125 Years of Community history • triumphs • truth
Readers of all shapes, hungry for news Thursday, October 17, 2019
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By PETER CROWLEY Managing Editor nly once have I woken up early enough to see the delivery driver swing by my house at 5:30 a.m. and, like a ghost, sneak the Enterprise into the brown and yellow tube below the mailbox. Since the Enterprise became a morning paper in April, many readers have told me how much they love getting the paper so early. I haven’t verified this by seeing their faces light up as they begin their morning read, but I have seen the glint in two young men’s eyes as they snatched the Enterprise shortly after midnight, when it was delivered to a crowded Saranac Lake bar where they were enjoying beers. I couldn’t hear their conversation over the loud music, and from the way they held the paper I couldn’t see which articles they huddled over, but they were drinking it in. Who says only old people read the print edition? Don’t believe the hype about young people not caring about local news. They do, and around here they get it from the Enterprise, whether online or in print. Anyone who follows Instagram feeds such as @saranaclakememes, @memethetrilakes and @lakeplacidmemes knows that the local news spoofed there is heavily dependent on Enterprise reporting, often including screenshots of actual Enterprise headlines. Whoever those anonymous satirists are, they appear to be pretty young, and their followers tend to be young, too, including many local teenagers. They’re probably too young to have read “Leaven of Malice,” Robertson Davies’ comic 1954 novel about a community newspaper whose editor compares it to a barber’s chair that adjusts to fit all buttocks. It’s a silly analogy, but it rings true in its basic point that a well-rounded newspaper is meant for everyone, not just people of one shape. It’s not a niche product. Some people read only the comics, or just the sports, politics, want ads or horoscopes. It’s a buffet for you to take what you like. Plus, in a small town like this, you can tell someone on the newspaper’s staff how you want it to be, and they’ll hear you out and possibly adjust it for you, as with the proverbial barber chair. I thought back to people with whom I’d discussed the paper over the years. I picked a few of them and interviewed them to see what they think of it. Here’s what they said. Sixth-generation local If we think the Enterprise is hot stuff because it’s been around 125 years, that’s nothing compared to Tim Moody’s family. His great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Smith Moody settled in what’s now Saranac Lake’s Moody Pond and Pine Street area in 1818, receiving the land in lieu of pay for his service as a fife player in the War of 1812. Tim called the Enterprise “the absolute backbone of the TriLakes area.” He noted that there have been times he didn’t agree with an editorial or a news story’s approach, but he said the paper carries plenty of local news as well as news of the region, state, nation and world. He especially likes the pages with numerous short articles to give him a wider selection of happenings in small bites. “I think it behooves everyone in the world to keep track of their surroundings,” he said. “Our paper has got the pulse of the central Adirondacks.” But he said people have to look beyond their
Two young men huddle over a fresh copy of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise just after it’s delivered to Bitters & Bones bar in Saranac Lake around 12:30 a.m. Saturday, June 1.
(Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)
hometown as well, and the Enterprise is a good way to do that. “You gotta care about what’s going on downriver,” he said. He added that he has advertised his plumbing business in the Enterprise, and it worked. “Advertising is expensive, but I have had nothing but fantastic results from advertising in the Enterprise.” Newcomer Mei-Ling McNamara has lived here less than a year, moving from Colorado to McColloms in December 2018 with her three children and her husband, who was hired by Paul Smith’s College. “We wanted to be closer to wild nature and the mountains,” she said. She’s 44 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. She’s an investigative multimedia journalist with such prestigious titles as the Guardian, focusing mostly on human trafficking. She’s also been a journalism professor. With such a high standard, I was a little surprised when she told me how much she liked the Enterprise. She said reading it helps her get to know the community here. “I like the angle on local news,” she said. “I like its profiles of local people. ... I like the fact that it does some historical pieces in the area, looks back at local characters ... while also having news, important local news.” It’s also useful in telling her “what I need to know about things happening,” she said. She’d like to see more in-depth news series, but that aside, she said, “The paper is very much part of how the community operates. ... Some local papers lose relevancy, but it tries to be on top of what’s going on in the community.” Critic Jim McCulley also believes the Enterprise should do more indepth local reporting, and he is not
timid about calling us out on that. “I don’t take it personally or with any animosity,” he said. “You just say what you need to say and move on.” He’s a fiscal conservative who thinks taxes are far too high and government spending far too lavish. A 54-year-old who has lived in Lake Placid since he was 7, he said he loves living here but added that he’ll have to move away after he retires, because of the property taxes. For example, it frustrates him that Lake Placid’s school district hasn’t downsized as its student enrollment has declined. “I look at all the spending that’s going in this area, and I’m very concerned,” he said. “I think the Enterprise should start focusing on more of those things.” McCulley said he doesn’t subscribe to the Enterprise but still reads it every day, and learns things from it all the time. He said he understands that because there’s so much news to cover here, the Enterprise would need a bigger staff to do the kind of in-depth reporting he wants to see. “This area is almost bizarre in some ways: It’s a tiny area with so much happening,” he said. “And the Enterprise stays on top of it. “I think the Enterprise is a valuable asset to the community. I don’t think there’s any question about it,” he added. “Most areas this size don’t have anything.” Fan Beth VanAnden, 71, grew up in Rochester and has lived since 2013 in Saranac Lake, where she retired recently as a physician’s assistant. She has told me several times how much she loves the Enterprise. When I asked her why, she gave a list of reasons. “This is an edited, professional paper,” she said. “This is not fake news. There are corrections if errors are made. The story selection is comprehensive. “Second, it’s local. I read sto-
ries about music, about sports, about arts, about businesses. I see the Tri-Lakes calendar; I use it every week. It’s great for people who can’t remember when things are, like me. She loves Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, an “age-mate” who grew up in Saranac Lake. She loves the Enterprise columnists, especially Bob Seidenstein and Howard Riley whom she described as “part of that elite group of people who write interesting stuff even if you’re not from there.” She loves that different points of view appear on the Opinion page and that they’re generally respectful. “This isn’t about shaming,” she said. “It’s about sharing ideas and information ... not just making somebody look bad. “This is a professional paper,” she repeated. “The layouts are good. The content is good. It is not sloppy at all. And we get awards because it is not sloppy. ... I say we get awards, but you get awards. Our paper. I think this paper represents something about our community that is exemplary.” Former staffer Rip Allen first encountered the Enterprise in Guinea, West Africa. He and his first wife were there, working for the then-new Peace Corps, when they met the U.S. ambassador to that country. His name was Jim Loeb, and he happened to be one of the Enterprise’s two owners. Loeb took a liking to the young couple and offered Allen a job at his paper. “He said, ‘Why don’t you go up to Saranac Lake and give Howard Riley a hand?’” Allen said. Up to that point, most of Allen’s writing was poetry. His only journalism experience was a summer course he took at Columbia after graduating from Cornell. Nevertheless, the couple moved here in 1964, and except for a brief stint in Pennsylvania, he’s
lived here ever since. He worked for six years as a reporter and associate editor on the Enterprise’s small news crew. He was the main historical researcher and writer behind the Enterprise’s 75th anniversary special section in November 1969. He had a column for a while, and if someone had a problem with something he wrote, they’d let him know. “I was a little bit liberal for the taste of Saranac Lake, and I probably stepped on some toes that way. But in general, everybody — it was pretty laid back.” The Enterprise had a long history as a Republican paper, but Loeb and his co-owner Roger Tubby were Democrats, and so was Allen. While on the news staff, he actively supported antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign. Nevertheless, he said, “I can’t remember a single incidence of someone coming in and complaining about the political swing of the Enterprise at the time.” Tubby and Loeb “worked very hard for the community ... and I think that was appreciated. ... It was not a split community in those days in any sense.” Is that still the case? “I don’t know,” he said. “If it is, I think you guys are pretty quiet about it. I know with things in general around the country, there are certain topics you just don’t bring up because you don’t want to get in an argument.” Since 1992, Allen’s main work has been for the American Red Cross disaster relief and with senior citizens. Now 80, he’s still an Enterprise subscriber. He often turns first to the Opinion page and the obituaries. “I personally also always head for the back page or whatever” for national and world news, “because I don’t watch that much television. ... I’d much rather read a story on a page, and without all the advertisements every five minutes.”
A2 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
CONTENTS Publisher Cathy Moore......................................A3 Archive gaps .....................................................A4 Press operators .................................................A6 Photography.....................................................A8 Advertising .......................................................A10 Editors ..............................................................A11 John Penney .....................................................A12 September 11, 2001 .........................................A13 Local sports ......................................................A14 Olympic tradition..............................................A15 Local Olympians ...............................................A16 Letters from readers .........................................B1 Bill McLaughlin.................................................B2 Employee memories.........................................B4 Current staff......................................................B15 CONTACT US: Phone 518-891-2600 Fax 518-891-2756 Office 54 Broadway, Saranac Lake, NY Mail P.O. Box 318, Saranac Lake, NY 12983 E-mail: adenews@adirondackdailyenterprise.com advertising@adirondackdailyenterprise.com circulation@adirondackdailyenterprise.com sports@adirondackdailyenterprise.com weekender@adirondackdailyenterprise.com calendar@adirondackdailyenterprise.com
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Enterprise has stood the test of time
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By CATHERINE MOORE Publisher ou might ask why has the Adirondack Daily Enterprise been going strong for 125 years, when about half of all small businesses survive just five years or less (according to the Small Business Association’s Office of Advocacy. Newspapers have been predicted they’d be dead forever, going back to the inventions of the radio, TV and now the internet. Tell me, did people throw out their stove when the microwave came along? Of course not. We survived the Industrial Revolution, and we’ll survive the digital revolution by being relevant and trusted. We are continually adapting to the changes in the economy. In the early 1920s, the Enterprise charged a nickel for the newspaper, until the Great Depression came and it was lowered to 3 cents. The Enterprise has always adapted to the economic times by growing and retracting how we did things to even the number of publishing days. But the one thing we never cut back on was quality. I guess that is why we have more readers than we ever had both in print and online. The front-page news of the Enterprise in the 1930s was mostly world and national news, due to lack of radio or TV in the homes. Now today, newspapers are the originators of the news that is picked up and distributed. However, our communities today want local news in their area, so we’ve focused on offering mostly local content. Our newspaper has transformed from hot lead and linotype to offset presses, from typewriters to desktop computers, from film to digital cameras. Now we have transformed to offer compelling robust content on all platforms and on all
devices, for you to consume however you prefer. The constant, most important factor in this community newspaper lasting so long has been the people. I’ve worked at the Enterprise since 1973 and have had the pleasure of working with many amazing people. They truly care. They engage with the community and, most of all, believe the work they do is important. The Enterprise staff gives its very best. Their hard work gives you the news you need to be informed. They design that ad that helps you grow your business and saves readers money. But we hope we also inspire and enrich your life with the content we deliver to your home Monday through Saturday. We help you celebrate your milestones with births, weddings, anniversaries and graduations. We share in some of the tragedies with fire, deaths, arrests, accidents or severe weather events. We report on your accomplishments in sports, academics and careers. We engage you in debates, web polls and elections. We take pride in what we do and strive to give you news you can trust. The Adirondack Daily Enterprise invites you to join us in discussing the issues, finding solutions, offering inspiring ideas that will lead to a great place to live, play and stay for centuries to come. Most of all, I need to give you a fair warning. Communities that have lost their hometown newspapers have seen their taxes increase, businesses decline and voter turnout diminish. However, you can help us avoid this from happening. You can keep the spirit of our communities strong by supporting this local hometown newspaper by subscribing or advertising. Please do so today, because I won’t be working here to see if your support has paid off for the 150th anniversary.
Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • A3
‘Cathy’s the one who’s kept it going strong’
Over 30 years at the helm, Publisher Cathy Moore has energized the ADE
By CHRIS KNIGHT Special to the Enterprise SARANAC LAKE — The first day after you get a big promotion at work is often filled with a kind of nervous excitement: getting settled into your new office, figuring out your new duties and responsibilities, meeting with key members of your team. Breaking up a fight in your office is usually not on the list, but that’s what happened to Cathy Moore on her first day after being promoted to publisher of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in 1989. “A local business person called me up and was angry about an editorial we had published,” Moore explained. “Apparently it was about a relative of his, and it struck a nerve, so I invited him down to talk about it with our editor. “At some point, he snapped and went to punch the editor. I grabbed his wrist. The editor leaned back and knocked into a bookshelf, which started to tip over. So I had one leg holding up the bookshelf, and I’m grabbing his wrist with my right hand. I said, ‘Sit down!’ “That was my first day. Later, I called up (former Enterprise publisher and owner) Bill Doolittle and asked, ‘Is this how it’s going to be?’” Playing the role of peacekeeper is just one of many hats Moore has had to wear during her long career at the helm of the only daily newspaper published in the Adirondacks. She’s been an Enterprise employee for more than 45 years, the last 30 as publisher. Next year, she’ll surpass John Ridenour as the longest-serving publisher in the newspaper’s 125-year history. It’s an amazing achievement in any business and in any location. It’s even more remarkable when you consider the challenges of running a small, daily newspaper in the rural Adirondacks, coupled with the major shifts the newspaper industry as a whole has faced in recent years. How has Moore done it? Enterprise Managing Editor Peter Crowley credited Moore’s longevity and success to the people skills and energy she brings to work every day. “She cares about people,” Crowley said. “That applies to staff as well as customers. In addressing problems, she really takes the time to talk to people and work it out. “The other thing is, her energy, her work ethic and her optimism pervade this building. The culture of the Enterprise during her time as publisher has been, jump in, bear down, work hard, and have confidence that it’s going to work out.” Accidental career Moore described her career in the newspaper industry as “accidental.” A native of Stony Brook, Long Island, she came to the Adirondacks in 1972 after her high school sweetheart (and later husband) Jack Moore was recruited to attend North Country Community College. One of her earliest memories of Saranac Lake, she said, was visiting a bar on Broadway where the Enterprise office is now located. “I stood right where my office is now, looking out the window,” Moore said. “It was starting to snow. I said, ‘I love this place; I never want to leave.’ Little did I know, about a year later I’d be working here at the Enterprise and never leave.” Moore enrolled at North Country
E NTERPRISE OWNERS AND PUBLISHERS 1895 to 1896 Carl D. Smith and Charles W. Lansing 1896 J.W. Ball (briefly)* 1896 to 1898 Allen I. Vosburgh and Carl D. Smith 1898 to 1906 Allen I. Vosburgh 1906 Harris and Dillenbeck ** George H. Foy ** 1906 to 1918 Kenneth W. Goldthwaite 1918 to 1949 John S. Ridenour Cathy Moore, publisher of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and Lake Placid News since 1989, stands in front of the newspapers’ Goss Community press, which was first installed in the building the same year she started working here, 1973. to study art. After graduating from NCCC in 1974, she needed more money to continue her education at Plattsburgh State University. The Enterprise was hiring in its circulation department, and she landed a part-time job. In her free time, when she wasn’t collecting change from carriers and stamping papers with the Addressograph machine, she would visit the advertising department and help draw ads. “She was so good at that, with her art background, so I said, ‘Why don’t you work for us full-time?’” Doolittle said. “Over time, we built up the ad department. She became the senior person there, and she started going out and making sales calls.’” In those days, there was a family atmosphere to working at the Enterprise, according to Jim Bishop, the paper’s longtime circulation manager, who had originally hired Moore. “We would get done Friday afternoon — this is before we had the Saturday paper — and we all went out for drinks together,” he said. “We used to have some big parties. The families got together. Cathy’s baby shower for her son Ryan, we had it right in the Enterprise, with a keg of beer.” Growing the business Moore became the paper’s ad department manager in 1978, the same year Doolittle sold the paper to Ogden Newspapers of Wheeling, West Virginia — although he stayed on as publisher for 11 more years. Around the same time, Moore took charge of the newspaper’s job printing accounts, growing what became a key part of the business. “We expanded the business, using our new offset presses, by printing weeklies, flyers and anything,” Doolittle said. “Cathy would get in her car and go out and sell the job printing in Plattsburgh or wherever. That was a way we were able to stabilize the paper as a business.” Moore created new tabloid publications and niche products, such as the Enterprise’s winter and summer guides, which brought in new revenue. One of its most successful and award-winning projects was the Daily Olympic Digest, a 30-page tabloid published every day during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake
Placid, sold separately from the newspaper. Moore also got involved in her community and in professional advertising organizations. She served on the Saranac Lake Area Chamber of Commerce board and as president of the Saranac Lake Business Association, among her many other civic involvements. ‘Natural choice’ When Doolittle decided to step down as publisher in 1989, there was no question in his mind about who should take over. “Cathy was the natural choice. She was the leader by then,” he said. “It wasn’t automatic, though. I had to talk with Ogden. They had some people from other papers who might be interested. But I said, ‘I think the right person is Cathy Moore,’ and they ultimately agreed.” “Everybody was happy it was someone who was already there, rather than somebody from the outside,” Bishop said. Moore said she became the first woman publisher in the Ogden chain. Although the Enterprise is not owned locally, she said Ogden has given her the support and freedom to run the paper like it’s her own. “I love this newspaper, and I love this community,” she said. “The best part about the job is you learn something new every day. There’s always something going on.” News and opinion Searches, fires, plane crashes, manhunts, murder cases, Adirondack Park Agency issues — Moore said the Enterprise has covered it all during her tenure. Being a small paper has its advantages, she said. “We can pivot quickly. We can adapt quickly,” she said. “Things happen, and we say, ‘We’ve got to cover that’ — not just breaking news but important community milestones and events. And no one covers the issues of the Adirondack Park like we do. I think that’s why we’ve been successful, as small as we are.” Unlike her predecessor, Moore didn’t have any experience as an editor or reporter before taking the publisher’s job. Crowley said that has led to a healthy friction between him and Moore at times.
(Provided photo — Howard Jennings)
“She comes from an advertising background, so I definitely see the need for someone to push back at her sometimes. And she understands where I’m coming from. And there’s also a need for somebody to kind of stick up for the public service aspect of the paper, which she believes in very strongly.” Moore, who does write an occasional editorial, says she often gets flak from people about the paper’s opinion pieces, but she has to remind readers that that’s the point. “That’s how the discussion starts, by taking a stance,” she said. “That’s how we work to find solutions as a community.”
