July 28, 2022 - Special Edition

THE

FREE At Newstands

and from Carriers

140TH Year

herald Hyde Park

$40.00 a year by mail

6100 S Blackstone Ave, Chicago IL 60637

"Chicago's oldest community newspaper"

Thursday, July 28th 2022

HERALD UNDER NEW 'OWNERSHIP'!

Bruce Sagan Retires After 69 Years HERALD STAFF REPORT Bruce Sagan, publisher of the Hyde Park Herald for 69 years and a widely-respected figure in Chicago, regional, and national journalism, retired this month. Sagan transferred ownership and assets of Chicago’s oldest community newspaper to the South Side

Weekly NFP, a newspaper and journalism nonprofit based in Woodlawn.

Sagan started his career in 1951 as a 22-year-old “copy boy” for Hearst International News Service. He worked as a journalist and as publisher of the Herald for several decades.

Sagan went on to publish 28 community newspapers in the CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

Will Not Interrupt Publication

BY AARON GETTINGER The Hyde Park Herald and the South Side Weekly, two newspapers serving the South Side of Chicago, have merged as a nonprofit. The merger comes at a time when newspapers across the country face mounting pressure to develop new long-term models to financially sustain local journalism.

Both papers will continue to publish as standalone publications uninterrupted, now under the nonprofit organization South Side Weekly NFP. (Nonprofits cannot be owned per se — their assets can only be transferred.)

“This is an opportunity to build a scalable framework for community news, one that combines the Herald’s 140-year long commitment to neighborhood reporting with the Weekly’s communitycentered approach to newsgathering on the greater South Side,” said Jason Schumer, the Weekly’s Managing Director. Ultimately, Schumer said, the partnership will strengthen both papers’ CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

The South Side Weekly and Hyde Park Herald teams together for the first time. Photo by Marc Monaghan

It Started With a Knock at the Door HERALD STAFF REPORT

This story was originally published in the July 21, 2004 edition of the Hyde Park Herald, commemorating Sagn’s 50-year anniversary as publisher.

It started in late June of 1953 with a ringing doorbell.

When the 24-year-old Bruce Sagan answered the door of his apartment at 6118 S. Greenwood Ave, there was

Walker Sandbach, the manager of what at that time was a small cooperative grocery located on 57th Street.

Sandbach said he represented a committee of neighborhood people who were trying to find some way of keeping their local paper alive. Sagan, then an editor and reporter for Chicago's City News Bureau, was asked by Sandbach if he would like to publish the local newspaper in Hyde Park.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 5

BEHIND THE COVER On July 23, 1953, almost 69 years to the day, the Herald announced the transfer of ownership from Great Lakes Publishing Company to Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Sagan of 6118 Greenwood Avenue.

It’s a testament to Sagan’s legacy that today, in 2022, a similar announcement can be printed in the Hyde Park Herald, after 140 years of continuous operation.

This week’s cover is an homage to the 1953 cover, reproduced on the left. One notable change to the headline announcing the transfer is that the word ownership appears in quotes. That’s because Sagan transferred the Herald’s assets to South Side Weekly NFP, converting the paper into a nonprofit. Nonprofits can neither be bought nor sold and they do not have owners in the traditional sense.

You’ll find several other artifacts from Sagan’s tenure at the Herald in this special section. We plan to keep digging into the archives to explore this storied paper’s legacy in the community. We hope you’ll join us.

The First Draft of History: Herald Headlines from 1953 August 6, 1953: Herald moves to 5335 Lake Park (Demolished in Urban Renewal) August 13, 1953: Army recommends the movement of the 5th Army Headquarters from 1600 Hyde Park Blvd. (Now the site of Regents Park) to Fort Sheridan.

September 10, 1953: Ray school avoids double shift after Board of Education rents additional space at local church, following local protests.

September 24, 1953: Turn on new street lights from 51st to 55th.

October 15, 1953: Hyde Park art center celebrates its 25th anniversary with a Tea and an exhibit of members' work.

October 21, 1953: Field Foundation gives U of C $100,000 grant for neighbor­hood planning effort.

December 16, 1953: Professor Harold Urey of the U of C says the earth is 4 to 4 1/2 billion years old.

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It Started With a Knock at the Door

CONTINUED FROM THE COVER

HERALD STAFF REPORT

Sandbach told Sagan that he was on the list of potential people because he had been active in the local block club and was a journalist. Sandbach would later admit that Sagan was the committee's last hope.

No one else they had contacted had been interested.

The previous Herald owner, Michael Weinberg, had set a deadline and there was very little time, they told Sagan. It seemed that the current publisher had announced that he was going to close the paper because he could not make it a viable economic business. Weinberg had been aggressive in promoting the paper and rumor had it that the paper had lost, in 1953 dollars, $20,000 to $35,000 (equivalent today to $130,000 to $230,000).

The committee was encouraged by Sagan's willingness to at least take a look.

In addition to Sandbach, the committee included Hubert Will, who became a U.S. Federal Judge, Benjamin Heinemann, who later headed the Northwestern Railroad, and Sam Borderlon, a dealer and designer who would lead the development of modern furniture.

Sagan offered to pay $2,500 for the Herald name, the subscription list and all the office furniture in place; there was no printing equipment as that was all done under con­tract with printing houses.

Sagan said, "We managed to raise $5,000 from family and if the purchase price was $2,500 we would have $2,500 to lose trying to make the newspaper break even. We thought we could last until Christmas."

