Delaware Valley News – was where I had a seven-year bout with workaholism. And I've been resting up ever since. No one but a workaholic could've turned out as many mistakes as I perpetrated so industriously at 207 Harrison Street.
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In 1932 the Moreau family of Flemington bought the old Frenchtown Star, a weekly newspaper, and renamed it the Delaware Valley News. They owned the Hunterdon County Democrat. The first editor was Jerry Zich, the longest-serving editor was Nick DiGiovanni with a term of about 22 years, and the last editor was Deb Dawson.
When I was editor we covered Frenchtown and Milford, and the townships of Alexandria, Holland and Kingwood on the Jersey side, and Riegelsville and the townships of Bridgeton, Nockamixon, Tinicum and Durham on the Pennsylvania side.
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In the time before Facebook and MySpace, weekly newspapers were the social media. Besides printing news of fires, floods, crime and local government, they announced births, engagements, marriages and deaths,
In the old days they went even deeper into the local lives.
One feature of the News and other weeklies was columns called “locals.”. For example, on Page 5 of the April 6, 1934, edition of the News, the heading is: FRENCHTOWN LOCALS, Mrs. K.L. Willson, 308 Harrison Street, NEWS phone 22, Mrs. J.K. Schanck, 24 East 8th Street.
Underneath are 60 news items, such as: “Mr. and Mrs. Fred H. Sipes entertained their children and families at dinner Easter Sunday. The guests were Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Heisel and daughter Beverly, Mr. and Mrs. Lester Dalrymple and son, Fred, Miss Gloria Sipes, Miss Nelda Sipes, of Frenchtown, and Charles Bedman, of Rahway.”
I admit, even at this late date, it's nice to see the name of my old friend Gloria, and picture her 9-year-old self dining with the fam. Of course it was that pleasant pang of recognition that was the hallmark of small-town journalism back then and also when I sat at its deathbed in the 21st century.
Of those 60 items, here's by far the newsiest one:
“Mrs. Percy Niece was tendered a surprise handkerchief shower in honor of her birthday Saturday evening. Besides receiving seventy beautiful handkerchiefs, Mrs. Niece was presented with several bouquets of cut flowers and potted plants. Guests were entertained with music and games, and refreshments were served.”
Wow! That is a lot of handkerchiefs! I guess any reader who was feeling the least bit sad would know where to find something to cry into. The absence of married women's first names is also striking. The old custom was that only unmarried women, including widows and divorcees, used their first names. That custom was just dying out in the late '70s when I came to the Delaware Valley News. The most stubborn holdouts were the woman's clubs; I had to practically pry their first names out of them.
The “locals” were still going strong in 1964, when Ruth Ann Worman was compiling them. Some other locals correspondents were Marguerite Sipes, Fanny Wilson (Opdyke), and Ginny Kiggins. But by 1971 only Barbertown and Everittstown were represented.
The Delaware Valley News' paid circulation hit the 1,000 mark in 1933 and it would peak at 4,734 in 1991.
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When I was there, it had a staff of one editor/photographer (me), an office manager (the kind, lovely and efficient Bev Krechel), an ad rep, two full-time reporters, and the left-handed efforts of Hunterdon Democrat's sports staffers John Siipola and Bill Tooker. They'd been ordered to take it on temporarily, but they carried the burden for decades.
About my mistakes: They were many and varied. They were the mistakes of a writer who did not know how to spell “aqueduct” or “marquee,” along with the mistakes of a manager who once fired a reporter (and roommate) by putting a cupcake on his desk with a little sign stuck into it that said, “You're fired”; an editor who decided he wouldn't publish photos of hunters with their dead deer; and a photographer who occasionally would forget to put film in his camera.
I printed a photo of Francis Case to illustrate a story about John Case, and wrote an obituary that had the protagonist dying on an upcoming Sunday. When for some reason an attorney told me a silly lie that billionaire Howard Hughes was buying a controversial gravel pit in Holland Township, I made it the lead story. I was pretty good about facing up to my mistakes and apologizing for them. I gave myself plenty of practice.
Occasionally an apology, no matter how sincere and how exquisitely constructed did not suffice. My coverage of the 1982 Memorial Day parade failed to include even a mention of the American Legion, which had sponsored the event.
An angry auxiliary member called to complain, and my apology for the omission and my promise to do better next year were swept aside over and over.
She further charged me with printing too much bad news and too much Pennsylvania news. I told her that Pennsylvania readers think we print too much New Jersey news, and that our ratio of good news to bad news is about 30 to 1, and the only reason it seems like there's a lot of bad news is that it's more interesting so it's more memorable.
But she wasn't having it. Our altercation went on and on, and I wanted to hang up and go make some fresh mistakes; I was tired of this one. To help wind things up, I yelled at her, “Lady! Lady! Gimme a break!” It was the only time I did that in my seven years at the News and it helped end our conversation. To quote my diary for that day, “You just can't reason with some people. But you can yell at anyone.”
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Another civic-minded woman seemed to be on the receiving end of a lot of my mistakes. One day in 1982 my fiancee, Betsy, and I were in the A&P, and I saw that aggrieved woman, who would be especially aggrieved because I'd failed to publish her announcement of the firemen's hoagie sale.
I explained the situation to Betsy, and said, “I just can't bear to hear about it today. When we get to the end of an aisle, would you be a dear and take a peek around the corner and make sure she's not there?” It was an ignoble episode, but Betsy played her part. The supermarket is not large, but if you are small enough and have some help, it's big enough to hide in.
But pain and suffering aside, that job took everything I had, and I've been slowing down ever since.
After I'd moved on, the News went from broadsheet to tabloid (to make the ads look bigger) and then it went to free circulation. The general decline in ad revenue, plus the national financial nosedive of 2008 provided the one-two punch that killed the News. One day Executive Editor Jay Langley sent me down to the News office at 205-207 Harrison Street to pick over its mortal remains for any photos or clippings worth adding to the Hunterdon County Democrat's archives.
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I sat on the floor sifting through the manilla folders full of articles, some of which had been written by me or my friends, and some of which had been clipped and filed by my daughter Molly, who was the News' librarian during her high school years, doing what may have been the last easy job in journalism.
The filing system was adequate for its time – with folders like “1978, Features, NJ.” If you had been working there in 1978, that usually sufficed. But it wouldn't for anyone else, and I was representing posterity. Eventually I filled one filing cabinet with photos and files for transport to Hunterdon Democrat office, and gave up.
For seven years, the News had been my life, and I'd loved the experience and that newspaper. But what was started in 1879 by William H. Sipes with his Frenchtown Star, ended that afternoon. I'd worked alongside displaced Linotype operators, and interviewed men who'd driven mules along the Delaware Canal, cranked projectors for silent movies, and ridden horses in the U.S. Cavalry – so I understood the come-and-go nature of things.
But it made me sad.
Excerpt from "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia."
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