Challenges During Moore’s first years at the Enterprise there were more businesses and a bigger population in the area. Since then, she has seen a shift in the local economy that has affected advertising in the paper. “There’s definitely been a change downtown from retail to more service industries,” she said. “We used to get full-page ads from Town and Country, Wilson’s, Altman’s — all those stores. Now our biggest advertisers are probably the health care industry and real estate.” The paper’s print circulation, which hovered close to 6,000 in the early 1990s, is now down to about 3,500. Moore is quick to point out, however, that the Enterprise has “twice as many readers as we ever have” because much of its content is available online. From 2015 to 2016, it was restricted to subscribers, but it’s once again free to read, although that is a financial challenge. “We have good journalists and a good staff, and they deserve to be paid,” Moore said. “I feel if we’re going to be sustainable, we’ve got to charge for our product.” There’s no doubt the Enterprise, like other small daily papers, has faced its share of pressures in recent years, Bishop said. “But Cathy has always been able to weather the good times and bad times with the economy,” he said. “She’s always trying to get more advertising, more outside work and create new inserts to help survive.” “We want to keep our presses going,” Moore said. “We continue to look for new revenue streams to
1949 to 1951 Fred Kury 1951 to 1953 Dean Carey 1953 to 1970 James Loeb and Roger W. Tubby 1970 to 1989 William M. Doolittle, owner from 1970 to 1978, publisher from 1970 to 1989 1978 to present Ogden Newspapers Inc., owner 1989 to present Catherine Moore, publisher *Sources: Essex County Republican, Plattsburgh Press ** Source: “Historical Sketches of Franklin County and Its Several Towns with Many Short Biographies,” by Frederick J. Seaver. No other information given.
grow. I always joke that we’ll sell hot dogs at the front desk if we need to.” Consistency Despite the challenges, Crowley said the Enterprise has held its own. It has the same number of reporters as it had 20 years ago and is offering the same amount of content, he said. “That consistency is really important from a customer standpoint and a community standpoint,” he said. “We’ve had consistency in a publisher, and a publisher who’s kept up our offerings and is always looking for new revenue.” “She’s done a terrific job, considering how difficult the situation is now,” Doolittle said. “(Many of) the smaller newspapers in the U.S. are now dead, and others are just hanging on. The Enterprise has found stability by diversifying. Cathy’s the one who’s kept it going strong for all those years.” Moore, 67, said she still enjoys every day as publisher of the Enterprise and wants to keep working, “if I can keep up with the changes.” Asked what keeps her going, she named the people she works with on a daily basis. “They’re the ones who keep me coming back,” she said. “I couldn’t do it without them. We’re all doing what we can to make it a better community. We have a sense of purpose, and that’s so important to me.”
Early editions are hard to find A4 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
Record of the community was destroyed in 1926 fire, 1953 housecleaning
By JAMES M. ODATO Special to the Enterprise SARANAC LAKE — The Adirondack Enterprise has rolled off a press in Saranac Lake every year since 1895. But the archive of the newspaper that has been documenting what Robert Lewis Stevenson called the “little Switzerland of the Adirondacks” for a century-and-a-quarter is full of holes. Some old editions are rarer than buffalo nickels or Indian head pennies. Bad luck and shortsighted management decisions combined for years of missing papers. As for the bad luck: A fire in the early morning hours of July 27, 1926, wiped out the Enterprise’s operation. As for lacking foresight: A couple of new owners in 1953 ordered some housecleaning in the circulation department and consigned decades of papers to the dump. Today, to find old copies of the Enterprise, it’s hit or miss. The most frequent hits are at the Adirondack Experience’s library at Blue Mountain Lake and at the Saranac Lake Free Library for editions before 1953. But don’t plan on a big selection for some periods. Even the strongest collections lack some years altogether, such as 1900. Scattered copies — perhaps no more than one day’s edition — exist for some years. From 1926, where you’ll find just one copy of the Enterprise online, until 1948, nothing is available for review on the NYS Historic Newspapers site. That site gets its material from the biggest repositories of Enterprises, and sometimes those collections don’t send everything they have for the webmasters to upload. Much is missing from 1895 to 1953. The fire Big gaps in the early history of the Enterprise came about because the home of the paper went up in smoke. According to accounts available from the historic newspaper site and from the Wead Library in Malone, the Harrietstown Town Hall caught fire early on July 27, 1926. A “conflagration” erupted, as the July 28, 1926, Malone Farmer reported. The town hall, a wood frame structure, was “practically destroyed,” the July 31 edition of the Adirondack News in St. Regis Falls reported. The Enterprise resided in the hall’s basement and first floor. The Farmer, the News, the Adirondack Record-Elizabethtown Post in AuSable Forks and the Malone Evening Telegram all had accounts about the blaze, noting the destruction of the Enterprise equipment and records, as well as the government documents in the town hall. Most of the accounts blame the fire on a person in the lockup at the town hall, some reporting him as a “drunken” man who set fire to his bunk. However, the Post said the fire “is believed” to have originated in the composing room of the Enterprise. The Evening Telegram allowed the Enterprise to set up shop in its Malone plant while a new plant was built in Saranac Lake. Enterprise Publisher John S. Ridenour accepted that invitation and didn’t miss an edition, even assembling a four-page Enterprise the afternoon
This four-page supplement on Saranac Lake history and culture was inserted inside the first-ever edition of the Adirondack Enterprise, published Feb. 21, 1895. The newspaper into which this was placed does not survive, like most early copies of the Enterprise, which began as a weekly.
of the fire. The Telegram account on the day of the fire stated that the Saranac Lake plant was ruined. That wiped out the copies of the Enterprise held by the paper from its earliest years. An Enterprise story in June 1965 about former owner Ridenour’s death noted that the Enterprise never missed an edition and printed from the Telegram from July through November 1926. Many of those editions are lost,
too. The Saranac Lake Free Library possesses two copies of the fourpage paper that the Enterprise staff put together in the hours after the fire. Unlike the broadsheets that came before and after, this paper is a tabloid, dated July 28, 1926, alerting readers that a temporary office was set up at 96 Main St. while a new plant was under construction at 72-76 Main St. “Valuable records of the Town of Harrietstown were entirely destroyed,
as was the only complete file in existence of The Enterprise, covering a period of 32 years or more.” An expansive editor’s note was printed in that tabloid: “With a newspaper to be gotten out today, and not so much as a piece of copy paper or lead pencil to be salvaged from the pile of smoldering ruins which remained of The Enterprise plant yesterday morning, we know that the people of Saranac Lake will be charitable in their judg-
ment of this first effort of our homeless and unequipped staff.” The writer thanked the publisher of the Lake Placid News for getting the edition printed. The News’ plant was used by the Enterprise the evening of July 27, the note stated, and the Telegram’s facility would be used going forward to produce the usual eightcolumn, eight-page paper delivered every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. (Continued on next page)
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Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • A5
Other Saranac Lake newspapers have come and gone
By RIP ALLEN (Editor’s note: Rip Allen, then a reporter for the Enterprise, researched and wrote this article for the Enterprise’s 75th anniversary special section published Nov. 14, 1969.) ——— This is the story of “The other newspapers.” Out of respect for the past we cannot really call them Brand X, although it is true that none of them was around for very long. Some of them tried to work up a viable Democratic opposition to the staunchly Republican Enterprise but with little apparent success. History has perhaps shown that the best way to defeat a Republican opponent is to buy him out. Saranac Lake has known seven newspapers, in the more or less full sense of the word. The first, The Adirondack Pioneer, you can read about it in another story. It was followed by The Enterprise, and later by the Saranac Lake News. Beginning publication around the turn of the century, The News, a Democratic weekly, rolled from the presses at 86 Broadway every Thursday and became the arch enemy of its Republican rival, The Enterprise. It opposed, for instance, virtually every move of second Enterprise publisher Isaiah Vosburgh. News publisher and editor Edward C. Krauss wrote on March 6, 1919 (Vosburgh by then out of newspapering and a public figure): “With his characteristic modesty in giving full share of credit to himself for what others have done, Isaiah Vosburgh, perennial candidate for village president, has an interview with himself in his favorite newspaper, in which he asserts that all the public improvements that have ever been made in Saranac Lake are directly due to himself.
1900-1919 were generous years for local journalism
“He adds the interesting information that so far as he is concerned he has no desire to continue as chief of police. As far as that particular matter is concerned, Mr. Vosburgh’s desire to step down and out from that office makes it unanimous, and it may be considered as disposed of.” Republican journalism was to be triumphant in that year, however, for The News was in trouble. For years it was published as a weekly, issuing daily a single sheet of Associated Press news, called The Item. On June 12, 1919, The Item was absorbed into The News to produce an enlarged daily with an AP column, but despite its reported popularity, The News failed later that same year and was taken over by The Enterprise, then with John Ridenour at the helm, on Sept. 27. Although they were not bonafide newspapers, it is fitting to mention at this chronological point Fuller’s Gleaner and The Adirondack News, both well known in their own right. Fuller’s Gleaner was a local curiosity first published in April, 1898, and sporadically issued after that. Its publisher and editor, Professor Fuller D.E., known as “The Duke,” was an early TB patient and is sentimentally recalled by those who knew him as a whacky fellow who used to go around dressed in an admiral’s uniform complete with sword and plumed hat. He entertained at boarding houses by singing and playing the violin. Apparently the news to be had from Fuller’s Gleaner consisted mainly of reports of his performances, though there were also nearly unintelligible editorials which the publishers of The Enterprise,
then Carl Smith and Vosburgh, termed “breezy.” Here’s part of one: “D.E. has the capability of becoming in time, as he is trying hard to get up in the world for a young fellow of a wide reputation, yet he is not convinced until he can see ahead for himself very fast for a little fellow. Even a gentleman remarked a few days ago in the editor’s hearing what a boy can do if he tries. “D.E. visited many homes with pleasure, and his calls were out of sight, and as to his paper it is to be blessed, as his heart and hands are all wrapped up unrer (sic) his idea of perseverance and having many talents he stands with such a reputation and respect of all who know him, or even heard of him ...” That’s “breezy?” The Adirondack News began publication in 1894, the same year as The Enterprise. It was affiliated with a resort chain. Edited by Seaver A. Miller, who was also to serve as town justice and village clerk for many years, this News, published by Frank G. Barry, really consisted of press releases from the large area hotels. The parent organization was called the News Series which included some half dozen papers from various resort areas. All the papers of the News Series were made available at large hotels from the Adirondacks to London and Berlin. Editor Miller, incidentally, also campaigned extensively to insert columns of Adirondack resort news in most of the larger newspapers of the United States. The Adirondack News, as such, was last published on Sept. 19, 1896. Back to the regular papers in the year 1900, The Franklin County
Forum, another fierce Democratic weekly, began to appear on Fridays. Published by the Forum Publishing Co. in the Harrietstown Town Hall with M.B. Murphy managing, The Forum was to run for at least six years, perhaps a bit longer. Very political, this second Democratic challenger to The Enterprise territory was a staunch Bryan supporter and violently anti-corporate monopoly. Editorials tended to be on subjects of national scope. The Forum published national and international news along with major local news on its front page and devoted the inside pages to area columns, more national news, features and short stories. For the most part it seems to have treated local subject matter as of secondary importance. About midway through 1900, there appeared still another paper, the formidable-looking, semiglossy Northern New Yorker. The New Yorker published six to eight pages weekly on Saturdays under the flag of the Riverside Publishing Co. in the Murray Building on Main Street. Its contents were exclusively local news and features, and through its editorial columns, editor Francis DeWitt (formerly publisher No. 3 of The Enterprise) led many a strong crusade into the jungles of local politics and civic affairs. But the Northern New Yorker lasted barely more than a year. The editorship fell to John J. Connors in the summer of 1906, but by the next year, the paper was out of business. The first ten years of the 20th Century were by far the most active years of newspapering in Saranac Lake. After the demise of The
Early editions are hard to find
(Continued from previous page)
“Humbly and on bended knee we pray that our readers and advertisers will be charitable and patient with us during our shortcomings,” the missive concluded. The cleanout More copies would be around if not for the men who took possession of the Enterprise in 1953, a pair of Truman administration associates from Washington, D.C., political jobs — Roger Tubby and James Loeb. The partners bought the paper, with little fanfare, and took it over in June of 1953. Surviving 1953 editions declare that the paper was “established in 1894,” indicating an incorporation that predated the first published Enterprise. Dean R. Carey didn’t even mention the sale in his final day of publishing the paper on May 29, 1953. But Tubby wrote in a June 3, 1953, edition that he and Loeb had acquired the paper and had settled on a new masthead that listed their names as well as the names of every member of the staff. In that masthead was the name of Howard Riley, of the “mechanical department.” Riley, now 89, would move from running a 90-plus-character Linotype machine into working in the circulation department. He later became a reporter and editor of the paper during more than two decades of full-time employment. He recalled what gentlemen Loeb and Tubby were, as well as intelligent and able leaders. But he couldn’t understand why they ordered the cleaning of a long room with metal shelves off the circulation department shortly after they arrived. Ridenour built the wing at the plant after he reopened in his own
‘They had two young men — kids or something — and they took piles of stuff and dumped them, and at the time they burned everything at the dump.’ Howard Riley
building on Main Street in Saranac Lake following the 1926 town hall fire. He made sure the circulation department was fireproof, according to Riley and to plans noted in an earlier Enterprise. “The archives were off that room,” said Riley. “They had two young men — kids or something — and they took piles of stuff and dumped them, and at the time they burned everything at the dump.” He said years and years of archives were thrown out. “Everybody wondered why some guys who were so smart ... would do that.” He said he thinks the cleanout happened on a weekend because the following week someone entered the archive for something and the stacks were gone. “Somebody said: ‘Oh, my God, look at this.’” In a commentary for the 75th anniversary of the newspaper on Nov. 14, 1969, an author with the initials JL (James Loeb) mentioned the missing record: “Enterprise history is not easy to come by because of two events: the fire which destroyed the old Town Hall back in 1926 and the ‘clean up’ campaign which, in 1953, destroyed the records that existed from 1926 to 1953.” JL did not elaborate. The Adirondack Experience, formerly known as the Adirondack Museum, subscribes to the Enterprise and keeps a running record. It has a $4,000 annual budget for microfilming its
newsprint collections, said Ivy Gocker, library director, and has been filming its oldest copies. The museum has agreed to send its microfilms to the NYS Historic Newspaper facility in Potsdam, which scans and uploads the material to the web. But the museum can only afford to pay for microfilming a portion of its holdings and has prioritized the oldest editions of six newspapers that cover the Adirondacks for the project: the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Boonville Herald, Tupper Lake Free Press, Lake George Mirror and Hamilton County Express. “We used to do the Lake Placid News,” Gocker said, and explained cutting that expense because the Enterprise covers the Lake Placid area. Even though they are not on the web, scattered editions from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s are in the collections of the village library and the Experience. Those copies may simply not have been microfilmed and sent to Potsdam. Gocker said the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake acquired some copies of a few old and lost editions over the years, likely through donations. “I’m guessing we don’t have a record of how those individual issues came in,” she said. Michele Tucker, director of the Saranac Lake Free Library’s collection, also is unsure how its old holdings
arrived. The earliest edition of those publicly available is a portion of the first Enterprise. It dates to Feb. 21, 1895, and is a copy of a supplement to that day’s paper. Very few editions from 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899 and 1902 are available, and not a page for several other early years. Microfilm copies of holdings from the Experience can be found at St. Lawrence University’s library, and a small collection of old Enterprises is at the New York State Library in Albany and at the Franklin County House of History in Malone, which has an 1898 copy that is brittle, said museum archivist Martha Gardner. The Essex County Historical Society (Adirondack History Museum) in Elizabethtown has hard copies of some early editions. The New York State Library has a few copies from the 1980s and early 1990s on microfilm. It possesses some print copies from 1925 and 1926, stored in a warehouse. It is much easier to find editions of newspapers in the 21st century, as many publications tend to place them online in archives of their own. Sometimes those websites are not fully maintained, which has been the case with the Enterprise. The NYS Historic Newspapers site lists all publicly available copies known and where they can be found. But if those newspapers cease to exist, there is no one left to maintain their own web archives, and those sites could disappear as quickly as the newspaper itself, said Gocker. That is why the New York Historic Newspaper Project is so important, she said. Chuck Henry, the director of the 15-year-old project, said his group posts editions of newspapers almost every day as it gets microfilm copies. More than 9 million
Saranac Lake News in 1916 no other paper was established until the 1930s, and that paper, The Saranac Lake Mirror, was really more of a local trade journal than a regular newspaper. The Mirror was first published by Oscar L. Dailey at the Bourne Print Shop, 68 Margaret. It was a six-page weekly claiming an early circulation over 2,000. Local news was largely confined to the front page where you could also find some chamber of commerce-type editorial comment. Inside was devoted to advertising and anecdote filler material. In about 1935, Leon O. Bourne took over as publisher, and the format took on even more of a trade look as strictly commercial local news items occupied most of the front page. Club notes replaced the anecdotes inside. But circulation began to slip, and The Mirror was out of business by the 1940s. On Dec. 5, 1947, the last newspaper to make a start in Saranac Lake appeared on the stands. This was the Adirondack Observer, a Thursday weekly published at 74 Broadway by Richard H. Dale and Bruce R. Henky. Claiming independence of political stance, the Observer nevertheless reached its zenith through its opposition to Henry Wallace. But by and large, it was devoted exclusively to local news and managed to uncover 14 pages of the same every week. The Observer was something of an experiment in that it was the first local paper to use off-set printing methods. The cost of offset turned out to be prohibitively expensive, however, and reportedly this was the main reason the last short-lived local paper bit the dust on June 18, 1948, barely more than six months after its inception.
pages of historic papers have been placed on the site from every county of New York. The Enterprise was one of the first newspapers posted. The partial edition of the 1895 Enterprise is not an original, but a copy of a page created by the Enterprise staff in 1994 for a special 100th anniversary section. No one seems to know where the copy came from, although private collectors possess Enterprises from years ago, according to the Library of Congress’ finding aid. The Enterprise staff has been providing copies of its paper to the statewide project for archiving, he said. Papers must grant specific authorization to post any editions after 1923 on the site because of copyright provisions, Henry said. Some newspapers won’t grant permission because they are trying to make money by charging viewers to see their archives, he said. Despite Tubby and Loeb’s housecleaning, a few 1953 Enterprises are around. One, from July 27, 1953, quotes Robert Lewis Stevenson as referring to Saranac Lake as “the little Switzerland of the Adirondacks.” That little village has supported its daily newspaper for a long time, although the record of what was reported in that publication about the comings and goings, the fires and rebuilding plans, the tax increases and arrests, are missing for larger chunks of its existence than some of its peers. “Our sense of history is something we compile from multiple sources, and local newspapers are an important source because they make it their job to chronicle what’s happening. If there are gaps in the Enterprise, that means you have to look at other sources. That job gets a little harder if the paper of record isn’t there,” said the Experience’s Gocker.