And so Sagan and his first wife, Judith Sagan, purchased the paper. "But," Sagan said, "The actual transaction did not close until after the former publisher had pub­lished his last issue."

In that issue, on July 16, the former pub­ lisher wrote a farewell which said in part, "We feel some pride that we have produced a respectable community newspaper. We have done so at a tremendous cost, expecting that the organizations and individuals that we

were presumably serving would in turn support us by joining our subscription cam­paign…failing such support, drastic financial steps would be required."

Because no sale had been completed to Sagan, that last issue only said, "Continued future ownership appears hopeful."

And so on July 23, the Sagans published their first issue; the paper did not miss a week.

"There we were in charge of the old­ est community newspaper in Chicago, with a history that dated back to January 1882, and we did not know anything about publishing a paper. It was indeed baptism by fire. We worked 60 hour weeks for a very long time but we finally figured out publishing," he said. (See story on Sagan's journalism career, page 7.)

A former Herald editor from 1958, Lee Pravatiner, returned to school at the U. of C., and wrote a Master's thesis on the Herald's role in the Hyde Park community. He quotes publisher Sagan after several years of pub­lishing saying, "We're broke, but happy. Contrary to all expectations, including my own, it looks like we're here to stay."

Pravatiner, in his thesis, writes about University of Chicago Sociologist Morris Janowitz, who wrote a study of the commu­nity newspapers in Chicago.

Janowitz had said the community press grew out of local business interests. He said the community paper "acts as a mechanism which seeks to maintain local consensus through emphasis on common values rather than through solu­ tion of conflicting values."

However, Pavatiner said, the Sagan Herald "abandoned its traditional role as a creature serving neighborhood commercial interests, thrived on community conflict rather than merchandising consensus, and became a potent force." He pointed out that after a few years under Sagan's ownership the "Herald had established itself in its new image, possessed of a definite personality and firmly entrenched

as a community institution."

As is still true today, Pravatiner points out that in his day the paper's readership was not all uniformly friendly.

He says some readers were outspokenly hostile but they all used the Herald as a place to expound their views, particularly in the Letters to the editor column. He wrote, "I became one of the key arsenals from which combatants drew ammunition, sought weak spots in their opponent's armor, and sought to manipulate the formation of com­munity imagery and opinion."

Since its founding 122 years ago, there have been at least 12 publishers of the Herald. There may have been more but the records from the early 1900s are missing. The longest tenure prior to Sagan was held by Spencer Castle, who guided the paper from 1927 through

1940. Castle, who was still living in Hyde Park when Sagan became publisher, told him that the Depression of the 1930s almost did in the paper.

Sagan thinks the toughest moment in the paper's history must have been the annexa­tion issue of 1889. Hyde Park was an inde­pendent village, stretching from 39th Street to 15th Street. Hyde Park's vote made Chicago the United States' second largest city, outstripping places like Buffalo and Cleveland.

The Herald of that day opposed the merger. Says Sagan, "I am not sure where I would have stood on the issue."

Looking back on the paper's long history, Sagan said, "I like the motto of the founders of the paper, Fred Bennet and Clarence Dresser. In 1882, they put at the top of their masthead: 'Independent, Progressive, Clean, Local."' ¬

Congratulations, Bruce

from Hyde Park Neighborhood Club!

From one community institution to another, we recognize and appreciate your passion for local journalism. Thank you for making our community stronger through the Herald!

HPNC Mission: Hyde Park Neighborhood Club brings people together to strengthen the health, vitality, and sustainability of our diverse local community through programs and partnerships, with a particular focus on child and youth development.

hpnclub.org JULY 28, 2022 ¬ SPECIAL INSERT 5

Historic South Side newspaper changes hands

CONTINUED FROM THE COVER

BY AARON GETTINGER

ability to support community journalism on the South Side of Chicago.

In an interview, Bruce Sagan, the Herald’s publisher since 1953, said "the economic changes in the journalism business are such that there need to be a shift." The Herald was profitable in 2021 after partnering with the Weekly, but unprofitable in 2020 and 2019.

"The Hyde Park Herald standing on its own, like all newspapers, was losing revenue and losing circulation — circumstances we're all now used to,” said Sagan. “The existence of South Side Weekly and the Herald, in terms of their contents, approaches to an area which is in some ways similar and in some ways overlapping — that offers an opportunity now to be taken that could lead to some understanding of a new economic structure for this kind of journalism," Sagan said.

Printing and distribution have always been newspapers' biggest expense after payroll. The Internet Age's promise was to bring about a significantly different economic potential for the industry, as websites are relatively inexpensive to operate. That model went largely unrealized when classified ads overwhelmingly shifted to other online listings, the fundamental nature of advertising changed (i.e., consumers could use the internet to search for goods and services they needed) and online subscription revenue has not yet made up lost revenue except for a few national news organizations.

Tim Franklin, senior associate dean at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a former president of the Poynter Institute, said what is happening at the Herald is not unusual in the context of the broader crisis that local news faces, with revenue down on the order of 70% over the last 15 years because of declining print ad revenue 6 SPECIAL INSERT¬ JULY 28, 2022

and digital ad revenue not making up the difference.

"The business model for local news has been vaporized," Franklin said in an interview. "The problem is also especially acute for smaller community publications, because they've also suffered the same loss of revenue that everybody else has.”

