It looks good on paper

Bob McLeod motioned toward the National cash register, circa 1898, sitting atop a bureau in his office.

"When we got here, they were still using that thing for cash sales in the warehouse," he told BusinessWest, shaking his head as he did so. "It was like going back in time to another era."

That's how he described what he and three partners encountered when they purchased the Carter Paper Co. in the fall of 2001, By then, the company, a distributor of everything from packing tape to toilet paper and once the main supplier to the Dairy Queen chain of ice cream shops, was hanging by a thread. The cash register, it seems, wasn't the only museum piece still being …