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A6 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
Fit to print
Pressman Jesse Phelan looks over a copy of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise’s North Country Living section on Sept. 26. By ELIZABETH IZZO Staff Writer SARANAC LAKE — A bell sounded through the press room. Surrounded by machinery and buckets of ink, Pressman Jesse Phelan pushed a button the size of a thumb, and with a loud, rumbling whirr the Adirondack Daily Enterprise’s press churned to life, filling the air previously occupied by the sound of quips between co-workers and rock music from a nearby radio. Perfectly folded newspaper sections, one by one, filed out of the machine. The process of turning a blank roll of newsprint into a copy of the Enterprise is lengthy. Like the machine that physically prints the newspaper, there are countless moving parts — some human, some not — that work in tandem to produce what readers ultimately pick up every day, six days a week. Producing that product ends here, in the back of the Enterprise offices on Broadway. The Enterprise uses a Goss Community press to print its newspapers. Its core units were installed here in 1973, and they weren’t new then, according to Publisher Catherine Moore. Before that, the Enterprise had used the same press since 1926. In fact, it’s had only three presses in the last century and possibly no more than four ever. The installation of this web-fed offset press 46 years ago marked the end of an era of newspaper production. Up until then, the newspaper was printed with hot lead set on linotype machines, an intricate process that involved thousands of custom-made lead pieces set in the image of each page. Hot metal typesetting was difficult to execute in the rural Adirondacks, where utilities were, and still are, somewhat unreliable. Jim Bishop, who has worked at the Enterprise in various roles since the 1950s, said if the power went out at the Enterprise — which it often did, back then — the hot lead would cool and the crew would need to stop the production process and wait until the lead could be melted again. The offset press was a gamechanger. Past presses It’s unclear what kind of press churned out the earliest copies of
Rick Burman has been the Enterprise press foreman since 1985.
the Enterprise in the late 1800s, but a Miehle press printed the Enterprise in 1906 when Kenneth Ward Goldthwaite purchased the newspaper for $1,500. It had the capacity to print four pages, on one side of the newsprint, at a rate of 1,500 to 2,000 copies per hour. After one side of the pages were printed, the forms were changed and the newsprint flipped over and run through again. In the best of conditions, that press couldn’t print 5,000 copies of a 16-page paper in fewer than eight hours — and that’s before the process of folding the papers began. When the Enterprise’s circulation blossomed to more than 5,000 subscribers, sometime before 1918, Goldthwaite decided to invest in a Goss Comet press. The installation of that machine caused a stir in town, in no small part because the man contracted to do the work, Joseph LeBeaux, used dynamite to clear a pit beneath the press where pressmen could sit and feed newsprint into the machine. In a time when the Enterprise’s offices were in the Harrietstown Town Hall, with the press room below jail, LeBeaux reportedly didn’t tell anyone ahead of time
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that he was going to set off the dynamite. After the town hall was gutted by fire in 1926 and the Enterprise offices moved up the street to 76 (now 77) Main St., then-Publisher John Ridenour bought a Wood Beeline press, a machine designed specifically for small daily newspapers. Because it was so expensive to manufacture, only two were ever made. One was sold to a newspaper in Jerusalem, and the other was purchased by the Enterprise.
The Goss Community press Rick Burman, the Enterprise press foreman since 1985, said Goss was the main newspaper press maker of the 1970s and the Community model was sized for small operations. The Enterprise press had three units in 1973, and then in the late 1970s, before the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, a fourth unit was added for spot single color. That allowed for the pages to be laid with a single color, perhaps green or orange, other than black and white. In 1993, the paper started printing in full color, although not every day. It was extremely labor-inten-
Learning the craft Learning how to run this machine takes years. In the past,
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sive, Burman said, because the same press units were being used for black and color ink, so they had to be scrubbed clean before and after each color run. That extra cleaning ended in 1995, when the paper added two more press units, for a total of six, plus a bigger page folder. At its peak, the press crew had one part-time and five full-time members. They might have spent two hours setting the four colors together to make plates and then 20 minutes for a press run, Burman said. The addition of a computerto-plate machine in 2009 sped up the process and made plate images much more accurate, but it also led to the loss of a couple of pressmen who weren’t needed anymore. Still, this press is an old machine, with relatively few updates. How does the crew keep it printing sharp color newspapers on a daily basis? “Grease, oil, many, many adjustments a week, just because it’s old,” Burman said. “Many hours a week — I couldn’t even tell you.”
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universities around the country offered classes to learn the trade, but many of those programs have disappeared. Now, it’s a craft passed down from generation to generation. Burman started at the Enterprise in 1973 as a paperboy. He was hired by Armand Amell, a former production manager. Burman joined the press crew in 1981. Four years later, he was named press foreman, a position he’s held ever since. When he started in the press room, he worked under Don Renadette for a year. He learned the ropes from Renadette, through a lot of trial and error, and through a once-a-year visit from a Goss representative when the press was not so old. Phelan has worked at the Enterprise for the last 11 years. Burman hired him. “I’ve been learning this for the better part of half my life,” he said. Phelan was homeschooled. His mother worked in the mailroom at the Enterprise while he was growing up. When he was a teenager, Cathy Moore, the Enterprise’s publisher, asked his mother if he’d like a job here. He accepted the position. A few years later, Burman asked if he’d like a job in the pressroom. Running the presses isn’t for everyone. It requires someone with a mind for mechanics. “When I was 2 years old, I got a hold of some screwdrivers and took the hinges off a door,” Phelan said, bending a page plate with the pull of a lever. “To be in a job like this, you have to like it.” ‘That’s a run’ The Enterprise’s editors, along with the newspaper’s production crew, piece together a digital version of the newspaper. They lay out each page using Quark Xpress publishing software. Until this year, the newspaper was delivered mid-day and this process ended in the early morning. That changed in April, when the Enterprise became a morning paper. Now it’s printed late at night. After each page is proofread, it’s sent as a PDF digital file to the computer-to-plate machine that processes it like film on a piece of (Continued on Page A7)
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Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • A7
(Editor’s note: This was originally published on Nov. 20, 2010, as one of Howard Riley’s weekly local history columns.) ——— By HOWARD RILEY Columnist hose were the dreaded words that might echo up through the labyrinth that made up the many floors of the old Enterprise building at 76 Main St. ... and always on a dark and stormy afternoon in January ... and it was always 3 or later in the afternoon ... and there were always 26 newsboys crowded in the small room in the circulation department, raising hell, waiting for the newspapers so they could start their routes ... and the drivers would be waiting for the newspapers to be delivered to Tupper Lake, Lake Placid and the “tube” routes that ran helter-skelter out into the rural areas. The “web” was the newsprint that ran off 400-pound spools into the old rotary press in the bowels of the Enterprise. When the room would get too dry and the newsprint too brittle, that paper would snap like a firecracker after the press started — maybe after a few papers were printed or maybe after a thousand — and then someone had to decide who would get the first pick of those papers (usually the tube route driver) as the pressman, with a helper, would begin the intricate job of rewinding the newsprint into the press.
(all cut by hand from scrap newsprint) is placed onto the inked galley. A roller operated by an electric foot pedal makes the proof, which is then wrapped around the original copy and sent up to the newsroom in the basket for proofreading. The corrections come back, the proof is hung on a hook for the operator who set the type, he or she makes the corrections and places them on a counter, and a printer places them in the proper galley for the corrections to be made before the type (story) goes into the chase.
T
Hot type Here is the story of getting out the newspaper in the days of hot type. Everything was cast in lead. Every line of type in every column were letters cast on top of a lead “slug” that came out of a Linotype machine. Those lines, hundreds to a story, depending on the length of the story, were locked into a steel chase (mounted on a heavy steel table) with all the other stories that would make up the page, and that
The Enterprise used this Wood Bee-Line press from 1926 to 1973. The Wood company only ever made two of this model; the other was sent to Jerusalem. page would eventually be cast into a curved lead “plate” (that weighed about 30 pounds), which would be locked into that big press along with the other seven or 11 pages that would become that day’s Enterprise. The Linotype The newsroom opens at 8 a.m. A reporter writes his story on a typewriter about the village board meeting the night before (with the margins set correctly, 250 words to a page) and sends it down to the composing room. Sending, mind you, by opening a little door cut into the wall near the editor’s desk, where there is a basket mounted on a pulley, placing that story carefully into the basket, pulling down the cable sending the basket down the track to the composing room and
then banging on a pipe to let the people know in the noisy composing room that the story was in the basket. Sounds complicated, but it took only a few seconds. A Linotype operator would have to retype the story on a 99-key keyboard. (The caps were a separate keyboard.) When the operator pressed a key, a brass matrix — say an “e” — would be released from a “magazine” built at an angle above the keyboard. That “e,” along with the other letters to make up the word, would fall onto a pulley belt that would drop the letter upright into the space in front of the operator. When that line was full (12 ems wide), the operator pressed a big handle on the right of the keyboard that sent the line onto a higher transfer track and then into a locked mold that cast that
(Enterprise file photo)
line into lead. A big arm would then come down, pick up all the matrices and lift them to the top of the magazine; then a round steel worm would drop each letter back into its correct channel, guided by notches cut into the top of each matrix. That keyboard had a delicate touch: An instant too long touching the key, and there would be three “e”s, not one, or if the mold did not lock tightly, the operator might get a “squirt,” which would send a speck of hot lead onto the left arm. That is one line in the story completed. Getting a proof The operator slides the completed story of lines (“slugs”) into a steel galley that is placed on a proof press inked by a small hand roller. A long piece of proof paper
A full page Let’s look at a page one, the last page to be made up. The editor then comes down to the composing room with a layout (the only page to have a layout) to oversee things with the printer as he puts the page together. When the headlines and stories are all locked in, the printer scans the page to be sure the corrections are all made and proper headlines are over the proper stories. Remember, we are reading this page upside down and backward, which eventually we could do just as fast as anyone reading that page in the newspaper. This page was rolled over to a steel mat press. There it was slid in and covered with a thick, soft fiber mat and put through the press. That page was sent down a shaft, just the right size and built for that purpose, to the press room, where the page was cast into the lead plate that would go onto the press. When all eight or 12 pages (we could not print 10 pages) were cast with no problems, we could “tear down” the pages to get ready for the next day. That was the way we got out the Enterprise for the 23 years that I worked there, leaving shortly after the paper went offset. Just multiply the above tasks a thousand times for the New York Times, because it took the same process to publish the Times as it did the Enterprise.
Pressman Jesse Phelan takes a closer look at the ink alignment on a copy of the Enterprise’s North Country Living section.
Fit to print
(Continued from Page A6)
aluminum and puts it through a chemical bath. The end result is called a “plate,” a piece of thin metal that looks similar to a film negative. Four plates are created for each color page of the newspaper: in cyan (blue), magenta, yellow and black. A black-and-white page just gets a single plate. Each plate is manually bent at the edges, a process that lets the pressmen affix them to cylinders in the press. The press, while interconnected, has four different color sections. Plates of each page are placed on large cylinders in each section. The first section is where cyan ink is pressed onto the pages, magenta ink at the next, then yellow and then black. Rolls of paper the size of hay bales are attached to the bottom of the press and fed through
each section. The aluminum plates are pressed with ink and water. The paper is imprinted, cut and automatically folded. It’s not as simple as pressing a button and watching the press run. The different ink colors have to be manually aligned, and the amount of ink that’s dispensed has to be adjusted by hand. On one night in late September, the press crew was printing the Enterprise’s North Country Living, a section inserted into the weekend edition. That cover story was by Outdoors Writer Justin A. Levine, about the nuances behind a proposal to implement a hiker permit system in the High Peaks Wilderness. Getting the color right takes a few tries. That night, Phelan printed a few dozen papers at a time. He plucked one from the lineup each time and looked closely at the ink on the pages.
Copies of the Enterprise’s North Country Living section roll out of the press on a conveyor belt after they’re automatically folded by the machine. Phelan pointed to a part of the newspaper where the black ink was heavier, distorting a gray line at the bottom of the page. He pointed to a photo where there was too much yellow ink. Then he walked quickly from section to section, newspaper in hand, and manually adjusted small keys in the press that control the flow of ink. At one point, he used a small rubber hammer, then his hand, to hit a metal prong on the press to adjust the orientation. The process looks random, but takes some finesse. For Phelan, it was almost automatic. “It’s not thinking memory anymore,” he said. “It’s all muscle memory.”
After a few rounds of this adjustment, the presses were all ready to go. Phelan pressed the button again, a bell rang, and the machine whirred to life. He pointed to a meter that showed him how fast the press was going. “PAPERS THOUSANDS PER HOUR.” Phelan said he tries to keep the pace at 12,000. Within moments, newsprint was flying through the machine. Folded sections flowed out of the press on a conveyor belt. Phelan put on protective headphones and looked to his right, where a machine showed him the number of papers that had been printed so far.
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This crew prints more than just the Enterprise. They also print the Lake Placid News, which this company owns, and other companies’ papers such as the Tupper Lake Free Press, Gouverneur TribunePress, North Country This Week, Lake Champlain Weekly and the Lake George Mirror. The length of the run is different for each newspaper. Altogether, a press run for one day’s Enterprise takes around 45 minutes. Phelan looked to a reporter and shouted over the din of the presses. “And that’s a run,” he said. Managing Editor Peter Crowley contributed to this report.
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A8 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
The Enterprise’s visual record
The moment a boy stood on his tippy-toes to see how his mom voted was caught forever by former Enterprise staff photographer Michele Buck, whose job was to tell stories with images.
(Enterprise photo — Michele Buck)
By AARON CERBONE Staff Writer They say a photo is worth a thousand words, but what are words worth? Not much, by themselves. Stories. Now there’s where the worth is. For years at the Enterprise, photographers, reporters and editors have been trying to tell interesting stories through images. Some of these images become burned in the minds of readers: popular businesses up in flames, local Olympians crossing the finish line, famous politicians visiting town. Some are lost to time, just one of hundreds like them: Winter Carnival Ice Palaces, moose sightings, smiling children watching parades. Photos capture moments, just moments. A bit of the truth, a glimpse of emotion. Police officers investigating a death, frozen; plane, train and automobile accidents, brought to a stop; lives being ruined or saved are caught forever. A supplement from the first Enterprise, all that remains of that 1895 inaugural issue, focuses on the history of Saranac Lake. The page is chock-full of photos showing off churches, the town hall and a panorama of the Saranac Lake skyline. Early on, most front page photos in the paper were portraits, showing the faces of the important people in a story. Most were not local; they depicted, chiefly, politicians and criminals. Some photos were of important events. As the decades went by and the technology became more widely available, local images became more common in the paper. One photographer, Kathleen Bigrow, shot the town of Tupper Lake for 50 years, on and off for the Enterprise and the Tupper Lake Free Press.
When Kathleen Bigrow was photographing Tupper Lake she covered all sorts of events, as big as a visit from Bobby Kennedy to Big Tupper Ski Area (left) and as small as a baby deer (above). (Enterprise photos — Kathleen Bigrow)
She was known as a nononsense but kind shoeleather photojournalist who was there to capture Tupper Lake, no matter the occasion. She was there for construction and destruction, for the mundane and the extraordinary, for the candid and the posed. Bigrow’s library gives a detailed impression of the time she lived in. People feed bears from wood-paneled hatch-backs, bartenders smoke while chatting with patrons, and crews of girls ride slim motorbikes through the streets without helmets. She did not discriminate between the young and the old. Future mayor Mark Arsenault, then only 5 years old, sits on the steps of the school on the first day of school with a large book and his dog Prince. Teens piled on a snowmobile smile and fix their hair. Old-timers sit on the side of the road and fish. Bigrow photographed Little League baseball teams and Bobby Kennedy skiing at Big Tupper with the same
urgency. Being this thorough took guts. When she didn’t own a car she walked anywhere to get a photo, no matter the weather. She put herself in danger to get the shot, even to the point where she was caught in a tackle at a Tupper Lake-Carthage football game in the 1980s. It paid off. Her photos are now being catalogued and displayed at the Tupper Arts Center by Jim Lanthier, a photographer himself, who says he finds great inspiration from Bigrow. Sifting through the thou-
sands of photos, one thing stands out: the faces. Bigrow captured faces, smiling while at play, focused while at work and facing Bigrow, always. No easy task Putting these photos in the paper was no easy task, though. Howard Riley, who worked many jobs at the Enterprise in the 1950s and ‘60s, can explain some of the multi-step process. The crown jewel was the Scan-AGraver, a long machine that (Continued on Page A9)
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combined electronics, optics and mechanics to convert each photograph into an engraving on a plastic plate that could then be used on a press. “I can’t tell you how hard it was to get a photo in the paper then,” Riley said. “I can’t get more technical as I have no friggin’ idea how it worked.” Photos had to be developed in a darkroom, converted via Scan-AGraver and then placed on a page, which would then be prepared for production. Riley said though the art and excitement of developing film has been lost, the change to digital photography has been a good thing for the paper. “I think (digital) has totally changed the look of the newspaper for the good,” Riley said. “The way we used to have to wait, if we could get a couple pictures in every day, that would be a big deal.” He said when he started at the paper, no one thought of photographing every moment they saw. “I went to cover so many things and never had a picture,” Riley said. He said aerial photos of Saranac Lake date back to the 1920s and ‘30s, and are invaluable because of their scarcity. “I think that pictures then ... had a lot more value to them because they were more rare,” Riley said. “I realize now how valuable those photos are that were taken back then.” Fake photos Riley worked with the photographer Bill McLaughlin, who documented 20 years of local history and, on occasion, fiction. Like Bigrow for Tupper Lake, Riley said McLaughlin was at just about every accident, fire and bobsledding event in Saranac Lake and Lake Placid. McLaughlin was a troublemaker, though, and used his position at the paper to have fun. While most of his photography was straightforward photojournalism, some images were less than factual — pranks and hoaxes he pulled on the public. Riley said McLaughlin kept his car stocked with props, ready for when inspiration for a stunt would strike. Sometimes his inspiration was desperation. If he arrived to bike crash scene late, he had a mangled bicycle in his trunk he would throw in a ditch and snap a picture of. He also employed darkroom editing tricks as a predecessor to Photoshop, enlarging woodpeckers to unearthly sizes or putting someone’s head on someone else’s body. His biggest hoax came in 1958. The front page led with a story about a fire ball over the Adirondacks that experts from Clarkson and Cornell agreed was a meteor. Next to it was a photo of local police encountering a small humanoid wearing a space helmet with the accompanying headline: “Is This Man From Outer Space Or Just Another Mental Case?” The late 1950s were a hotbed for alien sightings, with the hype around Area 51 sparking sightings all across the world. This photo stirred those coals, with a curiously short figure wearing alien-like gadgets, or at least what “alienlike” looked like in 1958. It was actually metal wires attached to a bobsledding helmet and the kid wearing it was police officer Chuck Pandolph’s son, Chuck Jr. The photo wasn’t manipulated in the darkroom, but it was staged. Compelling imagery Michele Buck’s mind is filled with images. So are the walls of her apartment. Since starting work in a photo lab at 16 years old, she has been working with images, and from 2001 to 2003 she was in charge of the imagery of the Enterprise. She was the paper’s last staff photographer. Buck was never formally educated in photography, but she had been taking wedding and nature photography for a little while before she started at the Enterprise as a typesetter. She actually turned down the photographer position initially, cit-
Enterprise photographer Rob Fountain mixes chemicals in the newspaper’s darkroom sometime in the 1990s.
(Enterprise file photo)
Michele Buck stands nearly waist-deep in Raquette Pond in Tupper Lake as Tinkids competitors start the swimming leg of the competition.