According to a June report from Northwestern that Franklin co-authored, within the last two years, more than 360 newspapers have shuttered. By 2025, the report speculates, the country is on track to lose a third of its newspapers.

By becoming a nonprofit, Franklin said the Herald "is at the front end" of an emerging trend in the industry "of commercial news organizations converting to nonprofit status." In 2019, the Salt Lake Tribune sent shockwaves through the industry when it became the first big-city daily to go nonprofit. Locally, the Chicago Reader is transitioning to a nonprofit model, and the Sun-Times, acquired by Chicago Public Media, has become the second big city daily to go nonprofit.

Franklin said this transition opens

the door to revenue that might not have been available otherwise, such as foundation and philanthropic funding from corporate and individual donors.

“Those are dollars that (papers) would not get in all likelihood as a commercial enterprise,” said Franklin. “That's the bet, is that there will be enough revenue from donors, individuals and foundations to help compensate for some of these other losses and to be on a path towards sustainability."

In addition to subscriptions, philanthropy and advertising revenue,

The South Side Weekly and Hyde Park Herald teams take a photo together for the first time. Front row, left to right: Marc Monaghan, contributing photographer, Alma Campos, immigration editor, Zoe Pharo, contributing writer. Middle row, left to right: Sky Patterson, director of fact-checking, Chima Ikoro, community builder, Jacqueline Serrato, Weekly editor-in-chief, Hannah Faris, Herald editor-in-chief, Brigid Maniates, outgoing director of operations. Back row, left to right: Tony Zralka, production manager, Spencer Bibbs, contributing photographer, Susan Malone, advertising manager, Aaron Gettinger, staff writer, Adam Przybyl, Weekly managing editor, Malik Jackson, special projects coordinator, Jason Schumer, managing director/publisher.

the Herald has been experimenting with volunteer payments for the news. "We say to some of those people, 'It costs us more than we can generate through advertising, will you help?' And the answer's yes, at least for some people,” Sagan said.

F

red Bennet and Clarence Dresser founded the Hyde Park Herald in 1882, 29 years after Paul Cornell bought lakefront land seven miles south of a Midwestern boomtown called Chicago and the year before Hyde Park Township was annexed into the city. It is the third-oldest newspaper in Chicago, after the Tribune (founded in 1847) and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin (founded in 1854).

Sagan, Originally of Summit, New Jersey, has lived in Chicago since matriculating at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. He never graduated, having begun his journalism career in 1951 as a copy boy — the longsince obsolete position that entailed taking typed articles from one section of a newsroom to another — for the Hearst International News Service.

In 1953, then-Herald owner Michael Weinberg Jr. was on the verge of closing the paper because it wasn’t making money.

So Sagan, 24-years-old and a night editor of the City News Bureau, bought the Herald for only $2,500.

Sagan went on to buy the Southtown Economist (now the Daily Southtown) in 1958 and made his fortune there; it eventually came to publish 30 community newspapers. After founding the Ancona School, 4770 S. Dorchester Ave., he moved out of Hyde Park in the 1980s and continued publishing the Herald.

Just as the nature of advertising has changed, Sagan noted that the nature of local journalism has changed. Forty years ago, he said the Herald was publishing next week's church sermons and sundry announcements for the schools and neighborhood organizations.

"We were communicating for the institutions to their own participants," he said. "Churches and schools now have their own ability to talk to their audiences. In the old days, we published all kinds of news, including the kind that I'm talking about, communications for the institutions, and we talked about the things that were governmental, etc."

"Forty years we wouldn't have

published a list of the bills the state reps voted for, but we did this year," Sagan said.

S

chumer said the Herald-Weekly merger process began in January 2020 at a meeting brokered by Jamie Kalven, then the executive director of the Invisible Institute, the South Side investigative journalism nonprofit. Sagan told Schumer that he was interested in donating the Herald to South Side Weekly, meaning shared back-office, front-office and advertising managers with intact and separate editorial teams.

"A lot of for-profit newspapers, instead of scaling their operations in response to declining revenue, just close down," Schumer said. "But to Bruce's credit, he really wanted to keep this thing alive. And he realized that we could scale accordingly by combining forces."

Medill's Metro Media Lab has worked with South Side Weekly, which was founded as a nonprofit in 2013, and Franklin said that the news organization is financially healthy and doing well with its readers and community. He thinks that consumer perception could benefit the Herald.

“The Herald's success is going to depend on whether it can raise enough revenue from foundations, civically oriented individuals and corporate donors and memberships,” Franklin said, adding that most nonprofit news organizations — the vast majority of which are public radio stations — have membership programs. He said doing nothing was not an option, given the local news industry's realities.

"I think we are in this moment where there is a lot of money to support journalism, and there's a lot of interesting startups and ideas happening in Chicago in particular,” said Schumer. “(But) we know that the long-term sustainability of local journalism is figuring out how to get the communities that we serve to support it."

The Weekly is still awaiting official 501(c)(3) status, which will make it exempt from federal income taxes. But the organization has a fiscal sponsorship agreement with the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave., where the Herald relocated to in 2020, meaning that tax-deductible donations to both publications can now be accepted.

JULY 28, 2022 ¬ SPECIAL INSERT 7

Schumer doesn't doesn’t plan to put up a paywall anytime soon. "Accessibility is super-important,” he said. “I think everyone has the right to access reliable information about their community.”

