After beginning his career in 1945 as a film inspector and booker at the Walter O. Gutlohn 16mm film library, in 1952 he founded Fleetwood Films, which specialized in distributing religious-themed films to parochial schools. The numerous foreign-language films he discovered in this area led him to eventually compile one of the world's largest 16mm film libraries. He gained the rights to collections held by
Federico Fellini,
Luis Buñuel and
Roberto Rossellini, all of whom became longtime friends. He sold Fleetwood to Macmillan in 1968 and retired from that company in 1980, when he founded Grange Communications, a U.S. distributor of foreign films.