January 6, 2016
Community News marks 95th year Recipes
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Sensible tips for healthy eating
Letter to the Editor
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By Charlotte R. Beard
The Community News staff at a recent company gathering.
Photo by Heather Deatz
Publications owned by the Huneke family have been serving St. Louis region for nearly a century Around Town
By Brett Auten What you are holding in your hands is the end result of many things. Were it not for dogged determination and a splash of serendipity, this newspaper, the longest running weekly in the St. Louis metropolitan area, would not be here again this week stronger than ever. The Community News turned 95-years-old on Jan. 1, 2016. Once it gained its footing, the Community News and Huneke Publications, with a pledge to hyper-local coverage on all types of subjects, events, festivals and features, has blossomed into a weekly newspaper in both St. Louis and St. Charles Counties and two news magazines; Crossroads Magazine in Lake St. Louis, O’Fallon, Wentzville and Lincoln County and St. Louis County’s Our Town Magazine. Buoyed by both newsstand and online publications, the longtime-member of the Missouri Press Association and National Press Association, with a combined circulation of 58,000, is doing more than simply surviving heading into 2016. For Bob Huneke Jr., the third-generation owner who never had aspirations to get into the unnerving world of publishing, it has been an arduous but fun and rewarding road from the first office at 14th and Cass Avenue in St. Louis to Bryan Road in O’Fallon. Here is a brief peak at our history. Getting started: With a love of the printed word, Harry Huneke Sr.
launched the newspaper out of a small office at 14th Street and Cass Avenue in 1921. Through the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the Community News eventually set up shop at Grand and West Florissant and became the largest weekly newspaper in North County. It became so popular that it spawned copycat papers in Overland, South County, West County and St. Charles County. Robert Huneke Sr. took over in 1961 and he, Charles Bockskopf and Ilene Willis held the paper together for decades. With the boon of competition, the Community News endured some difficult times in the late 1970s and 1980s. Huneke Jr. meanwhile had been living in Michigan working outside of the publishing business. But all that changed in the 1990s when he returned to St. Louis. With his father’s health growing worse and Huneke Jr’s frustration with corporate life, he decided to purchase the newspaper from Huneke, Sr. “The paper was is very bad shape, but after being burned twice in the corporate world, I wanted to do my own thing. I didn’t know what I was getting into. After a couple of years of very hard work and some modest success we had made some progress but were deep in debt. It was a hard sell going up against the (Suburban) Journals but I was too naïve and too stuck to give up. I felt like Charles Lindbergh half way across the Atlantic, it was too late to turn back and I could not
land. I had to keep going. Thanks to our dedicated hard working employees, and with the support of my wife Donna, we brought the business into a safe landing.” Then and beyond: The paper looked beyond its front doorstep and the scope widened to include more regional news and an eventual game changer. Like social media on paper or a bulletin board for the public, the ‘What’s Happening’ section launched and like a small pebble rolling down a hill, began to gain momentum. Content-wise, the paper consisted mostly of informational excerpts. But ‘What’s Happening’, with its simple listings of everything from church fish fries, support group times, club meeting times, began to grow a consistent and eager audience. “The other guys wouldn’t run it,” Huneke said. “They thought it was not newsworthy. The only place that would run it was the Community News and we kept doing it more and more.” The paper was still up against formidable odds with the competition printing and throwing hundreds of thousands of papers every week and there was no way Huneke could match it. In the late 1990s, the Community News began sprouting up in newsstands at all of the major local grocery chains in Bridgeton, Hazelwood, and on Main Street in St. Charles. This was when O’Fallon was See 95TH YEAR page 2
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MO National Guard prepares
Learn & Play
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Scrooged Again
Movie
“Brooklyn”
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