He noted that accessible, wellresearched, independent and thoroughly fact-checked journalism is essential in combating the rising tide of disinformation online. “I think it only perpetuates (disinformation) when we make more reliable information hard to get,” said Schumer.

He plans to launch a membership program across both publications that keeps the core content free. A survey Medill did last year of South Side Weekly readers found that two-thirds support such a membership program, whereas just 15% of South and West Side news consumers Medill surveyed support the same kind of model."

Schumer said the Herald is trying to find a solution without compromising the robustness of its news operation. He wants its staff to respond to breaking and timely news, and he also wants it to work closely with the communities the Herald serves to utilize their information and expertise.

There will be more opportunities for community feedback and engagement.

He added that the South Side Weekly NFP is interested in expanding the model, perhaps opening other neighborhoodspecific news organizations with a shared back-office.

"What would it look like to open up a newspaper in Englewood and have a small editorial staff that’s connected to the community like the Herald does?" he asked. "For us, it's actually an interesting way to think about scale, to get the kind of quality coverage that local papers used to provide but really don't any longer, other than a handful of papers like the Hyde Park Herald."

Schumer said he hopes the Herald will keep printing a newspaper in perpetuity. He thinks print is a valuable medium for a lot of reasons, from aesthetics to accessibility. For South Siders without reliable internet access, people experiencing homelessness or incarcerated people, a printed newspaper is still the best way to share information.

S

agan plans to fully retire now, saying he can give advice but that "the world has changed remarkably."

"We've put the Herald, I think, into a new situation with South Side Weekly, but the nature of news content is that the Herald deals with the very local backand-forth and the Weekly deals in a broader way with the city and the South Side. Those two things, I think, are both very useful in the development of content that people will pay for," he said. "And can we find out what will support that kind of journalism? That, in a sense, is the purpose of the combination."

"I'm still active and doing things," Sagan said — he is on the boards of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Joffrey Ballet and the Chicago Public Library Foundation as well as the management committee of classical and folk radio station WFMT — "but in this particular circumstance, I know that what's needed is a relatively long-range effort to find a solution. And I can't be sure that I'll last."

"For me, the community newspaper has always been one of the things that has made a community," Sagan said. "And it is a concern to me that with the loss of the community press, communities will lose that sense."

"I'm doing this now because I believe this is an opportunity for the business model to be developed in a way that could be very meaningful to the whole situation," Sagan said. "And having been through all the meaningful changes of the past 70 years, and there have been many, I know that they don't happen in short-range terms."

"It gives me great satisfaction to know that we may, if we're very lucky, develop some ideas that prove the model for the future. Everybody's looking for it.

Everybody's trying." ¬

Bruce, congratulations on 69 years of Chicago journalism Backed by 60 years of doing things right…

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8 SPECIAL INSERT¬ JULY 28, 2022

Congratulations, Congratulations,

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Bruce Sagan Retires After 69 Years

CONTINUED FROM THE COVER

HERALD STAFF REPORT Chicago metropolitan area. He folded them into a regional daily newspaper in the southern suburbs, which is now known as the Daily Southtown and is part of the Chicago Tribune publications.

He published papers in four states and worked on newspaper projects with the New York Times and Financial Times of London. Sagan was a consultant to the Washington Post and Media General.

Sagan became publisher of the Herald in 1953, when it was a failing weekly local newspaper. The publisher had announced that the paper was going out of business and was publishing its last edition.

A Hyde Park neighborhood group approached Sagan about taking over the paper, given that he was now a reporter at the City News Bureau and active in neighborhood improvement initiatives.

The 24-year-old Sagan borrowed $2500 from family and friends to buy the paper’s name, office furniture and mailing list.

He published the very next week, never missing an issue. Initially, Sagan and one additional editorial person reported, wrote stories and editorials, sold ads, and started the newsstand route.

Sagan’s work at the Herald reflects the evolution and challenges of both Chicago’s South Side and more broadly, of community journalism. When Sagan bought the Herald, Hyde Park was just beginning to face two profound American problems: race relations and the decline and rebuilding of inner city neighborhoods. The Herald began to report on these complex issues, providing a local, frontline perspective. Under Sagan’s leadership, the Herald wrote about and editorialized for the creation of the city’s first interracial neighborhood.

The Herald developed a reputation for addressing tough issues and giving voice to community concerns.

Sagan reimagined and transformed 10 SPECIAL INSERT¬ JULY 28, 2022

the role of a community newspaper, which traditionally served neighborhood commercial interests. Former Herald editor Lee Pavatiner wrote that the Sagan Herald “abandoned” this traditional role, “thrived on community conflict rather than merchandising consensus, and became a potent force.”

He pointed out that under Sagan’s ownership the Herald “established itself in its new image, possessed of a definite personality and firmly entrenched as a community institution.”

Sagan brings a valuable historic perspective to the economic, market, and technological challenges facing local journalism and community newspapers, especially given the disruptive rise of digital media. In the 1980’s, Sagan helped Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications develop a curriculum for the internet age. “Our job was to catapult the school forward and truly revolutionize the curriculum,” said John Lavine, then dean of Medill. “Bruce was indispensable. He had wisdom and strategic insights that penetrated every facet of what the media does. Bruce understood the changes coming long before others saw them.”

“The internet impact on classified advertising and the change in retailing have forever changed the economic system that supported most journalism,” Sagan noted.