Kathleen Bigrow was Tupper Lake’s most active, attentive and aggressive photographer for 50 years, some of which she spent shooting film for the Enterprise. ing the editorial department as being too “intense.” (She had once seen an editor throw “something” across the newsroom.) But while the paper tried to hire a long-term photographer, “I agreed to keep the position warm,” Buck said. “I got suckered.” Sixteen years later, though, she says it is still her favorite job she’s ever worked. “The things I got to cover for a small-town newspaper were just incredible,” Buck said. Buck was responsible for getting one or two front page photos and one page 3 photo every day. She also was responsible for editing and archiving every photo in the paper, except sports. “It was my job to make the imagery in the newspaper interesting,” Buck said. This meant every day she was going to interesting places, seeking out interesting people or finding interesting ways to shoot mundane
(Photo provided)
scenes. She looked for newsworthy photos but said that in a small town “newsworthy” becomes a gray area. Eventually, her job description changed a bit as a new editor had her work with reporters taking photos for their stories, too. Reporters taking their own photos had long been part of the Enterprise newsroom’s culture.
Stories and ethics Voting photos are usually dull. Buck broke the standard mold, telling a story below the voting booth curtain. Three pairs of legs stick out below the curtain while a stuffed animal waits patiently on the floor outside. On the left is a tiny pair of sneakers on their tiptoes, curious to see how their mom voted. “I have to give Ned P. Rauch and Peter Crowley a lot of credit,” Buck said. “I learned a lot from them, and the ethics of journalism also.” She looked for angles no one else
would get. She recalled being part of a gaggle of reporters following then-president George W. Bush on an Earth Day hike through the AuSable River valley in Wilmington in 2002. She got in low and close to get an interesting angle and felt a heavy hand land on her back. Secret Service? No, it was another reporter gruffly saying “Get back here with the rest of us.” “I did what it took to get the photo,” Buck said. She said that day, listening to the president talk and joke around with what she referred to as the “peanut gallery” of Washington reporters, was one of the most memorable in her career. “I don’t care what you think of George W. Bush. I got to hike with the president,” Buck said. Buck said people loved to see her, and she could get access anywhere. She was close enough with the family of Olympic speedskater Jack Shea to get an iconic photo from his funeral in Lake Placid. As the hearse drove around the speedskating oval where he had won two gold medals at the 1932 Winter Olympics, she stood behind the family and captured his grandson, Jim Shea Jr. raising his fists to celebrate his grandfather’s final lap. Buck said her passion for the job pushed her to do hard things she wouldn’t have done otherwise. She recalls a time she took photos of a home that burned. A boy had died in the fire, and she met the father at the scene. Buck said she felt his tragedy. She told him she had to take photos of the house. Looking back, she wonders if he was too shocked to be insulted, or maybe he was an empathetic per-
(Enterprise photo — Colin Surprenant)
son, too. “I was young and bold,” she said. Buck said she did not want to do harm. She recalls the time she learned the phrase, “A fed duck is a dead duck.” “I was desperate for a photo,” Buck said. “Some people were feeding some ducks; that’s a photo for me, great.” She was new to the area. The next day someone wrote an aggressive letter to the editor. “I was crushed,” Buck said. “I didn’t mean to insult or cause harm.” There are pros and cons to being well-known. Buck said when her position was eliminated in 2003, she was hurt and upset. She loved her job as the curator of the Enterprise’s visual record, and she loved the people she worked with. “It’s a family that never goes away,” Buck said. “That newsroom is one of the most dysfunctional families ever.” Eventually, she said, she adjusted to the change. She quickly grabbed a photography job with an office high up on Whiteface. She slowly gained her privacy back and said she had a new appreciation for anonymity. Buck said shooting for the paper changed how she shot weddings, nature and her own life. “My personal photography definitely picked up a very photojournalistic style,” Buck said. “That photojournalist that found me, stayed in me.” Still, today, Enterprise reporters take photos for their own stories, capturing the images they witness and using those pictures to help to tell stories, 1,000 words at a time.
Advertising is a two-way street A10 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
By KEVIN SHEA Staff Writer SARANAC LAKE — Susan Moore sits in the conference room at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. Less than 20 years before, this room housed a big camera that took pictures of each page, part of the process of making plates for the press. Newspaper technology has changed since then, but her job has changed relatively little. It is no secret that newspapers are challenged by the growth of online markets. But the advance in technology has brought advantages, too. Susan, an advertising representative, used to have to cut and lay out individual advertisements on pages. When she started in 1989, part of her job was to lay out the ads in the Lake Placid News. The ads had to be cut and waxed to lay on the page. Then news copy followed. The page would be suctioned so there were no bubbles. With globs of hot wax, the page would be put through a roller. The big camera would take a picture of the page, a machine would translate that full-size film negative’s image onto an aluminum plate, and that plate would be put on the press. Eventually you would have a newspaper. The process was complicated, time-consuming and occupied more staff and office space than the digital process does. Most of that is done on computers now, and that has saved time. “It’s a quicker turnaround to do both the layout and the sales, compared to the old days where you needed a whole department to do the ad,” Enterprise Publisher Cathy Moore said. It took even longer because you had to create the advertisements, check with the business owner by delivering the draft of the ad by hand, and then return back to make corrections or get the page made. Now staff shoots pictures and words over tens or perhaps hundreds of miles through cyberspace. It’s faster, easier and lets advertisement representatives like Susan, Carol Swirsky and Lindsay Munn spend more time doing their main job. What an ad rep does is not altogether different than a reporter. “I listen — very important in advertising, listening to your customer,” Susan said. “Listen, listen, listen. Don’t just go in and say, ‘Do you want to buy an ad? Do you want to buy an ad?’ Listen to what they have to say.” Susan said quite often when she goes in to talk to one of her customers, she sits down with them and asks what’s going on. She hears stories that she knows her customers don’t want to leave the room, and they don’t. Susan’s job is understanding and working with an individual to come to an agreement that benefits both parties. “It’s not something that you tell other people,” Susan said. “They just had to get
Adirondack Daily Enterprise advertising representative Susan Moore talks on the phone with a customer.
(Enterprise photos — Kevin Shea)
A Budweiser advertisement in a 1910 copy of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.
An advertisement for Disney’s “The Incredible Journey” is shown from a copy of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise from 1963. something off their chest, and I seem to be that person.” Some days Susan would walk into people’s offices. Scowls and frowns would cloud their faces, but Susan wouldn’t be discouraged. “They’d be grumpy as heck, and I would sit down,” Susan said. “(I’d ask) ‘What’s going on today?’ and within five minutes that person is smiling, buying an ad, and we’re going over it.” She said it goes both ways. “And if I need a pick-meup I would go to one of my customers that’s right around here, and in two minutes he’s got me smiling and laughing,” Susan said. “Yeah, it’s a two-way street. You do for them, and they do for you.” She isn’t worried about the Enterprise. She said it’s been around for 125 years and will be around for a lot longer. Swirsky says that without newspapers chroni-
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cling facts, people and happenings, these would be lost with time. If ever the Enterprise became less frequent than daily, people might miss events such as funerals. Susan also finds that possibility unlikely. But the newspaper industry is constantly changing, and recently not for the better. According to a Pew Research Center analysis of year-end SEC filings of publicly traded newspaper companies (the Enterprise’s parent company, Ogden Newspapers, is not publicly traded), the revenue from advertising in just the past 10 years has plummeted. Some local papers around the country have closed or limited the amount of days they go to print. “The change seen in advertising is the change we see in the downtown landscape,” Cathy Moore said. “In the ’70s we had more
retailers: Altman’s, Wilson’s, Fair Store, Town and Country, National Army store, etc. With the shift to big-box stores, malls and now online shopping, they have disappeared.” “Big-box stores replacing mom-and-pop, small-town businesses, it would destroy the newspaper,” Susan Moore said. Swirsky and Susan Moore have both been in advertising, in one form or another, for around 30 years. They’ve seen the trends. Swirsky said she’s seen fewer ads sold to car dealerships and retail stores. Health care, on the other hand, has been an upward trend. “Now the largest category is not retail but health care,” Cathy said. “It has grown, with baby boomers seeking medical services and more preventative services are now available.” Some businesses are looking for cheaper ways to advertise than with print
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newspapers. Store owners have also jumped onto Facebook as a means to promote. Ed Weibrecht, co-owner of the Mirror Lake Inn with his wife Lisa, said local advertising is valuable up north. “The Lake Placid region is unique from an advertising standpoint because, yes, people reach for their phones immediately to find out what’s happening,” he said. “Most of our bookings come from mobile devices, but around here, we find that the printed newspaper is much anticipated each day and each week. So we can’t ignore that fact.” He said he’s continued to advertise with the paper because it helps his hotel connect with locals. “Whether it’s a break from their normal routines at home, or a desire to take spouses and family out for lunch or dinner, it’s always been important to us to appeal to local consumers,”
he said. “We feel as if we’re a part of the Adirondack lifestyle, and so we’ve used local advertising to make the North Country aware of that.” Susan Moore sees advertising with the local paper as beneficial to local businesses as it is to the paper. Each supports the other, working in a symbiotic relationship that keeps the other alive and operating. Susan hopes it continues. Her job depends on it, and she loves her job. Being sick or injured and unable to work is never pleasant. She wants to get up and work with the community. “I literally look at the doctor and say, ‘I can go back to work, right?’” Susan said, widening her eyes and nodding, expressing the forceful tone she uses on her doctor. “They look at me, and I’m like, ‘I need to work,’ because I’m dealing with people. I like dealing with people. I like the pressure.”
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Editors keep newsroom in line Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • A11
By ELIZABETH IZZO Staff Writer SARANAC LAKE — Two men were dead, and the deadline for the next day’s print edition of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise was fast approaching. With the final stroke of a period key, Staff Writer Aaron Cerbone printed off two breaking news stories and walked across the newsroom. The managing editor was expecting him, red pen in hand. Peter Crowley, 44, grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. He has a slim frame and a head of neat, curly brown hair. He radiates a frenetic energy that matches the fastpaced atmosphere of the newsroom. He sits, stands and walks quickly from one reporter’s desk to another, talking and answering questions as he goes. Reporters at the Enterprise come and go. Some move on to larger newspapers, like Christopher Mele, who reported here in the 1980s and is now an editor at the New York Times. Others choose to leave journalism, opting to enter public relations or another profession. While countless reporters have cycled through the newsroom throughout the Enterprise’s 125 years, far fewer have filled the managing editor role. The job isn’t easy. As managing editor, Crowley fields phone calls from Enterprise readers. He answers questions from both residents and reporters. He dispatches reporters to cover breaking news, and he reins them in whenever they’re stuck in the weeds and lose sight of the story. All the while, he types out the beginnings of the next day’s editorial. He sifts through hundreds of emails and letters. He follows up with funeral homes when an obituary is submitted with missing information, pulls together event listings for the calendar and pieces together dean’s list and honor roll entries. He lays out pages for the next edition of the newspaper. He brings a red pen to reporters’ stories. Sometimes, he does all of this while writing his own stories, too. All the while, interruptions arise like a staccato drumbeat. But after 20 years in the newspaper business and 15 here in this role, he’s become a conductor. “The key is to like what you’re doing,” Crowley said. Getting the facts out there On one Monday night late last month, Cerbone was working on two breaking news stories. One provided details about the death of a Keene Valley man who police say drowned in Lake Colby after being discharged from Adirondack Medical Center across the street. Another outlined the little authorities were willing to share at the time about someone found dead in Lower Saranac Lake. The quick slap of a page plate on its way to press was heard in the next room. The clock was ticking. “This is so sad,” Crowley said, leaning his chin against his hand as he read the first draft of one of Cerbone’s stories. This type of story is never simple. Information becomes available piecemeal from multiple different sources, and the choice of words to convey what’s known and what’s not is crucial. Crowley asks targeted questions to make sure the reporter has it right. “That’s ready to go?” he asked of the story about the Lower Saranac Lake death. “State Police said he drowned?” “‘Apparently drowned,’” Cerbone read from the State Police
The
Current Enterprise Managing Editor Peter Crowley works at his desk as deadline approaches. press release. “They have not confirmed that yet.” Crowley reread a part of the story back to the reporter, typing as he edited the story on the page. He changed “apparently drowned” to “was found dead” since no autopsy had yet been done to confirm the cause of death. Sometimes, edits go beyond grammar and syntax. In the span of one day, managing editors make countless decisions about news coverage. They gauge how soundly a story is reported. They make a judgment call on how important a story is and where to place it in the newspaper. “It’s sad. It’s terrible,” Crowley said again, frowning at his computer screen. A few minutes later, both stories were published online. Readers started posting condolences for the families within moments. Reporting on the deaths of local people is important in part because it cuts down on speculation and rumors that can fester when the facts aren’t out there, Crowley said. It’s also important because it enables the community to offer support for the families left behind. “You can’t mourn if you don’t know,” he said. “You have to know more than just the facts of the death. You need to know about a person’s life, and that takes extra work and reporting. “You’re trying to inform people not just of a death but a life, and the human aspects of other people involved. Those are the stories. They’re real.” Managing the newsroom Crowley juggled putting out Tuesday’s paper with a spate of newsroom changes. A new news editor, Steve Miller, had just started work a few days prior. He
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replaced Brittany Proulx, who served as news editor for more than 11 years. The Enterprise’s Saranac Lake reporter was leaving for another position elsewhere, and a new reporter was set to take his place on Wednesday. Being a managing editor also means hiring and training new recruits. In the news business, there is no downtime for training. History never stops unraveling, and the paper doesn’t take a day off just because it’s short-staffed. Managing editors have to find a balance. The Enterprise has a long history of fostering the growth of young reporters. Evelyn Outcalt, the Enterprise’s first and only female managing editor, took that part of the job seriously. She worked at the newspaper for 20 years, mostly in the 1960s and ‘70s, including during the 1980 Winter Olympics, when she personally watched the historic hockey game between the United States and Russian teams. Outcalt served partly under owner and publisher Bill Doolittle, who purchased the paper from James Loeb and Roger Tubby in 1970. During his tenure, Doolittle wrote the newspaper’s editorials while Outcalt dealt with the news. Responsibilities that fall under the managing editor’s purview have since shifted. Outcalt died at the age of 100 last year. Doolittle said during their time together at the Enterprise, they worked in tandem to train generations of green journalists. “We became famous in New York state for training young reporters,” he said. “She was a major part of that, along with me, of course.” While Doolittle was loud, Out-
calt was quiet. She boasted a wealth of institutional knowledge, according to Doolittle. She used that knowledge to make reporters’ stories better. “I thought she had great patience,” Doolittle said. “She was very good at helping reporters with their copy. That’s very important in that job.” Shawn Tooley said lessons he learned while working under Doolittle and Managing Editor Charles Decker at the Enterprise in the 1980s have stayed with him throughout his life. “I still have a note from Bill, hacked out on a manual typewriter, where he scolds me — not for the first time — for using too-formal terms in describing arrests by local police,” Tooley wrote. “I’d write that someone was charged with ‘larceny at a hardware store,’ but he demanded the richer, more informative ‘stealing a hammer.’” Tooley served as managing editor himself for a few years before leaving the Enterprise in 1989. He wrote for the Watertown Daily Times for a short time, then started freelancing, before moving to North Carolina and into the tech industry. “It’s a hard job for an introvert, especially in a small town where the people you’re covering are lifelong friends and neighbors,” Tooley wrote. Andy Flynn, 50, is the current editor of the Lake Placid News and a former Enterprise managing editor in the early 2000s. He started as an Enterprise reporter in the mid ‘90s under Managing Editor John Penney. Penney, 56, held the job from 1989 to 1998. “John was tough on deadline,” Flynn said. “He wasn’t your friend. “I learned a lot from John about
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journalism. I did my best to pass along what John taught me, and hopefully in good spirits.” Flynn pointed from one end of the newsroom to another. The managing editor’s desk was once at one end of the room and his desk at the other end. When he did something Penney didn’t like on deadline, he remembers the editor throwing a pencil at him. “OK, it was only one pencil,” he conceded. Writing editorials Juggling different hats — editing controversial news stories and then opining on those stories in an editorial, for instance — is one of the most difficult parts of the job, Penney said. But he loved it nonetheless. “One of the cool things about working with the Enterprise — also one of the bad things — is that you had to do everything,” he said. “Something may come up at the Saranac Lake village board meeting that’s controversial. You have to make sure your reporters cover it objectively and fairly, and make sure you edit it as such. Then after putting that hat down, if you feel this is a thing the newspaper should take a stand on, you start looking at it as an editorial in concert with the publisher. “It was a peculiar role in a sense. News and opinion. You had to make sure you were being fair and wearing the right hat at the right time. I think it can be done if you’re a fair-minded person.” After he left the Enterprise, Penney moved on to the Poughkeepsie Journal. He wrote editorials for that newspaper as an opinion editor for 20 years before leaving the company last year. He now works (Continued on Page A12)
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Penney reflects on Enterprise career A12 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
By ELIZABETH IZZO Staff Writer SARANAC LAKE — John Penney was 25 years old and just three years out of college when he took over the newsroom at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. When he was offered the managing editor role by Ogden Newspapers, the company that owns the Enterprise, he was overwhelmed. He was young and didn’t know if he could do it. But he took a leap of faith, and when Penney moved to the Adirondacks from West Virginia, he found a community and a place that would change him forever. Penney, 56, served as the newspaper’s managing editor from 1989 to 1998. What he learned here he took with him to the Poughkeepsie Journal, where he served first as a news editor, then as opinion editor. He filled that role for 20 years until he left the company last year. Now he’s working as a communications and community relations official for the city of Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County. ‘I’d like to do that’ Penney’s father, Matthew Fiske Penney, was a copy editor at the New York Daily News, one of the largest newspapers in the city. Matthew Penney died by suicide at the age of 38, when John was 5 years old. John and his four sisters were raised by their mother. When he was a little older, John said his mother asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He asked her what his father used to do, and when she told him he was a journalist, he wanted to know more. He didn’t know what a reporter did. “She told me it’s someone who listens to people’s stories, writes them down and shares them with other people,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’d like to do that.’” In a column for the Poughkeepsie Journal, Penney reflected on his father’s influence on his career path. “I think about him every day. I’m grateful he was able to guide me on this career path, even though he never got to witness it,” he wrote in a 2018 column. “And, over the years, I also found a way to forgive him. I have lived about 18 years longer than he did, so I guess I am the parent now, and he is the scared, vulnerable child. It’s amazing what can happen when you decide to keep living. My dad couldn’t hold that thought during
(Continued from Page A11)
as a communications and community relations official with the city of Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County. Penney said the editorials he’s most proud of are ones where he underscored the importance of making sure “the state didn’t just run roughshod over the people’s voice, in terms of regulation” and appointments to the Adirondack Park Agency. “That was always a big thing for the Enterprise even before I was there,” he said. In 1991, Penney wrote a letter directly to then-Gov. Mario Cuomo, inviting him to sit for an interview with the Enterprise after the governor’s office released a 239-page proposal for economic and environmental reforms in the Adirondack Park.
