, very much a labor of love.”

It certainly wasn’t a profit-making venture. Robert said it was five years before he drew a salary. Yet the magazine slowly grew, right along with the burgeoning massage industry.

The logistics of publishing a magazine from Hawaii proved too daunting, so in 1990, the Calverts moved Massage Magazine, and themselves, to Davis, Calif. Soon, Massage Magazine had grown into North America’s major commercial massage magazine (the other massage magazines are association journals).

A year later, the Calverts moved back to Spokane to be near family. Then, in 1994, they brought the magazine headquarters up with them. The three staff writers didn’t want to move (“they don’t like cold weather,” said Bertucci), so they left a small editorial office in California. But the rest of the operation moved to Spokane (except the actual printing, which is contracted out to Wisconsin). The Calverts hired Bertucci, a former student at Bodyworks, to be the advertising manager. They named her publisher last year and she oversees the operation now while Robert puts the finishing touches on a book about the history of massage.

Today, Massage Magazine has outgrown its remodeled house, and it has expanded into another house right across the street on Mallon Avenue. Soon they may have to find bigger headquarters; the magazine keeps on growing.

Which is what empires do. The magazine represents something bigger than print on paper; the Calverts also like to think of themselves as advocates of massage to the greater world. They have become involved in legislative issues. They have held seminars. They have sent out teams of practitioners to Olympic events and to the Iron Man Triathlon, where their team performed massage on 1,100 athletes in seven hours. One year, they even sent a team to Sturgis, S.D, for the annual Harley-Davidson rally.

“We would never go back,” said Robert dryly. “It was not our kind of crowd.”

The Calverts themselves embarked on a six-month lecture and workshop tour of the country’s massage schools last year.

The title they gave to the tour could be applied to the magazine itself: Ambassadors of Touch.