Sagan and his staff have been recognized for their journalistic efforts in local reporting. In one notable example, Sagan’s staff won a 2006 George Polk Award for investigative journalism for a series on a Chicago Alderperson and her family engaged in nepotism. The committee awarding the prize stated, “Its lone editor, four reporters and an intern tackled the complex investigation

of the $19.5-million Harold Washington Cultural Center, which had been touted

by Third Ward Alderman Dorothy Tillman as ‘the cornerstone of historic Bronzeville’s economic and cultural rebirth.’ Instead, the team exposed the Center as a money-losing operation that was staffed by Tillman’s family, friends and political cronies.” Tillman lost her next aldermanic election. At the same event, the Wall Street Journal won an award for their work exposing a backdating stock scheme.

Sagan has been President of the Illinois Press Association. In 2017, he was chairman of the management committee

of the Chicago Sun Times. Sagan is active in the cultural life of Chicago, serving on the Board of Steppenwolf, the Joffrey Ballet, and the Chicago Public Library Foundation. He serves on the management committee for classical music station WFMT. Sagan has been engaged in civic life throughout his career, serving as Vice Chairman of the Chicago Public Library Board, Secretary of the Chicago Housing Authority, and Chairman of the Illinois Arts Council and the Illinois Housing Development Authority. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson appointed him to federal commissions. ¬

On Behalf of Fuchs & Roselli, Ltd.

Thank You Bruce Sagan

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From Copy Boy to Enduring Innovator An Interview with outgoing Hyde Park Herald Owner, Bruce Sagan

BY JILL PETTY

Jill Petty, South Side Weekly’s board chair, met virtually with Bruce Sagan, outgoing Hyde Park Herald owner, to reflect on his 70 plus years in the newspaper publishing industry. They discussed the Herald’s origins; Hyde Park’s uniqueness; changes within the industry; and the rewards and challenges of a long career in journalism.The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Jill Petty: I was able to be in the Herald/ Weekly office on July 1, the first day the Herald had new ownership since July, 1953 – when you became owner and publisher, Bruce.

While reviewing old issues of the Herald, I spent time with Jason Schumer, Managing Director, Tony Zralka, Production Manager, and Hannah Faris, Herald’s Editor-in-Chief. And I felt we should have had some champagne, or some fancy sparkling drinks! So we could toast each other, and you. Because you held it down for a very long time, sir.

Bruce Sagan: I’ve known many fellow publishers in this business. Especially because I was lucky to do this work during a time when community newspapers were growing like crazy, all over the country.

I have known people who spent their careers in it. But by accident of my DNA,

I'm still here! And so, you know, I've managed a set of years. It's probably very, very unusual.

Jill Petty: Can you speak to some of the most important trends and patterns that you were able to witness, and also participate in, over the last 70 years?

For instance, you referenced a rise in community newspapers during your career – can you speak more about the conditions that allowed this to happen?

Bruce Sagan: Remember that we purchased the Herald right after the Second World War. This was a period of growth for urban centers – our big cities

– and for the suburbs. In fact, there was a national effort to build housing for all returning soldiers, and vast suburbs were built. If we look back, local newspapers were started in almost each one of those places. We finally wound up calling these new newspapers “the community press.”

But initially it was very heavily balanced in the suburban market, because that's where the growth was going on.

But in some ways, Chicago was special.

Because obviously, this trend took hold earlier here. There were a number of community newspapers here, even before the war. And the Hyde Park Herald started in 1882 – the oldest community paper in the city, and now one of the oldest in JULY 28, 2022 ¬ SPECIAL INSERT 11

Congratulations to Bruce on a Fantastic Run!

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the country.

Jill Petty: Why did the Herald initially take hold in Hyde Park?

Bruce Sagan: By the late 1800s, Hyde Park was like a rich suburban community, where wealthy people owned fancy second homes. For example, if you go a bit north of 51st Street into South Kenwood – many of those grand homes were built in the 1890s. And by then, Hyde Park was becoming a place for people to own fancy first homes.

As the area continued to grow, people wanted to know what was going on in their community.

When the Herald started in 1882, Hyde Park was like a village, and separate from the city. And Hyde Park Township, if you want to call it that, ran from Pershing Road – then 39th street – to the north, State Street on the west side, and 138th Street and the Calumet River on the south end. Really the entire South Side.

Jill Petty: Indeed. I didn’t know how large Hyde Park had been until I read earlier issues of the Herald! And I recall reading about “the annexation issue” in some of the older papers at the office – even recent special issues of the Herald referenced what a divisive issue it had been.

Bruce Sagan: It was a gigantic territory – sort of like Chicago's Brooklyn. And it grew and grew. So in a sense, we had the same phenomenon in the 1880s that we just talked about in the 1940s and 1950s, after the war. Hyde Park was like a suburb, and residents wanted a dedicated source for information about the community.

Here’s a great example. The earliest physical copy of the Herald we have is Volume 1, Number 8 – dated April 29, 1882. The entire front page is devoted to the school budget for the township of Hyde Park. I’m not talking about the Chicago Public School board – Hyde Park ran their own schools, had their own superintendent.

So, it’s not surprising many Hyde Parkers were against joining the city. To some extent, this broke down along class lines.

The guys working the mills out by 100th street, and others working in factories throughout this large neighborhood – they wanted better services, and there were more numbers supporting annexation in 1889.