John Penney works on a computer at his desk in the Enterprise newsroom during his nine-year term as managing editor, from 1989 to 1998. the worst of his times, and my family will be forever saddened by that fact. “It’s been almost a half-century since my father took his life, and I still can recall the horror of that night. Sometimes, I take a moment to think what might have been. I wish somehow I could have saved him from that torment, to show him how everything was going to work out, to get his focus on his beautiful, caring wife, and to remind him gently how much his children were going to need him.” Penney started dabbling in journalism as early as 8 years old. He was on a Little League baseball team in his hometown in Long Island, and he remembers coming home from his games and sitting down in front of his typewriter. “I would start typing on my typewriter how I would cover the game if I would be covering it for my hometown paper — which is
Newsday on Long Island — imagining I was a sports reporter,” he said. Road to the ’Dacks Penney attended West Liberty University in Wheeling, West Virginia. He majored in communications and minored in English. While attending college, he made his way up the ranks at his college newspaper, The Trumpet. He started first as a sports reporter, then a news reporter and became assistant editor of the paper before he graduated. Right out of college, Penney was hired as a reporter at the Wheeling News-Register, a daily newspaper that is the flagship of Ogden Newspapers Inc. After spending three years covering courts and higher education, at the age of 25 he was offered a position as managing editor at the Enterprise.
Settling in at the Enterprise It took some time, but Penney eventually settled into the managing editor role. He said as a managing editor, “you need to have a thick skin” and constantly gauge criticism and evaluate your own objectivity. “The job moves so fast, and you have to make so many decisions so fast,” he said. “You really do need
to take a step back for some reflection and think about, ‘What’s the totality of our work here? What are we missing? What are we not covering enough of?’ You really need that step back. It’s not easy finding time when you’re in such a daily grind of an industry.” When Penney first landed in the Adirondack Park, he didn’t know much about it. At the helm of the only daily newspaper published in the park, he learned a lot. Where he grew up, he played ball in the streets. Nature and outdoor recreation weren’t at the forefront of his mind. While here, he got into hiking and mountain biking — which are still passions of his. “When I got to Adirondacks, that all changed for me,” he said. “That didn’t happen overnight because I was so busy with the newspaper it took a while to find myself. That place really changed me. It really did.”
ers, but is also personally involved with the community, Penney said. “It’s essential. You can’t do the job if you can’t do that,” he said. When Penney moved to the Adirondacks from West Virginia, he was a little into hiking, but not a lot. That changed. “That didn’t happen overnight because I was so busy with the newspaper that it took a while to find myself,” he said. “That place really changed me. It really did. I got into hiking and mountain biking, and it’s still very much a passion of mine. “I ended up organizing adult soccer games once or twice a week. I organized bike rides based at bike shops in Saranac Lake and Lake Placid. There was this real sense of community that I appreciated.” Despite all the stress that comes with the job, the breaking news
and interruptions that derail carefully laid pages, that sense of community is what Crowley believes makes it possible to publish a daily newspaper in the Adirondacks. “The reason we’re still a daily here is not because we cover the big stories. That’s important; that’s part of it. The bigger part of it is that we put kid’s pictures and names in the paper. When a kid makes the dean’s list or graduates from college, it goes in the paper. People can write a letter to the editor, and it will go in the paper the next day,” Crowley said. The community, both in Saranac Lake and the greater Tri-Lakes region, is also what has kept him in this job for the last 15 years. “I wouldn’t do this just to do it as a career. I’m doing it because it’s here,” Crowley said. “And I’m always curious to see what happens next.”
“I was like, ‘What?’” he said. “I was pretty young at the time. It was overwhelming, in a way.” Penney decided to visit the newspaper before making a decision. “It felt comfortable. It was small, but you could tell it was important to the community and that there was going to be a connection to the community and an immediacy to it all, doing journalism in such a small town,” he said. He took the job.
Editors keep newsroom in line
“He held a number of editorial board meetings in the area about the report, but he, at one point, had overlooked the only daily newspaper published in the Adirondacks,” Penney said. “Some of the old-guard people at the Enterprise really did kind of laugh at me and say, ‘There’s no way you’re going to get a sitting governor to come to the Adirondacks.’ Two days later I got a call from the governor’s office.” Cuomo sat for an interview at the Enterprise office for nearly an hour. Penney said this was “a really big deal” for the newspaper. “It was cool. The coverage was really intense. I thought we did a good job,” he said. While Flynn was managing editor of the Enterprise, between 2000 and 2001, the launch of social media behemoths like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were
still years away. The newspaper had just made the switch from film to digital photography. Not many people used email to communicate with the newsroom at the time, according to Flynn. When readers wanted to express their opinions, he said they’d often do it in person. “You could not get away from it unless you left the area,” Flynn said. “You’d be shopping and run into people. You have to make peace with that, I think.” Readers also sent in a lot of letters to the editor then, he said — they still do today. “The Enterprise still has a vibrant editorial page,” Flynn said. “The readers feel ownership of the paper. They have ownership of it, and it’s good to see that continue.”
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Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • A13
Mary Beth Kikel of Ray Brook prays at a candlelight vigil in Saranac Lake’s Riverside Park on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001.
Enterprise scrambled to report people’s reactions to 9/11
(Enterprise photo —Michele Buck)
I
By PETER CROWLEY Managing Editor t was relatively quiet, newswise, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. We were going to lead the Enterprise front page with a feature I had written on a local man who built Eskimo-style kayaks out of wood and canvas. I was kind of proud of the photos. I don’t remember what the other local stories on page 1 were. It doesn’t matter; they all got scrapped. Amy Bowers was laying them out that day, filling in for Managing Editor Dean Rock, who had started taking Tuesdays off. Amy had been hired that spring, right out of college, as our city editor. (The job title has since changed to news editor.) Back then our story deadline was 8 a.m. The newsroom had to have pages sent to production by 10, presses were to run at 11, and the paper was to be on newsstands in Saranac Lake, at least, by noon. Those deadlines got scrapped, too. The paper was coming together pretty well until shortly before 9 a.m. when Cathy Moore, our publisher, raced into the newsroom, turned on the TV and told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I remember wondering whether Cathy was overreacting to something that wasn’t local news. I figured it was a small plane and that we’d run something from the AP wire, but I didn’t think it would change the paper much. Of course, as we watched, we quickly realized that this was something none of had seen before — even though we (and the TV news people) weren’t really sure what we were seeing. Then we watched the second plane hit, and everything erupted. In the confusion, it was hard for everyone to quit watching and talking about it. We had to remind ourselves that we were news people who had a paper to put out. But what were we supposed to do? Most of us were in our 20s, and
even the older people in the room didn’t have much hard news experience. We felt like students left without a teacher to fend for themselves when a crisis hits. Reporter Ned Rauch called his girlfriend, who lived and worked in Manhattan, to see if she was OK. He got her on her cellphone (something that had become common among city folks but not among small-towners yet). She had been walking to work in Lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center, when she saw both planes hit, and now she was huddled in the recessed doorway of a shop. She described panicked people trampling each other and clouds of smoke. Ned typed as she talked — I’m not sure whether she knew he was quoting her for what would be the only locally bylined story on that day’s front page. Amy announced that she could use some help with page 1, so several of us huddled around her desk. She had initially cleared a short section of page 1 for the news, but that wouldn’t do. We advised her to do something scary: With less than an hour to deadline and many pages not yet done, she grabbed almost everything on page 1, moved it aside and started from scratch. Around that time the Associated Press started making photos available to small papers like us that only subscribe to the AP’s text service (which is still the case with the Enterprise). We looked over Amy’s shoulder and settled on a stunning picture taken from Midtown, with the Empire State Building in the foreground and the Twin Towers smoking in the back. It suggested that New York was standing tall, despite the attack. We ended up laying out that front page together, updating the AP story frequently as news came in: of a plane hitting the Pentagon, of another crashing in Pennsylvania, of one tower’s catastrophic collapse, and then the other’s. We debated the headline for a bit, but Production Manager Judi Latt came up with the final one. She said we
need something stronger than what some of us were thinking, because this seemed bigger than just New York and Washington. In my gut it felt right to roll with “America Attacked” in something like 150point type, but in my mind, it felt reckless. I worried we didn’t know enough. I worried we would regret going out on that limb. Needless to say, we didn’t. Quietly huddled around another computer were Features Editor Bruce Young, Copy Editor Randy Lewis and reporter Kelly Fox, writing an editorial. We reprint it every Sept. 11. I’m still amazed they could write so well when the rest of us were so frazzled. Cathy let us blow deadline bigtime as more news developments and photos came in, but after the second tower collapsed, we sent the last page to press. I remember going to Stewart’s afterward and being proud that our paper, on the racks, had the same breaking news people were still watching live on TV. The only other paper that had it was the Watertown Daily Times, which back then was not a morning paper but came out earlier than we did. It had gone to press with the towers hit; in the Enterprise you could read that they had fallen. Meanwhile, we reporters got to work, splitting up to cover whatever local tie-ins we could think of — local people with family and
friends in Manhattan, for instance — as well as local people’s reactions. At first it felt strange, asking people what they thought about non-local news, but we soon realized that it really was local news. People’s reactions were so powerful, it might as well have been in their own backyard. Emotionally, it was in all of our backyard. The headline I was so worried about turned out to have been right. Our photographer, Michele Buck, had been hiking St. Regis Mountain that morning to get what she thought would be the last photos of the fire tower there before British soldiers disassembled it as a training exercise. As it turned out, they were instead dispatched to help after that day’s attacks, and the tower remains to this day, now restored and designated as historic. We went to schools, restaurants and a hastily convened candlelight vigil in Riverside Park, where Michele took heart-wrenching pictures of heartbroken people. We worked late into the night writing it all up and came in early the next morning to finish it off. We three reporters had decided to combine our reporting into three long articles: one on local people’s connection to the tragedy, one on schools explaining it to students (or opting not to), and one on local reactions and mobilization. Each story bore a simple byline, “By the
Enterprise staff.” The next morning when I read our rival, the PressRepublican of Plattsburgh, I saw that they had instead done tons of shorter stories with individual bylines. They had headlines announcing local news developments we had buried in 1,000word stories. I wasn’t sure which approach was better, but ours was humbler. We were humbled more still when our local stories were relegated to back pages and a little on the bottom of page 1, below a mountain of AP stories and photos. Only one of Michele’s powerful photos of local people was used, at the bottom of page 14. We knew the national and world news was much bigger than what local people thought about them, but we had worked hard, figuring it out for ourselves with no direction. You could get AP content in other papers, but not what the news meant to people here. Still, we had to admit the Enterprise pages looked good — Dean had done a nice job with the layout. In the days that followed, we covered local reactions from churches, schools and other places, as well as airlines taking flight again and local emergency personnel and Red Cross volunteers being deployed. The attacks dominated the paper for a long time. We didn’t run that kayak feature for almost two weeks.
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Local sports brings communities together A14 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
Saranac Lake coach John Raymond consoles his Players on the 2005 Saranac Lake girls soccer team celebrate a championship during a season where players in the waning moments of a state Class C they won three titles on the way to reaching the state Class B quarterfinal round. The team was the semifinal game against Edgemont at Dietz Stadium in Kingston in November 1998. It was Raymond’s most successful ever in girls soccer history at the high school. (Enterprise photos — Lou Reuter) final game as Saranac Lake’s football coach. By JUSTIN A. LEVINE Sports Writer The Adirondack Daily Enterprise has had local sports coverage for most of a century at least, even if the sports page doesn’t look quite the same as it does today. It’s hard to tell how the paper’s sports coverage evolved because most early copies of the Enterprise were destroyed in a 1926 fire, or else tossed out in a 1953 back-room cleanup. According to a search on New York State Historic Newspapers, the first time the word “Sports” appears on the page is on Nov. 15, 1926. And while much of the page is devoted to Associated Press national sports news, there are a couple of local items as well. “Saranac Lake’s champion football team will be feted tonight at a dinner ... which promises to be the most enthusiastic athletic celebration this town has ever seen,” the brief says. “Although Saranac Lake’s season closed a week ago Saturday with a defeat, the closeness of the game with Franklin Academy and the margin by which the latter team nosed out a victory stamps the Red and White eleven as one of the greatest in the high school field.” While the current Enterprise sports department is unlikely to use such flowery language to describe a dinner, local athletes, coaches, athletic directors, teachers and friends and family still rely on the sports coverage in the paper to keep tabs on student-athletes and celebrate their achievements. “The Enterprise’s local sports coverage is great for our school,” Saranac Lake Central School District Athletic Director Eric Bennett wrote in an email. “Whether publishing future events in the sports calendar, alerting readers to the week’s games/matches or covering athletic contests, the ADE
provides exposure for our school that would not be nearly so comprehensive if solely reported by news outlets outside of Saranac Lake. “Our athletes most definitely appreciate the coverage gleaned from the paper. For instance, staff at the high school do a great job of posting ADE feature stories about upcoming seasons or reporting on recent games on the bulletin board in the gym hallway for all of our student body to see. Local sports coverage is a way to bring our community together. It’s great to see a young athlete’s name in the paper for the Fun Run or to see the culmination of a season’s work in an article celebrating a championship. To read about our athletes and then be able to acknowledge their accomplishments in passing is a luxury not found in most small towns.” Lake Placid Central School District’s Athletic Director John Burdick also said the coverage of local sports is appreciated, even by those who don’t have kids in the game. “Though the student body does not regularly read newspapers, when they are shown articles and pictures, they certainly enjoy and appreciate stories about themselves, their teammates, or any of their peers,” Burdick wrote. “Our school shares stories with any number of ways: We post some stories on our Facebook page, a few bulletin boards around the school have articles cut out from the paper or printed from online, and of course we have some parents that share stories using any of a variety of social media. “I think the reporters are very respectful of student achievements, and therefore the coaches are willing to take the time to talk them. As a small community, we all know families with students in the district and really enjoy sharing in the athletic careers. It is often the topic
After the field received more than half a foot of snow the day before, host Saranac Lake and Tupper Lake slugged it out on Oct. 21, 2006, in an epic mud fest. The Lumberjacks won the game 14-8 in three overtimes. of conversations around town.” Dan Brown, who is in his third year as AD for the Tupper Lake Central School District, echoed those sentiments and added that the Enterprise’s coverage helps his student-athletes feel more at home in the TriLakes, since Tupper Lake plays in Section 10 while Lake Placid and Saranac Lake compete in Section 7. “I think for our community, the Enterprise coverage allows the rest of the Adirondack region to see how we can compete with other towns,” Brown said. “It lets people know that we’re still around; it lets people in Saranac Lake know that we have just about what they have in sports; it lets the people in Long Lake know what we have. It gives us a chance to level the playing field since people can read about what we have in Tupper. “I see the Enterprise at, I feel, like half our sporting events, for crying out loud. I feel like every time we have something going on in Tupper, we see you guys here, and that makes our kids feel enthused when they pick up
the paper in the main office and see a Tupper score or they see a Tupper Lake picture. “It’s good for the adults to see what the kids are doing; it’s good for the kids to feel accomplished,” he continued. “Especially the last couple years we’ve seen a huge boost in the number of students we have playing sports. And I think the kids feel like they’re taken seriously and they feel like what they’re doing matters, and that comes right down to the paper. It’s great to have our local paper (the Tupper Lake Free Press) once a week, but having the Enterprise cover us on a day-to-day basis really helps us get out there and helps kids fell important. And ultimately, they want to play when they feel important.” Brown said that anyone who enters Tupper Lake Middle-High School sees a bulletin board full of photos, printouts and clippings of local sports coverage. “If you walk in our school, you see a whole plethora of Adirondack Daily Enterprise articles and pictures,” he said. “The kids see it, and
they comment on how great it is to see all this press coverage. It helps morale and keeps everybody coming back and checking to see what’s new on the board. “Being the school out of Section 7, it means a lot to our community to still be covered in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.”
On the sidelines for a quarter-century Senior Sports Writer Lou Reuter has been prowling local sidelines for a full one-fifth of the Enterprise’s history and said he loves the way its sports page contributes to the community. “I think what’s kept me here is the year-round variety,” he said. “During the high school season you get high school sports. And then the World Cup stuff, the World Championships — bobsled, luge, World Cup snowboarding. I’ve seen a lot of Olympians come here. “In summer, the (Lake Placid) horse shows are huge, the rugby tournament, lacrosse, Ironman, Tinman. It’s year-round. I looked years ago at moving to other
papers, bigger papers, maybe make some more money. I would have made the best of it, but the year-round summer, winter variety has kept me here. “I’ve always been a sports guy; I was raised like that,” he continued. “It’s a huge part of the community, from little kids throwing the ball around in their yard right up through people in their 80s playing tennis and golf. It’s a part of their lives.” Reuter has also covered three Winter Olympic games — Salt Lake City in 2002, Vancouver in 2006 and Sochi in 2010 — and said there was little that could prepare him for the frenetic pace of Olympic coverage. “It can be a pretty crazy pace at the newspaper, and you just gotta crank stuff out and write and write and write,” he said. “Nothing really prepared me for the Olympics. I had a couple 36-hour days working the Olympics, and nothing can prepare you for that at all. “But all the journalists who work there are in the same boat. They’re going all out like they never do in their lives. Just to do that every four years, it’s pretty freaking amazing.” Despite 25 years of coverage, Reuter said there are a few things he’s missed out on in the local sports beat. “Unfortunately, I’ve never gotten to see one of our local teams play in a state championship game,” he said. “I’ve been at track state championships, and I’ve seen some of our local athletes win. But in terms of team sports, I’d love to someday go and see a football game in the (Carrier) Dome (in Syracuse). “I think Placid’s baseball team won the state championship the year before I was on board, and Saranac Lake, the year before I was on board, played in the state championship game in football. That’s one thing I’ve always wanted.”
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Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • A15
Jim Shea of Lake Placid revels in the snow after winning men’s skeleton gold at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Shea, a third generation Olympian followed in the footsteps of his grandfather Jack, who captured two speed skating gold medals in the 1932 Lake Placid games, and his father Jim Sr., a Nordic skier at the 1964 Innsbruck, Austria, Winter Games.
By LOU REUTER Senior Sports Writer The Adirondack Daily Enterprise has been in the unique position of being the hometown newspaper of the Winter Olympics, most notably the 1932 and 1980 games held in Lake Placid. Being on site with reporters and photographers in the venues and on the streets of Lake Placid and having the opportunity to put their work to press 10 miles away in Saranac Lake, enabled the Enterprise staff to provide extensive coverage of the 1980 Winter Olympics through the paper’s Daily Olympic Digest, which was a special section published each day during the games. E.J. Conzola, who is currently the managing editor of the Malone Telegram, was a year out of college as a staff member at the Enterprise covering the Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980. In an interview on the first day of October this year, Conzola fondly looked back to those days in February when the world’s eyes were focused on the small village in the Adirondack Mountains. “It was an experience like no other. Covering the Olympics, how do you match that?” Conzola said. “Probably the biggest thing I remember was the sheer exhaustion. Every day I was going from 7:30 to 1 or 2 the next morning; pretty much running on adrenaline.” For many, the biggest highlight of those Winter Olympics will always be the United States men’s hockey team’s stunning “Miracle On Ice” victory over the Soviet Union. Although Conzola wasn’t in the Olympic Center attending the game, he was watching
Vermontville’s Bill Demong reaches the finish line in a 10-kilometer race at the 2010 Vancouver Games to become the first United States skier to capture a gold medal in Nordic combined. Teammate Johnny Spillane won the silver and Bernhard Gruber of Austria claimed the bronze.
