ZICH, Gerald E. “Jerry” – (1907-1987) became a reporter for the Hunterdon County Democrat in 1928, and helped cover the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932. Later that same year the Moreau family, owners of the Democrat, bought the Frenchtown Star and rebranded it the Delaware Valley News. They promoted Zich, making him its first editor.
Gloria Sipes Paleveda remembers him as handsome, “tall and lanky with a warm, little-boy smile (and) curly black hair, and eyes that were electric blue.” She wrote that he “used to stop and talk to my dad a lot as Dad leaned against the Post Office mailbox, his vantage point from which he could see down Bridge Street and up Race Street.”
Zich (pronounced Zick) was an energetic young man, and his Delaware Valley News was full of well-written fact and fun. He organized an ice skating derby on a pond north of town, held a garden contest, judged the costumes in the Halloween parade, helped organize the river “regattas,” and took part in every civic enterprise or whimsical stunt.
Zich organized a Sea Scout Troop, which included young Bill Eddy, whose father donated the hardware for a 16-foot, broad-beamed, flat-bottomed boat the Scouts built in the back room of the News office, which was on Race Street at the time. “It was very heavy and ugly to handle in the water,” Zich recalled later. But it floated.
He wrote extensively about the river, it being of mutual interest to his New Jersey and Pennsylvania readers, and the salient feature of this community.
In 1936 Zich left newspapering, but continued writing – for the state Department of Agriculture. In 1977 he was living near Lawrenceville, downsizing to relocate in Florida, where he would spend his final decade. He phoned me to see if we wanted a big oil painting of him working in the Delaware Valley News office back in 1935. I wasted no time in borrowing a company van and driving down to collect the work of art and interview him about the old days.
Implying that he lacked ambition, I asked him why he'd stayed at the News for four whole years. (There was a Depression on, and he loved the job.) But then I would stay at the News myself for seven years, experiencing the hardest but most satisfying time of my professional life.
The painting was 4 feet square, done by Robert Hogue. It shows Zich in a broad-brimmed fedora at his desk leaning over newspaper pages, secretary Eleanor Ritchie beside him, and an overflowing wastebasket on the floor. Horace Sipes and his press could be seen in a back room, and in the street, all three engaged in conversation, are Raymond “Butch” Loper in his butcher's apron, public works employee Godfrey Hawk with his scythe, and a representative Apgar sister. Hogue also managed to fold in the river bridge, plus that row of shops on Race Street. It had been a wonderful souvenir for Zich.
I hung the big painting on the wall of the Delaware Valley News office, where it remained for 31 years. When the News office closed in 2008, it found a new home on the wall of the Hunterdon County Democrat newsroom. In 2015 the Democrat was downsizing, shedding employees like the last leaves of autumn. Its files of clippings and reels of microfilm were to be donated to the Hunterdon County Historical Society. The Democrat would soon be leaving its big building on Minneakoning Road in Raritan Township and moving into smaller quarters.
My last day would be July 31. I asked my boss, Craig Turpin, if I could have the Jerry Zich painting. Despite our turbulent personal history, he graciously said, “I can't think of anyone who deserves it more.”
Understandably, running a news organization that had just laid off nearly everybody, the future had his urgent attention. When he contemplated The Big Picture, it was not the one showing Jerry Zich hard at work in 1935.
I lugged the painting home with me and it's hanging on my wall right now, awaiting further developments.
From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"
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