Jill Petty: Bruce, it’s so interesting to me that some of these tensions, some of these competing agendas – you could say they’re in the DNA of the paper. And some might say they’ve continued to play out over the years!

Bruce Sagan: Yes, indeed. And the founding of the Herald is connected directly to the growth of a major American city – that’s fascinating by itself. But when we took over the paper, at the end of the Second World War, it was a new moment – cities had gotten old, and urban planning was emerging.

Not just here – all over the world, because of the war. There were enough bombings in Europe to have to replan the world.

They were doing it, and it was happening in the US too. All of these issues were alive and present in Chicago, and in Hyde Park.

But Hyde Park – because of its geographical location and demographics – came head to head with race in very different ways than other cities, or communities in Chicago. What people wanted to do here – to create an interracial community – was just unthinkable then.

It was far out, and not expected.

It’s hard for some kids and young people to understand, but we’re talking about a time when discrimination was legal, sanctioned, and prevalent. And the assumption was that segregation was the way forward. Drinking fountains were still separate in the south. While the Supreme Court struck down restrictive housing covenants in 1948, redlining and blockbusting continued throughout the city. And in the 1950s, the Hyde Park Herald served a community trying to deal with those complicated problems.

Jill Petty: Can you speak a bit more about how restrictive covenants worked?

And how they shaped Hyde Park?

Bruce Sagan: Restrictive covenants were JULY 28, 2022 ¬ SPECIAL INSERT 13

PHOTO BY BETTY SAGAN

agreements between property owners stating that they, individually, would not sell their house to specific groups of people. Entire communities would agree and proceed not to sell to Black people. And these agreements were sponsored and endorsed by real estate people, and by dominant neighborhood institutions – like the University of Chicago.

In effect, these covenants created territories where Black people could not live. In Chicago, the Black Belt – between 12th and 79th streets, and Wentworth and Cottage Grove – had been formed because of decades and decades of discrimination and racism. In the period we're talking about, Cottage Grove was the line between the university neighborhood – Hyde Park – and the poor and poorly-resourced neighborhoods where Black people were forced to live.

Bridgeport was on the other side of that line, to the west, and covenants operated in the same way there.

14 SPECIAL INSERT¬ JULY 28, 2022

When I bought my home in Hyde Park, my deed said I could not sell it to African Americans – to be precise, it said I could not sell to Negroes. Because of the Supreme Court decision in 1948, it was not enforceable, but it had been enforced for 100 years. And as we’ve discussed, other discriminatory practices were continuing. So the Chicago Title Company decided to keep the language in deeds and titles. Why? “Because some day the court may say something different. So we’re not taking it out.”

Jill Petty: What role did the Herald seek to play? How did you see these issues then?

Bruce Sagan: Chicago was very segregated, a very constricted place. Hyde Park was part of that problem. And the university was an active participant in maintaining the status quo, writing letters supporting the use of covenants, for instance. Robert Maynard Hutchins,

president of the university for many years, was very active on the international scene after the end of the war; he promoted the United Nations, and the idea of a world without discrimination. Yet the University’s real estate office was still signing restrictive covenants in 1945.

By the time I became a publisher, at the grand old age of 24, they had been declared illegal. And the people trying to organize the community were already in action, including the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference – a group of local, liberal activists – and the Southeast Chicago Commission, founded by the University.

In Hyde Park, I was in the middle of crises where people wanted to know what was going on in their community in the worst ways. Even though a lot of this was getting attention from downtown and from city wide media, they could never provide the kind of coverage we provided. So from a journalist’s point of view, I had walked into heaven. And for the next 20 years or so, we went through the complicated urban renewal process, which is still playing itself out.

house, built earlier in the century, that held thousands. Mike and Elaine came back, and did a little bit in the show. One of their lines was “Hyde Park! We're so glad to be back. Black and white, shoulder to shoulder, against the lower classes.”

But here’s what's important, Hyde Park worked as a place where white people would live. There it is, okay – saying that it might offend some people, especially younger people. But in 1953, so many white people were terrified about Black people moving into the community.

Only a few people, these people in the conference, for instance, some religious leadership and others – were openly pushing back, for an integration.

And on the other side, there was the university. Do you know the university considered moving?

Jill Petty: Jumping ahead with you, what were the next 20 years like for the Herald?

Jill Petty: I grew up in Hyde Park, in the 1970s and 1980s. When we were kids, university police would tell my sisters and I to leave “The C Shop” – a little cafe on campus, in the Reynolds Club – and they would follow us around campus. The irony is my sisters were usually hanging out at U of C after Chicago Children’s Choir practices – another Hyde Park-based institution that championed integration and celebrated interracial harmony.

Bruce Sagan: By 1963, the University had allowed a Black professor into housing, just east of the university.

They had urban renewal plans on the books. And they finally got around to saying we're going to have an interracial community, but they used class as the mechanism to try to control the circumstance.

Jill Petty: This the story about Mike Nichols.

reminds me of Elaine May and

Bruce Sagan: That’s a good story! May and Nichols went to U of C, became part of the group that founded Second City, and then moved on to New York and Broadway.

Some time in the 1950s or 1960s, the Hyde Park/Kenwood Community Conference held a fundraiser in an old movie theater in Hyde Park, which used to be on 51st Street. It was a big movie

Jill Petty: I did not, but I am not surprised, When?

Bruce Sagan: During the period around the Second World War, there was a time when the university considered moving to the suburbs.