An Olympic tradition
(Enterprise photos — Lou Reuter)
United States pilot Steven Holcomb and his crew of Justin Olsen, Steve Messler and Curtis Tomasevicz triumphantly ride up the finish ramp at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, becoming the first American fourman bobsled team in 52 years to win gold at the games.
and reporting from a bar across the street, where the contest was aired live. “Our paper only had one pass to cover it, so I was doing a color piece on the people in the bar,” he recalled. “It was funny because initially, nobody was paying much attention to the game. I think everyone knew how it was going to turn out, but obviously, that all changed. More and more people started checking out the TV. By the time the game ended, everybody was yelling and screaming and spilling out into the street.” Although it was a mob scene outdoors following the
game, Conzola said the streets were busy every day during the Olympics. Conzola said the Enterprise staff also proved to be a valuable asset for the Associated Press. “We were producing so much copy and the AP was using it,” he said. The advancement of technology has allowed the Enterprise to continue covering the Olympics, both
through Associated Press stories and photo services, and also in person. The Enterprise had one reporter/photographer at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, where Lake Placid’s Jim Shea won a skeleton gold medal as his family’s third-generation Olympian. The Enterprise was not on hand when Torino, Italy hosted the 2006 Winter Olympics, but by the
time the next two games rolled around, the paper was able to send a team of two to provide coverage from Vancouver, Canada in 2010 and Sochi, Russia in 2014. Not only was material in the form of stories, columns and photographs published in the Enterprise’s print editions during those Olympics, it was also available on the newspaper’s website thanks to the digital age. Readers
didn’t have to wait to read about how area athletes such as Nordic combined skier Bill Demong and bobsled great Steven Holcomb raced to their historic gold medals. And although many more area athletes didn’t reach the top step of the podium at the Olympics, their stories and experiences were all conveyed through stories and photos in the Enterprise. The Enterprise was there when Lake Placid’s Andrew Weibrecht won bronze in Vancouver and silver in Sochi Although the Enterprise didn’t have a physical presence at the most recent 2018 Winter Games held in February in South Korea, the paper continued to provide loads of content from Pyeongchang, with the biggest local story emerging from there being Saranac Lake’s Chris Mazdzer historic silver medal in men’s luge. The Enterprise’s local coverage of the Winter Olympics really kicked off with the 1932 games held in Lake Placid, where local speed skater Jack Shea captured gold. The games became ingrained in the culture of this region back then, and that still holds true today. The Winter Olympics were first held in Chamonix, France in 1924 and their history is approaching the century mark. Beijing China will be the next host in 2022, and in sticking with tradition, the Enterprise looks to continue stepping forward with coverage as the hometown newspaper of the Olympic Region.
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A16 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
Local Olympians, so far
By the Enterprise staff
The first gold medal awarded in the first Winter Olympic Games went to someone from Lake Placid — Charles Jewtraw in 1924 in Chamonix, France — and residents of Lake Placid and surrounding towns have competed in every Winter Olympics since, plus a handful of Summer Olympics. The following list of 119 local Olympians was provided by the Lake Placid Olympic Museum, with some recent additions by the Enterprise, such as adding 2018 local Olympians: Adams, Arthur — *bobsled, d, 1932 Ashworth, Jeanne — speedskating, d, 1960, 1964, 1968 Bailey, Lowell — biathlon, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 Barile, Joseph — luge, 1988 Baumgartner, Floyd — bobsled, d, 1964 Belknap, Stuart — sled dog racing, d, 1932 Benham, Reginald — bobsled, d, 1964 Benham, Stanley — bobsled, d, 1952 Bickford, James — bobsled, d, 1936, 1940, 1948, 1952, 1956 Biesemeyer, Tommy — Alpine skiing, 2018 Brennan, Peter — bobsled, 1976 Brown, Ivan — bobsled, d, 1936, 1940 Bryant, Percy — bobsled, d, 1932 Burke, Tim — biathlon, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 Butler, Charles “Tom” — bobsled, 1956 Carron, Schuyler — bobsled, d, 1948 Colby, Casey — ski jump, 1998 Cook, Annelies — biathlon, 2014 Crowley, Robert — bobsled, 1968 D’Amico, William — bobsled, 1948 Deitz, Milford — *speedskating, 1932 Demong, Bill — Nordic combined, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014 Devlin, Arthur — ski jump, d, 1948, 1952, 1956 Dewey, Godfrey — *bobsled, d, 1928 Dupree, Donald Sr. — bobsled, 1948 Dupree, William — bobsled, 1948 Duprey, Philip — bobsled, 1968, 1972, 1976 Fee, John — luge, 1976, 1980 Flagg, Monroe — *bobsled, d, 1956 Fortune, Fred — bobsled, d, 1948, 1952 Frenette, Peter — ski jump, 2010, 2014 Frisbee, E. Peter — bobsled, 1976 Grant, Daniel — bobsled, 1976 Grimmette, Mark — luge, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010 Haponski, Maura Jo — luge, 1976 Hayes, Todd — bobsled, 2002, 2006 Heidt, Adam — luge, 1998, 2002 Helmer, John — bobsled, d, 1952 Hickey, James — bobsled, 1968, 1972 Hickey, Robert — bobsled, 1980, 1984 Hickey, William — bobsled, 1964, 1968 Hollrock, William — bobsled, 1976 Homberger, Henry — bobsled, d, 1932 Horton, Edmund — bobsled, d, 1932 Hoye, Hal — bobsled, 1984, 1988 Jacques, Donald — bobsled, 1956 Jewtraw, Charles — speedskating, d, 1924 Johnson, Haley — biathlon, 2010 Jost, Jeffrey — bobsled, 1980, 1984 Kelly, Karen — figure skating, 1994 Kelly, Patrick — speedskating, 1992, 1994
Lake Placid’s Andrew Weibrecht, right, and Bode Miller celebrate their silver and bronze medal performances in the super-G race at the 2014 Winter Olympics based in Sochi, Russia. Weibrecht had taken the bronze medal in the same race four years earlier at the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
(Enterprise photo — Lou Reuter)
Kennedy, Duncan — luge, 1988, 1992, 1994 Kent, Terry — rowing, 1984, 1988, 1992 Kilbourne, Andrea — hockey, 2002 Lamb, Joseph — *Nordic combined, 1972 Lamy, James — bobsled, d, 1956, 1964 LaTour, Tuffield — bobsled, d, 1948 Lawrence, Richard — bobsled, d, 1936 Linney, Robert — bobsled, d, 1940 Luce, Michael — bobsled, 1968 Lussi, Craig — Nordic combined, 1960 MacKenzie, Ronald — *bobsled, d, 1936 Maher, Steven — luge, 1988 Martin, Leo — bobsled, d, 1948 Martin, Robert — bobsled, d, 1936, 1940 Mazdzer, Chris — luge, 2010, 2014, 2018 McKellan, Gordon — figure skating, 1972 McKillip, Lawrence — bobsled, d, 1956, 1964 Meconi, Joseph — bobsled, 1948, 1952 Merkel, Crawford — bobsled, d, 1936 Miller, Hubert — bobsled, d, 1952, 1956 Miller, Lloyd — *bobsled, 1956 Miron, Lucien — bobsled, d, 1948 Monahan, Matt — bobsled, d, 1940 Morgan, James — bobsled, d, 1976
Mulholland, John — *bobsled, 1972 Myler, Cammy — luge, 1988, 1992, 1994, 1998 Napier, John — bobsled, 2010 Nardiello, Timothy — luge, 1984, 1988 Page, James — Nordic combined, 1964 Pandolph, Charles — bobsled, d, 1964 Rand, Jay — ski jump, 1968 Reidl, Theresa — luge, 1984 Retrosi, Samantha — luge, 2006 Rogers, Neil “Bob” — bobsled, d, 1964 Rosser, Robert — biathlon, 1998 Rossi, Ronald — luge, 1984 Roy, Matt — bobsled, 1988 Rushlaw, Brent — bobsled, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988 Savage, Paul — bobsled, 1964, 1968 Scott, Joseph — bobsled, 1952 Sears, Dexter — dogsled, d, 1932 Sears, Peter — hockey, 1972 Shea, Jack — speedskating, d, 1932 Shea, James — Nordic skiing and combined, 1964 Shea, Jimmy — skeleton, 2002 Sheer, Gordy — luge, 1992, 1994, 1998 Sheffield, Gary — *bobsled, d, 1964, 1968 Shene, John — bobsled, d, 1936
Snow, Shirley “Bucky” — *bobsled, 1964 Stevens, Curtis P. — bobsled, d, 1932, 1940 Stevens, F. Paul — bobsled, d, 1932 Stevens, J. Hubert — bobsled, d, 1932, 1936, 1940 Stevens, Raymond F. — *bobsled, d, 1932 Stowe, William — rowing, 1964 Tavares, Laurie — luge, 1994 Tavares, William — luge, 1992 Terwillegar, Erica — luge, 1988, 1992 Tyler, Francis — bobsled, d, 1936, 1940, 1948 Tyler, James — bobsled, 1984 Tyler, Joseph — bobsled, 1980 Varno, Hugh — *bobsled, 1936, 1940 Washbond, Alan — bobsled, d, 1936, 1940 Washbond, Waightman — bobsled, d, 1948, 1956 Weibrecht, Andrew — Alpine skiing, 2010, 2014, 2018 Wells, Aubrey — bobsled, 1940 Whisher, Floyd — bobsled, d, 1952 Wilson, Joe Pete — Nordic skiing, d, 1960 Zayonc, Miroslav — luge, 1988 * = alternate d = deceased Note: 1940 Olympics were canceled due to World War II.
Congrats to The Enterprise on
125 years of serving its readers!
Everyone needs an editor. If you need help with your writing or need copy-editing or proof-reading services for your book manuscript, corporate presentation, academic paper or any other writing, bettergetaneditor.com is your one-stop place to turn. Lowell Bailey, of Lake Placid, climbs a hill during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia. Bailey competed in four different Olympic Games during his biathlon career.
(Enterprise photo — Chris Knight)
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Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • B1
A freshly delivered Adirondack Daily Enterprise is protected from rain in a tube in front of a Saranac Lake house.
Readers say why they value the Enterprise
(Editor’s note: In a Sept. 16 editorial, we asked readers to share why they value the Enterprise, in light of its 125th year. Here’s what they wrote.)
My family has lived in the village of Saranac Lake for 27 years. We value the ADE for many reasons. Most importantly, we subscribe to help keep this newspaper viable. We realize how fortunate we are to have this resource and how important this daily newspaper is on many levels. We shop locally, and for the same reasons we have continually subscribed to ADE from day one. ADE is an anchor to our community, socially, politically and commercially. Thank you, and huge thanks to all the staff and leaders of ADE. I love my life and home here, and the ADE box at the end of my driveway is part of my home. Sincerely, Kathy Sauers Saranac Lake P.S.: AND I love the early delivery so I can read a paper when clear-headed and well rested! Hence the prompt response! I read the Enterprise every single night after work. It is part of my daily routine. I get the national highlights, as well as what I need to know about my community. When my husband and I were raising our two girls, we never had the television on until after dinner.
But I would find a comfy place to sit for a bit and read the Enterprise before the hectic domestic chores and homework began. I continue that routine even now. Janet Simkins Saranac Lake When traveling I always like to read local, small-town newspapers, Never has one stepped up to the journalistic quality of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise! Marty Shubert Lake Placid
My world of information and entertainment is currently supplied by all the latest forms of technology. These items consist of a smart TV, a smartphone, radio, landline, email, texting, voicemail and iPod, to name a few. It has taken me a short while to discern just why I find myself a bit agitated, fretting and edgy throughout the day. It is because I feel harnessed, assaulted and bombarded by all the electronic devices at home, car and on my person. All of the whistles, bells, chimes, clangs, music, vibrations, providing a cacophony of irritation on all my senses makes me frustrated. It was then I recognized the value and pleasure of having a hand-held, quiet newspaper. Having my own personal copy of reading material put me in control of the who, what, where, when and why. I am able to pick up a news-
paper at any given time and enjoy many informative and researched articles and photos. The world, both globally and locally, is at my fingertips. Now the only bell that charms me is the front door telling me that my much appreciated Adirondack Daily Enterprise has arrived for MY pleasure. Great job for the many years of service. We are all the better for your efforts. Bruce Van Vranken Tupper Lake
As a relatively small community, but with many towns and villages, I depend on the Enterprise to stay informed about what is going on in our local community. Your reporting is wide-covering and most of the time very welldone and interesting. Appreciate the care, concern and most of the time unbiased reporting. We are lucky to have such a quality newspaper and journalists covering our region. Knut Sauer Jay In regard to your article about the Enterprise 125. I have had dealings with your paper for the many years I have been involved in sports, both as a player and for the last 45 years as a coach. I have dealt with many sports writers in that time. THE number-one sports writer was and is Lou Reuter. He is in love with what he does and is
Congratulations!
Winter Carnival 2020 January 31st - February 9th
Myths & Legends
very thorough and extremely easy to talk to. In regard to your news staff and editors for the paper, with all the media bias one way or the other these days, this does not happen in the Enterprise. Your paper goes the extra mile to ensure what is printed is the truth. In regard to local issues, your paper has the pulse of the people who actually live here. I realize that you can’t print this because I am running for office, but I felt it was necessary to give credit where credit is due. Thank you, Enterprise staff, and happy birthday! Rik Cassidy Saranac Lake
Sort of like The Starship Enterprise?! This paper goes above and beyond the needs of the TriLakes! The new award for the under-30 awards, “Rising Stars,” is one perfect example. It took a lot of time and organization to bring this program to fruition. It shines a light on the future generation of leaders in our area and was read and appreciated by many. Thank you for all you do! Mary Shubert Lake Placid I love getting the Adirondack Daily Enterprise every day. The staff keep the public very well informed of what has happened locally and worldwide, as well as providing information on upcom-
(Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)
ing events. It’s also a great way for our voices to be heard through letters to the editor and a great place to advertise. I also enjoy the Sudoku puzzles each day, which help my old brain keep active. Virginia Daniels Saranac Lake
In an era when the very concept of a “free press” is being denigrated by an astounding number of Americans and our leaders, I find myself ever more grateful for the integrity — and openmindedness — of our Adirondack Daily Enterprise. Your editorials (whether I agree with them or not) are always fact-based, thoughtful ... and thought-provoking. What I personally appreciate most, though, is your willingness to print “Guest Commentaries” by readers. I have found that most area newspapers do not welcome such lengthy opinions by John Q. Public, but sometimes it simply takes more than the limitations of a letter to the editor to express heartfelt ideas that may impact the community. You are walking the talk of allowing the freedoms of expression and exchange of ideas that are critical to our democracy. The ADE is playing a big part, in our little corner of the world, in standing up to those who don’t value such freedoms, and for that we should be extremely grateful. John O’Neill Saranac Lake
B2 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
Bill McLaughlin, right, receives the Saranac Lake Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year award in 1976 from Bill Doolittle, who was both chamber president and owner-editor-publisher of the Enterprise at the time.
Even now, you have to like Bill’s chances I
(Enterprise file photo)
By HOWARD RILEY like our chances,” was Bill’s favorite expression when we were in trouble. That was to keep my spirits up because I never liked our chances when we were overdue at the office and “stacked up over Kennedy,” as we liked to say. Bill had a wit that was hard to match. He was a scholar, a writer, an artist; he was tall and handsome. He was anything else you wanted him to be. He was an athlete in his school years. He attended many schools, some for only short periods ... the schools and Bill usually disagreed on why they parted company. Bill said they simply did not measure up to his standards. However, he was very proud of the time he spent at the Wanakena Ranger School. In his prime he was struck down by tuberculosis, but with only one lung he could match you stride for stride up DeBar Mountain or Wright’s Peak. His trademark was his trenchcoat, loafers, a camera and no gloves. He wore the same thing summer and winter. One time when he went up a mountain in January to cover a plane crash, he did dig out his Red Wing
boots and Hudson Bay coat. The late “Mammy” Villeneuve, a good friend blinded in World War II, invited us for coffee one day at Maid’s Drug Store in Tupper Lake. When we finished, Mammy placed three dimes on the counter to pay for the coffee. Bill said, “That was pretty slick the way you put down those three pennies for coffee.” Mammy slapped his hands over the coins to check and replied, “Damn it, McLaughlin, you’re the only guy I know who would do that to a blind man.” His family meant everything to him. They knew that, and he knew it, so it didn’t matter if anyone else knew it. Bill was no hypocrite; he knew who he was. He was a friend to the Carmelite sisters from the time they opened their convent here. He helped a lot of people with good counsel and good money. For all his community activities, his political positions, his Citizen of the Year award, his devil-maycare attitude, he was conservative by nature and a very private person. In our long association I got to know him only a little bit. He loved the Adirondacks and fought for what he believed was right for
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Bill had a wit that was hard to match. He was a scholar, a writer, an artist; he was tall and handsome. He was anything else you wanted him to be.
the North Country. Like many others, it hurt him deeply when the state took down hi camp at Long Pond. Of course, it hurt Armand Amell, too, because Bill had conned him into doing most of the construction. He built a lighthouse on the Trudeau Road next to the beautiful house which he had sold. It never quite got finished, but he had a lot of fun working on it. At one point, to help finance the project, he was having fancy stock certificates printed which read, “Landlocked Lighthouses, Inc.”
He later leaked information that Anheuser-Busch was considering a major contribution in return for a bright red light on the top which would perpetually flash the message “Bud, Bud, Bud” over the village. This beacon, he said, would be for lonely, thirsty men to find their way there. One hoax, however, reached near Orson Wellesian proportions. His buddy, the late Chuck Pandolph, was on the Saranac Lake police force. He and Bill had Chuck’s son wearing a bobsled helmet with squiggly things sticking out
of the top, standing in the woods out on Forest Home Road. A picture ran in the Enterprise of Chuck, in uniform, capturing this creature from outer space. This was back in the days when UFOs were being spotted on at least a weekly basis. The Enterprise was deluged with calls from congressmen, generals, Air Force bases around the United States and from all the major news services. The newsroom at the Enterprise stayed open late that night. Bill wrote some great columns about his cronies when they died. My favorite was about Monroe “Monk” Flagg. Monk was a bobsledder who loved the sport and worked long and hard in its support. Bill ended his eulogy: “He’s through Shady and gone.” It seemed that it was almost worth going first just so Bill could write a column about you. Well, Bill, by this time you must be talking to St. Peter at the Pearly Gate
(and maybe glancing to see if you could easily slip it off its hinges) ... so all I can say is, “I like your chances.” ——— (Editor’s note: Bill McLaughlin was a legendary reporter, photographer, columnist and cartoonist whose career with the Enterprise spanned form 1950 to 1985. In between, he also did stints as a reporter-photographer for other newspapers such as the Albany Times Union, Syracuse Herald American, Plattsburgh Press-Republican and Lake Placid News, and he was engaged in the community in many ways, including as a Saranac Lake village trustee and cofounder of the popular Willard Hanmer Guideboat and Canoe Races. He worked closely with newsroom chum and confederate Howard Riley, who wrote this column for the front page of the Enterprise’s Jan. 13, 1986, issue that reported McLaughlin’s death.)