Bruce Sagan: Stop and frisk. What you were dealing with was a form of stop and frisk.

Jill Petty: Absolutely. It was a form of stop and frisk – we were just walking to get food on campus, or sitting in the cafe eating. Experiences like this showed us, at fairly young ages, that Hyde Park’s relationship with “integration” and “interracial harmony” is quite complicated.

Bruce Sagan: It is very complicated. Hyde Park is heavily an integrated community

because of its private school system, this is an example. Middle class people – white and Black – can send their kids to private schools here. We were very involved in the establishment of one private school, Ancona, in the neighborhood. We wanted it to be integrated, and we set up scholarships and support. We did a lot to get that school up and running, and to make it welcoming to everyone in the community but it was not a public school.

Jill Petty: Since we’re talking about education and earlier years, what were you doing before you bought the Herald in 1953?

Bruce Sagan: Well in 1951, I was a copy boy for International News Service in Chicago. Do you know what a copy boy did?

Jill Petty: I think copy boys literally ran marked-up copy between the reporting and editing desks – they made the whole process work.

Bruce Sagan: They did all of this, and they were also just plain old gophers – they got coffee, they ran all kinds of errands. And the whole process was entirely different.

Carbon paper – people may not have even heard of it. But each story had a book – each story would have several copies.

We’d take a very thin piece of vellum, put a piece of carbon paper behind that, and then another piece behind that. After the reporter would type up his story, he’d have seven or eight copies, to share to the proofreader, the editor, the fact checker, and so on. So the copy boy made up these books and circulated them, at least at the news service where I worked. Now all you do is flip on the screen. But in those days, someone had to physically move the material.

And I was very lucky. I got some funny assignments at the International News Service. I had to craft one-sentence stories about minor league games in Indiana from the score alone. Without seeing them. I came up with so many synonyms for winning, and for losing.

I was also lucky enough to have a general manager who understood how journalists get made. He watched what I was doing.

And the manager said, “You gotta go to work for the Chicago City News bureau.”

I said, “Yeah, what's that?”

City News Bureau was a news gathering organization owned by all of the daily newspapers in Chicago. They all owned it collectively. And this organization hired us kids cheap, and assigned us to coverages – beats – around the city.

In effect, we served as backup to their reporters' stories. I had been to college, but I didn't get a degree – I quit before I finished. And there were no journalism schools in the world back then – you didn't get degrees in journalism. That didn't exist. You just had to find a way to do it. And so here was this thing, the City News Bureau.

Jill Petty: Are you aware of this kind of cooperative arrangement existing in any other city besides Chicago?

Bruce Sagan: No. Once upon a time, Chicago had many more newspapers, and four newspapers – Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Daily News, and the Chicago Herald Examiner, owned by the Hearsts – shared the costs.

Since I’d been a copy boy at INS, I went in at City News as a reporter, as someone who could train reporters. You will never believe my first assignment – I was reporting from the old Hyde Park Police Station, in the 5200 block of Lake Park. Where Lake Park Avenue is now, against the Illinois Central tracks. At City News, I covered the federal courts, the circuit courts, and the criminal courts. I covered city hall, school board hearings, and police stations all over the city.

Jill Petty: What an amazing way to apprentice! It sounds like the minor leagues for the newspapers in Chicago.

Through City News, the papers invested in talent, and directly reaped the benefits.

Bruce Sagan: Exactly. And we worked on beats, under the beat reporters at the newspapers.

There was even a physical infrastructure to support this set up – there were pneumatic tubes, between City News and the newspapers, running between underground tunnels in Chicago. We’d

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drop the copy into the tubes. And there was no advertising – we didn’t sell anything.

One of the assignments I had at City News – I was the night reporter at Chicago Police Department headquarters. I ran from midnight to eight in the morning.

And at that point, there were four other reporters covering this beat. As the kid, I was supposed to wander the building and work, but I was never ever to scoop the other reporters. That was a no-no.

Once when I was working the federal courts, a judge criticized me because I wasn't wearing a suit. I was a reporter in his courtroom, and I was not appropriately dressed. And that was important. You're going to work the federal building, you’d better be dressed for it. We learned all of these things by having to be there.

This is how I learned the news business – from doing it. From listening to other journalists. You learned what facts you didn’t have, how to work the phones, how to organize your story. And there’s this famous story about City News.

Arnold Dornfeld was a legendary editor there. He said, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” This is how journalists were trained. It was absolutely terrific.

Jill Petty: Coming out of that experience, what were the things you learned that you applied right away, at the Herald?

And what were the things that stuck, over time?

Bruce Sagan: That getting it right is hard. And that's the most important journalistic lesson I can imagine. And you know, these editors, part of their job was to teach you how to write a story, and they loved doing this – they were writing 15, 20 little stories every day.

I also learned “the how” of it, right? I had a great education at this level, and City News really prepared me for the Herald. By the time I left, I was running the overnight desk – I ran the shop from midnight to eight in the morning. I knew how to train other reporters.

Jill Petty: Bruce, can you talk about why it’s hard to get it right? What makes it hard?

16 SPECIAL INSERT¬ JULY 28, 2022

Bruce Sagan: Well, first of all many of your sources are going to have their own agendas. One of the most difficult things for a reporter to do is to figure out who’s telling you the truth. If it's a complicated story, it really is hard. And that's the key question – who is telling the truth?