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Making a splash Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • B3
McLaughlin hyped all that was odd and colorful
I
By BOB SEIDENSTEIN f you asked any reputable historian who were Saranac Lake’s most influential residents, I’m sure they’d say E.L. Trudeau and the medical movers and shakers of the TB era. Or maybe they’d also mention some of the celebrities who lived or visited here — Robert Louis Stevenson springs to mind. But if you asked anyone who came of age here in the ’50s and ’60s, I’d bet Trudeau and company would take a distant second place, behind our town characters. In fairness to historical record and record keepers, I’ll concede that characters were not our most influential citizens. But they sure were our most memorable ones. And unlike now, they were not an endangered species. Since it’s impossible to have objective criteria for who is or is not a character, no census of them could ever have taken place. Still, I’d match our CPT (Characters Per Thousand) ratio with any other burgh in the lower 48 (no way I’d even attempt to match Alaska’s). Back then, if you’d stood in Berkeley Square on a Saturday night and thrown half a brick in any direction, you would’ve scored a direct hit on a town character. And after the brick bounced off, it likely would’ve hit at least one more. And what does all this have to do with the Adirondack Daily Enterprise? Just this: Back then the ADE did a stellar job of highlighting and even promoting The Most Colorful Among Us. Perhaps more specifically, it wasn’t the Enterprise in general but Bill McLaughlin in specific. Bill worked for the Enterprise for darn near a half-century, if not longer. He was a reporter, columnist, photographer and cartoonist, and mightily skilled in all those realms. Non-journalists use the term “article” and “column” interchangeably, but there’s a huge difference. Articles are news and, as such, must adhere to the facts and be clearly absent of opinion, the idea being it’s up to the readers to make their own conclusions. Columns, on the other, hand, are in essence editorials — it’s the columnists’ choice what to write about and how to write it. Columns can be based on facts (think William Safire), or they may not be at all (think Dave Barry). As a journalist, McLaughlin was unique in that some of his “reporting” that appeared on page 1 consisted of total flights of fantasy, sometimes even bald-faced hoaxes. Want some examples? OK, how about when McCarthy’s chicken farm in Lake Clear got a bunch of feed so overloaded with hormones that the chickens grew to enormous proportion, broke down the fences and headed off into the sunset. As proof, McLaughlin had a picture of a gigantic chicken sprinting down the runway of the Lake
Forrest “Dew Drop” Morgan hangs a New York Yankees pennant over the Saranac River from his restaurant, the Dew Drop Inn, on Broadway in Saranac Lake. Clear airport. Oh yeah, I forgot to say earlier that in those days, long before Photoshop was ever imagined, Bill was also a darkroom wizard: He’d rigged the photo so it had the head of a chicken but the body of an ostrich. Then there was the abandoned truck in Onchiota, near Bureau Brothers’ logging operation. Like every abandoned vehicle in the Adirondacks, this one had been shot full of holes by every gunhappy goober who’d passed by. But there was no story in that. Where there WAS a story was in McLaughlin’s account, which was the holes were drilled in by another darkroom-enhanced gargantuan woodpecker. And once more he had proof in his photo of said woodpecker standing on the truck. And finally there was his alltime winner — the time a spaceship crashed on Forest Home Road. Once again, he had a photo showing the little spaceman (Chuck Pandolph Jr.) between Tony Piro, an Enterprise reporter, and Chuck Pandolph Sr., a town
(Editor’s note: This editorial, written by Enterprise co-owner James Loeb, was published on the cover of the newspaper’s 75th anniversary special section on Nov. 14, 1969.)
cop (Pandolph with pistol in hand, making sure no extraterrestrial funny stuff was about to happen). It was on the front page, in 1958, when UFO sightings were frequent and fear of extraterrestrial invasion was at an all-time high (no doubt driven by Cold War paranoia and a spate of sci-fi movies). Predictably, hysteria gripped the town. The Enterprise’s phone rang incessantly, and the office set a record for staying open (till midnight), trying to quell the panic-stricken. Even crazier, the story hit one of the wire services and got picked up by papers across the nation. And craziest of all, the Enterprise even got a call from the Pentagon, asking — in the quaint parlance of the day — if the Martians had landed. A prince of promotion McLaughlin was not a mere hoaxer; he also was a great writer of ballyhoo. Ballyhoo is an oldfashioned word that means excessive publicity or praise, and has always been a staple of sports
writers building up one event or another. Perhaps McLaughlin’s greatest accomplishment in this realm was about the 1958 World Series. Of course it wasn’t about the Series itself. I mean, really, who read the Enterprise to find out details of things beyond the TriLakes? No, his promo had to do with a bet between two beloved locals, Chuck Pandolph and Dew Drop Morgan. Dew Drop was a diehard Yankees fan ... and a diehard gambler. So it didn’t take the Amazing Kreskin to figure out he was going to lay a pile of moolah on the Yanks. The Yanks’ opponents in the Series were the Milwaukee Braves, and since there were no known Braves fans in town, McLaughlin decided to invent one, namely Chuck Pandolph. Chuck, being Chuck, went along with it. A week or so before the Series, Bill started writing a series of articles, not about the Series, per se, but about the betting battle between Dew and Chuck. And
The aging process
M
ost wines — but not all — improve with age. Some wines — but not all — get sour when they grow old. So far as people are concerned, generalizations are dangerous. Some are sour to start with; others get sour with age as they decline in strength. Now as far as newspapers are concerned, the age has little or nothing to do with the vitality of the contents. Thus, while we celebrate the 75th Anniversary — the Diamond Jubilee — of The Enterprise, we must confess that our age, in and of itself, is nothing to boast about, except perhaps that the paper survived, despite all the efforts to offer other journalistic diets. Like others among the aged, The Enterprise had a face-lifting job done on its exterior this past Summer, but, as with other face-lifting jobs, the same old press that Mr. Ridenour bought in 1926 prints the paper. Our face-lifting job has some symbolic value, however, since it was inspired by some of our newer residents who saw a beauty in the old structure that had somehow not impressed us previously. Whether The Enterprise is young or old depends on the vitality of what is printed in its pages, day after day, the extent to which it serves its communities and its readers. And in this sense, the verdict will have to be rendered by more objective judges than the paper’s editor who hereby stands aside because of a conflict of interests.
James Loeb was co-owner and publisher of the Enterprise, along with Roger Tubby, from 1953 to 1970. (Photo provided)
¯¯¯ We would pay our respects to Carl Smith (no relation of Carl H. Smith of the Saranac Lake High School system) who actually founded The Enterprise as a
(Enterprise file photo)
weekly, to his successor, Mr. Vosburgh, and then to Mr. Goldthwaite whose years with The Enterprise are so beautifully etched in the article by his son, Eaton, in this special anniversary issue. To these pioneers we offer our thanks for the paper’s birth and early years. We know what a job it is to publish a weekly; in fact, one of the trade secrets is that it is far easier to publish a daily than a weekly. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen, there is always the wire service (in our case, the Associated Press) that will produce for a daily more yards of copy than a small paper can use. But with a weekly it is much tougher; you either have to write it or get someone to write it for you. But then we must pay an especial tribute to John Ridenour whom we came to know briefly after 1953 when we arrived. It was Mr. Ridenour who had the courage to make The Enterprise into a daily. We confess that there were days during the late 1950s when we came to question the validity of Mr. Ridenour’s confidence that this community could support a daily newspaper, but more recent developments have validated the dream which he made a reality. For us, and in this thought the editorial “we” includes both J.L. and R.W.T., the decision to purchase the paper and to make this our home was even more of a gamble and surely more of a change. Despite our worries during the community’s darker days, worries which were shared by many others, and despite our absences from time to time, including R.W.T.’s absence since 1960, neither of us would dissent from the flat statement that we never regretted our 1953 decision and that, on the contrary, we never gambled so much or so successfully.
how much was the wager? Not one red cent. After all, betting money on the Series was old hat and boring and never sold a paper. Uh-uh, the stakes were the loser had to jump in the Saranac River. And the ideal launching place for the immersion was the Dew Drop Inn’s porch, since it was right on the river (matter of fact, during high water, the Dew Drop porch was IN the river). Article after article appeared, the tension increased exponentially, and by the time the Yankees clinched the Series in game 7, I doubt there was anyone in town who didn’t know Chuck was going into the drink. Hot news on a cold day The Series’ final game was Oct. 9, and it was either that day or the next that The Big Splash would be made. I remember arriving long before the appointed time, but even then, a sizable crowd had gathered. Sadly, because at the tender age of 11 I stood about 4-feet-10 in boots, I couldn’t see over anyone and had to rely on hearing the blow-byblow secondhand. As befit the piratical nature of the gamblers, a plank had been set up on the porch, its end hanging over the river. There was a bunch of buildup beforehand, some of which I heard, none of which I saw. Then Chuck was on the board. Dew jabbed at him with a sword, as Chuck pretended to struggle back to dry land. Finally, Dew triumphed, and Chuck went off the board and into the non-briny shallow below. When I heard the splash and the crowd’s laughter, I shuddered involuntarily. Remember, this was the second week of October. I don’t remember the exact temperature, but I do remember it was chilly, and the last day for sane swimming had been at least a month in the past. Anyhow, as colorful as the ceremony had been till then, the best was yet to come. For when Chuck came got back on the porch, he shook himself a few times, spraying water every which way, and then reached into his jacket pocket. When he did, a look of shock and surprise crossed his face. Then, before anyone could figure out what that was about, he pulled his hand out of his pocket and in it was a big fish. Of course the entire event had been choreographed, detail by detail, by Bill McLaughlin. While I knew who Bill was and saw him around town a lot, I didn’t know him in any depth. But Howard Riley did, since they worked on the paper together and were bosom buddies besides. So it was Howard who filled me in on all the details I never would’ve known otherwise. In the course of our talking about Bill, I had to ask Howard if he knew the answer to a question that’d been bugging me for decades. “I mean,” I said, “what kind of editor would let him get away with all his nonsense?” “Hell,” he said, “I was the editor.”
Not financially of course, but our gamble paid off in a new way of life, in a wonderful area and with wonderful friends. For this new life and for the challenges it has meant to us, we are grateful. And we dedicate this special issue of The Enterprise, just as we dedicate every daily issue of it, to the people of the area which has become our home. ¯¯¯ Enterprise history is not easy to come by because of two events: the fire which destroyed the old Town Hall back in 1926 and the “clean up” campaign which, in 1953, destroyed the records that existed between 1926 and 1953. A number of individuals have helped us in bringing together some of this lost history, and we are grateful to all of them. But one young man is the editor of this special section, and we owe to “Rip” Alien (whose JRA initials appear under the editorial comment on the opposite page) the very fact that this special section has come into being. For almost a year now “Rip” Allen has been pecking away at the history of the Enterprise and of this community. Through personal interviews, correspondence and just plain “digging” he has brought it all into focus. As a poet, he has a poet’s sensitivity, perhaps even romanticism. He has sensed the background and the history of this 75-year span, and his gift to this village which he has adopted is the record that is found in these pages. ¯¯¯ Thanks to Mr. Smith and his successors, at least the comment of the Reverend Lundy printed on the preceding page is no longer valid. J.L.
B4 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
Eileen Devine Gerrish
(Photo provided)
Unexpected stint in the newsroom
A career in the newspaper biz Jim Bishop sits in a conference room at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise offices Sept. 26.
(Enterprise photo — Elizabeth Izzo)
By ELIZABETH IZZO Staff Writer SARANAC LAKE — Jim Bishop started as a paperboy. For 4 cents a copy, he delivered copies of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise directly to the homes of subscribers on Lake Street. “I started at 11 years old,” Bishop said. He laughed. “You had to be 12, but I started ahead of time.” It was 1951. The Enterprise was an afternoon paper then. His copies were dropped off outside an apartment building on Lake Street around 2:30 p.m., after he’d gotten home from school. That’s when he went to work. Saranac Lake had a lot of neighborhood bodegas in the 1950s, according to Bishop. He had a small mom-and-pop store on his paper route. Bishop, now 79, remembers stopping there along the way and grabbing sodas that the store owner would put on a tab. At the end of the week, when Bishop went to collect payment for the store’s newspapers, the store owner wanted him to clear his tab, too.
“He’d say, ‘You owe me,’” Bishop said. “It was different living back in those days.” He left the newspaper when he was 15 years old and worked at a body and fender shop. Seven years later, he returned to the Enterprise, this time working as one of eight people in the composing room at the newspaper’s 76 (now 77) Main St. location, where Origin Coffee, Human Power Planet Earth bike shop and Earthshine Yoga Studio are now. The newspaper had moved there in 1926 after its offices in the Harrietstown Town Hall were gutted by fire. At the same time, he was delivering newspapers to Lake Placid. Bishop helped lay out the newspaper in the days before the installation of its offset press under the ownership of Bill Doolittle in 1973. “In those days, it was all hot lead,” he said. “The whole thing was typeset. You set all the ads by hand.” Bishop was in the pressroom at the Enterprise on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy
was assassinated. Around 2 p.m., just before the press crew was about to start the run, the Associated Press warning bell rang with the news that Kennedy had been shot. Bishop remembers the moment when that news reached the pressroom. “They stopped everything,” he said. The composing crew tore apart the first page of the paper and put it back together again, except for one column of local news briefs. “We were one of the first papers in the country to run the news of his death,” Bishop said. Around the same time that Doolittle chose to relocate the Enterprise offices to its current location at 61 (now 54) Broadway, Bishop made the switch to the circulation department fulltime. A few years later, Bishop was still on staff when the 1980 Winter Olympics came to Lake Placid. He was in the audience when the U.S. hockey team won the gold medal against Finland in the final round. During the Olympic Games, the
Enterprise went from delivering five days a week to seven days a week, with a special Olympic Digest section inside, according to Bishop. “There were no computers back then. We had to stuff all the papers in the back, decide how many papers went where and make all the props by hand,” he said. “We would come in at 11 at night and go home at 5 in the morning, sleep a few hours and go out onto the streets to see what was going on. “It was hard work. But when else do you have your chance to experience something like that?” Bishop retired in 2009 after working at the Enterprise for more than 50 years. He later came back, from 2012 to 2016, to work parttime delivering vacation guides. He remembers working at this newspaper, and the people who made it happen every day, very fondly. “We were a family,” he said. And after all these years, he still reads the Enterprise. “Every day, every morning,” he said.
Ushering in a new era at the Enterprise
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By BILL DOOLITTLE t all began in late 1970, when my former stepfather and friend Ralph Ingersoll called to tell me he had been approached by Jim Loeb, halfowner of the Enterprise and the Lake Placid News, to buy the papers. Ralph, owner of a chain of papers, sent one of his publishers up to Saranac Lake to explore the opportunity, and Ralph sent me the resulting lukewarm report. “It’s too small for me,” Ralph wrote. But he remembered I had gone to Lake Placid to ski and vacation, and wondered if the opportunity might interest me. He knew the Newark News, where I was working, would be sold soon and was worried about its future. I met with Jim in New York City, raised the down payment and bought the papers, sight unseen. Before long, I went up to Saranac Lake, stayed with Jim, then went to the paper the next day when the sale was announced on page 1. Roger Tubby, the other owner, was not there. Jim said they had split over Vietnam and so decided to sell. Jim wanted to continue to write the editorials, which he did for a few weeks, then stopped. I knew a lot about reporting but nothing about business. The staff of about 24 at the two papers had mostly run the papers on their own for years, while Jim and Roger were away doing diplomacy and politics. At least once, Armand Amell, the paper‘s backbone, had pitched in to pay a paper mill bill. Howard Riley was an interim general manager, backed up by a wonderful backshop crew, plus Bea Drutz and Evelyn Outcalt in editorial. They kept the paper alive. But there were problems to address in editorial and advertising, and the equipment was falling apart. We’d buy parts from other papers that had converted to offset to keep going, but we were using century-old technology and had to make the leap to offset ourselves if we were going to survive. After a few years, I received some money from a long-lost uncle, borrowed from the Bank of Lake Placid and bought the old grocery (then bar) at 61 Main. The employees and I did a lot of
Bill Doolittle the cleanup work ourselves, scrubbing away the stench of stale beer and moving our new offset presses into an empty store — no walls or offices. The heroes were those people who kept the paper alive during the Loeb years, then pitched in to save it with me. We got computers of a sort along with the presses and were off to the races, and had begun to make enough to pay the bills when Cathy Moore came on, counting change in circulation. We had built a wing out back for the new press and newsprint storage, and everyone retrained themselves to use the equipment. Eventually, the presses allowed us to take on job printing of other papers, a revenue stream that has allowed the Enterprise to continue as a daily, although its small size suits it better as a weekly. Switching to offset improved the paper’s quality, resulting in more circulation and advertising, and moving to the new building sent a message that we were here to stay. That’s when I proudly displayed “Adirondack Daily Enterprise” in huge letters on the front of the building. We had always been a daily in a weekly market, making only a modest profit in the summers and December. Soon after the new plant opened, a wonderful thing happened: Joe Drutz, Bea’s husband, became available. Loved in the community, he took over our poor advertising department, and I moved young Cathy Moore over from circulation. Bea was my secretary and mother to us all, espe-
(Photo provided)
cially the new young reporters and ad sales people. We expanded the job printing with weeklies, advertising flyers, etc., and the business grew, especially in winter and the long, muddy springs when it seemed most of our smaller retail advertisers took off for Florida. We mailed them the paper so they could keep up with the Tri-Lakes even though the news arrived a few days late. One of our Florida snowbirds, Frank Casier, a friend, said to me that we had made a paper prosper in an area with a chronic 25% unemployment, “just like in the Depression.” The people of the Tri-Lakes, I learned, were strong, independent and hard-working. Joe became general manager. He was a good businessman, and the Drutzes kept all of us in line, especially me. But disaster struck. Joe died suddenly during a fundraising basketball game between the paper and Saranac Lake hospital employees. Without him, some of my spirit for the work left. He had done so much of what I was not good at. Cathy helped fill the breach, growing the business and becoming ad director and more. In the mid ’70s, I decided to sell the weekly and reduce the debt we had taken on for the new building and expansion. By then, my wife Susy and our four children were working for the papers: Susy and Will in editorial, Kim in advertising, Erin in editorial and Mike in circulation. Before Lake Placid was awarded the Winter Olympic Games,
the papers became deeply involved in coverage of the awarding. We sent Howard Riley to Europe to cover bidding for the 1980 Games. There were stories from all over that we covered: the politics of getting funding from Washington, including getting the federal Ray Brook prison, then the battles in Albany for state funding. In 1978, we sold the Enterprise to Ogden Newspapers, which had a chain of small papers, but I and the staff stayed in place. Ogden had already purchased the Lake Placid News, so the two were under the same management again. The new owners bought more presses and upgraded the conversion to offset. Meanwhile, during the Olympic Games, we undertook to putting out a special section — the Olympic Digest — every day of the Games under the leadership of Charlie Decker, who had been writing sports stories for the paper since he was in high school. The Digest was full of advertising from near and far. Covering the games was a huge undertaking for us, since we continued to publish the Daily Enterprise at the same time. Other papers from Albany, Plattsburgh and Montreal boasted they would be publishing Olympic papers each day, too, but they all failed. We won numerous awards for our Olympic papers. During the period before and after the 1980 Games, the Enterprise undertook two very important efforts to help the local communities. The paper initiated and executed a fund drive to build an indoor hockey rink in Saranac Lake. The community contributed thousands of dollars, and we ran the names of each donor on the front page each day. Over the years, more and more fundraising has resulted in the arena that stands proudly on Ampersand Avenue. Also, one day Jan Plumadore and I came up with the idea to start a rugby team, and the paper pulled out the stops to cover the annual event, which has grown into one of the biggest and best of its kind, attracting teams from around the world. Both efforts showed the way the local people and the paper have worked together over the decades for the good of the community.
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By EILEEN DEVINE GERRISH moved to Saranac Lake in 1976, a few years after my graduation from SUNY Plattsburgh. Wasn’t sure if I was ready to exercise my degree. Becoming a teacher was a big step, and I wasn’t sure it was for me. I was reading the Enterprise looking for a job when a “help wanted” ad caught my eye. “Assistant editor for the Enterprise, part-time job, five days a week.” I made an interview appointment and met with the editor, the late Evelyn Outcalt. She explained the job, and I told her I was interested. That afternoon she called to tell me I had it. So began a job that would grow into one of the best I’ve ever held. I started out as the wire editor, grabbing stories and photographs from the wire service off the teletype machine. News was fed over phone lines, typed out onto sheets of paper, while at the same time the story was fed through a machine that translated the words into thin, yellow strips of paper that had perforations that could be read by the production department. The galleys, as they were called, were sent through a machine that added a thin layer of wax to the back of the galley strip, and they could then be easily pasted onto a page mock-up sheet. We would choose the stories we thought newsworthy and of interest to our readers, added a headline and printed those stories in each day’s edition. In addition to editorial department duties, I assisted in the production department mocking up and laying out pages for the day’s edition. I was a whiz with an Exacto knife. Back then, the whole process was very modern, as previously the paper had been printed using a hot lead system. The production staff could show you their burn scars from those days. Now the hot wax system is ancient. Technology has streamlined the process. Eventually, I became a fulltime staffer. My job came to include special publications, and I was given the opportunity to start and edit a weekend edition, now known as the Weekender. Being part of a small staff, my duties grew to included filling in for those on vacation or on leave. I filled in on the sports desk, was acting editor and even helped fill in at the Lake Placid News, sister paper to the Enterprise. During the summer, I even helped deliver papers to the campgrounds and small local markets for those visiting the area. The highlight of my years with the Enterprise came during the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid. In addition to the daily editions of the paper, a Daily Olympic Digest tabloid was created every night during the games. It hit the streets in Lake Placid each morning for the reading pleasure of visitors from around the world. It was Herculean effort from a small staff of editorial and production personnel. We would put the daily paper “to bed” (on the press) by noon and immediately start to create the Daily Olympic Digest. We could not go to press until the last Olympic event of each day was ready to report. Incredibly long nights — and then get up early the next morning and start again. This could never had happened without the sheer willpower and immense talent of the entire Enterprise family. Every single person — from the advertising department, to writers and photographers, to production and circulation departments — pulled together to get the information to the public: locals and visitors alike. Since my years at the Enterprise (I left in 1983), I have counted on the skills I learned at the newspaper for my subsequent careers in public relations and teaching. And more importantly, for four decades I have remained friends with many of my former Enterprise co-workers. A local paper is a community treasure, and I’ve always been thankful I answered that classified ad many years ago.
Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • B5
In 1985, Gov. Mario Cuomo, left, tells Enterprise reporter Shawn Tooley, right, that his name sounds like he “should be playing second base for the Pirates.” At center is Ed Hale, former Lake Placid News owner-publisher then reporting for the Watertown Daily Times.
Life lessons on Broadway
(Provided photo — governor’s office)
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By SHAWN TOOLEY appy 125th, Enterprise! You look great. Lots of color for your age. You weren’t even 100 — and I was still in my 20s — when I came of age there, journalistically speaking, back in the 1980s. But those years had a big influence on my life. First, joining the Enterprise saved me from becoming a lawyer. In 1983, I was two weeks from leaving for law school when I saw an ad in the Enterprise for a part-time reporter covering my hometown of Tupper Lake. In hindsight, I realize I was looking for an excuse to stay home. A career in law had been an assumption, not a burning desire. More importantly, I wasn’t ready to move to the city, make new friends and all the rest. After a short interview with Bill Doolittle, the publisher, at the Enterprise office, I was a “journalist,” despite having never written a news article in my life. A few days later, my first piece — about a mundane meeting of the local chamber of commerce — appeared on the front page. Within weeks, I was hooked. Reporters got to meet interesting people and ask challenging questions. The hours were long but loose. What a job! Carol Bruce, the great city editor, patiently taught me the basics of news writing. A house is never “completely destroyed” by fire. (“Destroyed” is sufficient.) A meeting occurs at 8 p.m., not 8 o’clock (which isn’t specific enough). A good first paragraph tells readers the full “who, what, when, where, and why.” Others contributed to my newsroom education in various ways. Crafty Liza Frenette taught me
Shawn Tooley
(Photo provided)
lots of helpful reporter tricks, including the value of the little white lie, such as what you might say to an apartment manager to confirm that so-and-so lives there. If I started a paragraph with the lazy word “Meanwhile,” Managing Editor Charlie Decker would look over and say, disgustedly, “back at the ranch.” I quickly got the point. And I still have a note from Bill where he scolds me (not for the first time) for using legalese in describing local arrests. I liked to quote the cops directly, saying the subject was charged with “larceny at a hardware store,” but Bill demanded the richer, more informative “stealing a hammer.” “Must I make you sign an oath in blood?” he wrote. (Not that his words stuck with me or anything!) Despite such notes (and partly because of them, I’m sure), I developed some decent talent and the part-time gig became full time a few months later. In 1986 I took over for Carol as city editor and soon after that was named
managing editor when Charlie moved on. I wasn’t yet 25, and I was leading the news team and putting out the Enterprise — which I’d read all my life — five days a week. It was glorious. Looking back, I never once beat Dave Munn into the office, even when my editing roles had me arriving by 6:30 each morning. And thank God for that; I needed a cup of his coffee to get going. In addition to Dave, the production team then included Armand Amell, the manager, as well as Fred Charland, Destry Lewis, the two Carols (Baker and Sawyer) and Rick Burman running the press. Jim Bishop ran Circulation, Sue Neale the classifieds. Debbie McDonnell and then Rose Sinisi made sure we got paid on time. Buffy Van Anden moved from advertising to lead production. Bea Drutz proofread every word of copy and dispensed her special brand of motherly care. And Cathy Moore, who ran advertising when I arrived, was publisher, my boss, by the time I left in 1989. (Talk about baptism by fire. Ask Cathy about the time a Saranac Lake village trustee attacked me in her office. She hadn’t been publisher very long and certainly didn’t expect the job to involve breaking up fights, even one-sided ones. And the whole, crazy incident was only partly tied to local politics!) On the news side, I didn’t do the hiring at first, but Bill had an eye for talent (ahem, ahem). The sports department ran itself under Tom Keegan and later Jim Stowell. Some reporters arrived as full-fledged news bulldogs (Chris Mele comes to mind) while others, such as Laura Rappaport, had
writing ability and outgoing natures but needed time to shape those skills for journalism. I fired my first picture taker, but Bella Madden took over and quickly trained herself to be a sharpelbowed news photographer. A few writers joined the staff and left just as quickly, citing the crazy hours, deadline pressure, or just the long winters. I wrote more than 1,000 bylined stories for the Enterprise and twice that many editorials, obituaries, briefs and other “inside” copy. A lot of it concerned everyday town and village board meetings, Adirondack Park Agency debates, and so on. More memorable was a bizarre murder trial in Phoenix, Arizona — a case of grandmatricide with local connections that’s still among the most infamous in the Enterprise library. I also got to question candidates in two congressional debates, fly over the High Peaks with a bush pilot named “Feets,” and judge both a chili cook-off and a talent show. Eventually, the same reticence that kept me from law school led me to give up the news business (well, that, and the low pay). After a short stint with Charlie at the Watertown Daily Times and some freelance work, I’ve since made a living in North Carolina as a writer and manager for tech companies such as IBM and Lenovo. Fortunately, throughout my career, the lessons learned at 61 (now 54) Broadway have served me well. I’m sometimes asked, “How did you write that so quickly?” or, “How do you juggle so many projects?” My answer is always the same: I was once a reporter and editor at a daily newspaper. As we honor the Enterprise in
its 125th year, I’m proud to have played a very, very small part in its history. The paper’s tradition is to publish all the important local news, regardless of who might object. From exposing the excesses of the APA to promoting construction of the local civic center to covering the recent River Pigs dust-up, the Enterprise is always in the thick of it. And every citizen of Saranac Lake, Tupper Lake and Lake Placid is better for it. There’s one thing about today’s Enterprise that I don’t recognize, however. Back in the day, my deadline for finishing Page 1 was 12:30 p.m., which allowed the presses to roll and papers to be loaded onto the trucks by 1. But in truth, I rarely finished by 12:30. Fast-forward 25 years. I’m visiting my mother in her final days at Adirondack Medical Center. In the lobby, I walk by a newspaper honor box about 11 o’clock — er, 11 a.m. (thanks Carol) — and that day’s Enterprise is already on sale. At 11 in the morning. I’ve never asked Peter what his Page 1 deadline is today. I don’t want to know. Not even Dave Munn’s coffee could have gotten me moving early enough to meet it! Happy 125th, Enterprise. ——— (Editor’s note: Whether Shawn wants to know it or not, ever since April, when the Enterprise became a morning paper, the deadline for pages to be sent to press has been 11:30 p.m. the day before. Before that for many years, the deadline was 9:45 a.m. the day of publication, and the paper was expected to be on newsstands in Saranac Lake by noon.)
Bronx boy learned about community journalism here
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By CHRIS MELE n 1986, when I was just out of college and starting my journalism career, I aspired to work for one of the big outlets — the New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times — or even what were then statewide dailies, like the Miami Herald or the Newark StarLedger. Instead, I started at the Enterprise in a part of New York state that, at the time, this Bronx native had never heard of. As a stepping stone, the Enterprise, a five-day-a-week newspaper, felt like the size of a pebble. Looking back, though, it turned out to be the bedrock upon which my career was built. I’ve never stopped being grateful for and proud of the experiences I had working there from 1986 to ’88. Today, as the print newspaper industry undergoes paroxysms of change (read: steep decreases in revenues and readership and sharp increases in job losses and other cutbacks, including closures), the Enterprise celebrates 125 years as a pillar of community journalism. By the time I arrived at the Enterprise newsroom as a freshfaced 22-year-old, I had spent my entire life in New York City.
‘I learned about the importance of holding those in power to account, but doing it in a way that I could look them in the eye on the supermarket line the next day and we would share no ill will.’
Chris Mele
(Photo provided)
My sense of scale was always big: skyscrapers, mass transit systems, museums, food, movie theaters, sports teams — you name it. That sense of big extended to news as well. I grew up with the Daily News and its delicious tabloid sensibilities of covering the city, its politicians and their foibles, and sensational stories like the Son of Sam serial killer, and disasters like the 1977 blackout. So imagine the whipsaw I had coming to Saranac Lake and covering stories like the theft of the
“Keep Right” sign that stood where Broadway and Main Street meet, or calling Bob Kampf every morning to collect the latest readings from his weather station in Ray Brook. It was not that I thought those assignments were beneath me. Far from it, in fact. I was a newbie who was being schooled in daily journalism by the likes of Bill Doolittle and Carol Bruce, then the editor-publisher and city editor, respectively. It was exciting and fun, and learning experiences abounded. For instance, I learned what it meant to work and live in a small community. On one memorable occasion, in a fit of pique, I randomly complained to an Enterprise advertis-
ing rep about a village employee, referring to him in a way unsuitable to be retold in a family newspaper. Without batting an eyelash, she looked at me and said, “Oh, him? Yeah, that’s my brother.” I can’t be sure but I either spit out my coffee or swallowed my tongue. (She agreed with my assessment, by the way.) What I came to appreciate — and truly embrace — was the vital role a newspaper plays in a community. With its obituaries, police blotter, coverage of high school sports and annual events like the Winter Carnival, a newspaper like the Enterprise binds a community and promotes a shared experience among its readers. I learned about the importance of holding those in power to
account, but doing it in a way that I could look them in the eye on the supermarket line the next day and we would share no ill will. I learned about the importance of sources, of ongoing relationships and how newspapers can help a community heal in times of tragedy and loss. I’ve been in newspapers for almost 33 years, and now I’m at the New York Times as a senior staff editor and weekend editor for its breaking news desk, the Express Team. But I spent 28 years in community newspapers — the PressRepublican, the Times HeraldRecord in Middletown and the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. I wouldn’t give up a second of my time at those community dailies. They enriched my life and taught me valuable lessons, much the way the Enterprise did. I know the press has its critics, and some will derisively refer to some news outlets as “fake news,” but I’m here to tell you the Enterprise is the genuine article (pardon the pun) and has a special place in my heart. Enterprise, here’s to another 125 years of great community journalism!
B6 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
These front pages of the Adirondack Enterprise were published in the 19-teens, when Kenneth Goldthwaite was the newspaper’s owner and publisher. Under his leadership the paper’s frequency grew from weekly to twice a week and then three times a week, with circulation exceeding 5,000. The Enterprise offices were then located inside the Harrietstown Town Hall, which burned down in 1926. The paper at right is a special “racing final” edition for the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival.
Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • B7
This is the first issue of the Adirondack Enterprise after it became a daily, published Nov. 15, 1926. The paper’s former offices in the Harrietstown Town Hall had burned down earlier that year, and the paper had moved to a new home at 76 (now 77) Main St. From 1926 to 1973, the Enterprise was based in the Fowler Block at 76 (now 77) Main St., Saranac Lake, a building now occupied by Origin Coffee Human Power Planet Earth bike shop and Earthshine Yoga. (Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)
B8 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
Under the ownership of Roger Tubby and James Loeb, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise started a annual tradition — a spoof newspaper called the Adirondack Yearly Emptyprize, published during the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival. The first Emptyprize, in 1954, was just one side of one page. This is the second, in 1955, which took up the front portion of the regular paper. And no, in case you’re wondering, this is not real news. Below are two other front pages from the 1950s covering major events in Saranac Lake history: the proposal for the hospital on Lake Colby and the selling of the Trudeau Sanatorium property to American Management Association.
Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • B9
The Enterprise published this photo essay in 1962 to show how its staff assembled the newspaper each day.
The Adirondack Daily Enterprise staff poses in 1965. From left in the back row are Publisher Jim Loeb, Joe Evans, Howard Riley, Rip Allen, Joe Madden, Don Renadette, Bill McLaughlin and Dave Hunter. In the middle row are Evelyn Outcalt, Mae Hartigan, DeDe Duprey, Dorothy Smith, Rose Dest and Marge Lamy. In the front are Destre Lewis, Fred Charland, Roger Stephenson, Dave Munn and Armand Amell. (Enterprise file photo)
B10 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, the Enterprise staff tore down the front page they were almost ready to publish and redid it that afternoon to include the news, as well as a short front-page editorial. The building at 61 (now 54) Broadway, Saranac Lake, is for sale sometime before it became home to the Enterprise in 1973.
(Enterprise file photo)
Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • B11
The Enterprise took on a more hard-hitting style in the 1970s, as this 1979 front page shows. The Enterprise building is seen with a red facade and its name in white letters, probably in the 1980s.
(Enterprise file photo)
B12 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
During the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and Lake Placid News teamed up to put out the Daily Olympic Digest, a special tabloid published every day during the games and sold separately from the newspapers that turned out to be a big success. Here are two of the Digest’s front pages, covering athletic highlights of the games: Eric Heiden’s fourth of five gold medals in speedskating and the U.S. hockey team’s gold-medal win over Finland, after defeating the mighty USSR in the semifinals.
Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • B13
The Enterprise news staff scrambled on deadline Monday morning, Aug. 29, 2011, to round up news of damage done by Irene, a hurricane-turned-tropical-storm that hovered over the North Country and doused it with rain, swelling streams and rivers to beyond their bursting point.
B14 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
Three weeks after two convicted murderers broke out of the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, North Country people celebrated when the second was brought in by a state trooper near the U.S.-Canada border on June 28, 2015. The Enterprise news staff had covered the manhunt on a daily basis and covered David Sweat’s capture from various angles.
Thursday, October 17, 2019 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • B15
2019 Enterprise staff
The news staff is, from left, Lake Placid News Editor Andy Flynn, Managing Editor Peter Crowley, Staff Writers Griffin Kelly and Aaron Cerbone, News Editor Steve Miller and Staff Writer Elizabeth Izzo.
(Enterprise photo — Lindsay Munn)
The day shift mailroom crew is, from left, Tom Kilroy, Vinnie Pelletieri, Ron Burdick (also the building custodian) and Dawn Flynn.
(Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)
The night shift mailroom crew is, from left, Kaleb McCasland, Brandon Lane and Devon Stratton.
The press crew is, from left, Cory Coolidge, Jesse Phelan, Rick Burman (foreman) and Jeremy McCasland.
(Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)
Established 1902 Wishes The Adirondack Daily Enterprise All The Best On Their 125th Anniversary
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(Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)
B16 • Adirondack Daily Enterprise 125th Anniversary • Thursday, October 17, 2019
2019 Enterprise staff
The front office staff at the Enterprise, from left, are advertising representatives Lindsey Munn, Carol Swirsky and Susan Moore, Business Manager Donna Leonard, Circulation Coordinator Liz Murray, classified advertising representative Connie Martelle and business office assistant Scott Patnode. (Enterprise photo — Lou Reuter)
The Production Department is, from left, Tori Martinez, Production The sports staff is, from left, Sports Editor Morgan Ryan, Senior Sports Manager Steve Bradley and Corey Trombley. Writer Lou Reuter and Outdoors/Sports Writer Justin A. Levine. (Enterprise photo — Lindsay Munn)
(Enterprise photo — Peter Crowley)
Acknowledgements for this special section: Advertising sales by Susan Moore, Carol Swirsky and Lindsay Munn; page layout by Morgan Ryan; front-page banner graphic by Steve Bradley; flowers on building facade by Donna Leonard.
Congratulations! Village of
Happy Anniversary 125th From
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tthh Happy 1 2 5 th Happy 125 Anniversary Anniversary
ffrom r o m the the To w n of Town o f St. S t . Armand Armand E Essex ssex C County o u n t y NY NY E Established s t a b l i s h e d 1844 1844
C O N G R AT U L AT I O N S ON 125 YEARS