Then sometimes nobody wants to tell the truth. When you get into stories about government and politics, nobody wants to be helpful.

Jill Petty: What were those first years at the Herald like?

Bruce Sagan: I didn't write the first issue when I took over, but I wrote most of the third, and many going forward. We kept the Herald alive by reducing overhead, and shrinking the staff. We had one person. advertising. The editorial department had two or three people, but after we came in, it was me. I made sure the paper was at the newsstands. I took the paper from the printer. We simply did everything.

We moved locations, to keep costs lower.

Thankfully, people were delighted that the paper stayed. The community was supportive. We were lucky. It wasn’t all luck, but we were lucky.

Jill Petty: What was the high watermark for you, financially? Was there an especially good and profitable stretch?

Bruce Sagan: We invested $2,500 to purchase the paper in 1953– we got the furniture, the subscription list, the records, And we held another $2500 that we could lose. This was July, and we figured we would make it until Christmas, but we didn’t need to use it. Really, the Herald was able to build from 1953 to 2008. But in 2008, two things occurred simultaneously – there was the recession, and the rise of the internet. The impact of those two things – this did newspapers in. For instance, newspapers – including the Herald – lived on classified advertising. Where do people shop now? Craigslist. Online, it’s no longer via newspapers. This was a huge revenue stream for the Herald, for most newspapers.

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Jill Petty: You’ve innovated in Chicago journalism for so many years. In addition to the Herald, you owned other neighborhood newspapers, most notably you bought the Southtown Economist in 1958. We're compressing a lot, but can you share your perspectives on the challenges you believe the Herald currently faces.

Bruce Sagan: Our problem is that the economic model of newspapers is broken.

And everyone is trying to figure out how to make something new work. Clearly, many readers are going to pay for the journalism they want. You can see that at the upper levels, with papers like the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times.

But it’s challenging. Most papers are still struggling to figure this out. The question you're asking – what do we think we're doing in this market? How can we succeed? I hope this alliance between the South Side Weekly and the Hyde Park Herald creates an enterprise that can experiment at the most local level, and

Steppenwolf Theatre Company congratulates Bruce Sagan on his legacy at the Hyde Park Herald and impact on Chicago.

supports people whose jobs are to wander the streets, and share back the news.

Jill Petty: If you had to identify the most important legacy from your time at the Herald, what might it be?

Bruce Sagan: During most of my career, there were a few ways to communicate.

One was the local community newspaper, if you had one. Another might have been the church bulletin.

But newspapers allowed many factions in a community to participate, to belong.

They broadened the sense of community.

Now information is segregated, and targeted. We're in a harder moment. If we lose independent journalists, this would be a great shame – a great breaking apart of shared experiences. Newspapers strengthen connections. ¬

We have enjoyed your friendship and continue to admire you.

With loving support, Kristen and Barclay

Bette Cerf Hill and Bruce Sagan backstage at Steppenwolf, 2021

A trustee since 1985 and former board chair, Bruce has been the guiding hand behind Steppenwolf’s rise from a group of young artists into a leading American theater and Chicago icon. His mentorship has uplifted generations of artists, and his leadership has shaped the company’s innovative home on Halsted Street.

STEPPENWOLF’S 2022-23 SEASON BEGINS SEPTEMBER 1ST steppenwolf.org | 312-335-1650 18 SPECIAL INSERT¬ JULY 28, 2022

Congratulations Bruce,

A Paper Ahead of the Times

HERALD STAFF REPORT

This story was originally published in the July 21, 2004 edition of the Hyde Park Herald, commemorating Sagn’s 50-year anniversary as publisher.

P

art of a newspaper’s success is being ahead of the times. If a newspaper is ahead of the New York Times, even better.

That was the case with the Hyde Park Herald, an unlikely front-runner in the news­paper technology revolution.

The Herald, precisely because of its small size, lent itself to experiments with the early printing techniques.

When Sagan started publishing the Hyde Park Herald in 1953, newspapers were being produced as they had been for 67 years, since the usage of the Linotype machine. The Linotype was the 19th century’s tech­nological leap. Since Gutenberg’s time, books and periodicals were produced by painstakingly putting

How the Hyde Park Herald Changed Newspapers

together the text one letter at a time.

The Linotype machine, about seven feet wide by seven feet high, made possible the casting of a complete line of text by pouring hot lead into a set of brass molds of letters.

But the process was slow, subject to error and very labor intensive, leading Sagan and others to look for better solutions.

A quick lesson in printing methods: Linotype machines, and even Mr. Gutenberg himself, used raised letters to print pages. The method of printing was to rub ink over the raised letters and press paper against the type, like using a rubber stamp. It is called “letterpress.”

Now, however, most newspapers and many other types of printing use an age-old artist technique of lithography.

It uses a flat image (not raised letters) and chemical techniques to transfer the letters to paper. Toulouse-Lautrec made

his famous posters that way.

To set up the letters and words the comput­er now does the work instead of the Linotype machine. But the computer puts out a flat piece of paper, not raised letters.

It was the marriage of computergenerated letters and lithographic printing (now called “Offset Printing”) with which the Herald began to experiment in 1957 and is still used today.

The Hyde Park Herald was first printed using this new technology on December 10, 1958.

Over the next 25 years, from that first 1958 publication, the Herald, and its sister publi­ cation the Southtown Economist, worked with manufacturers and engineers to enhance the technology. In the setting of the words and letters, the experiments moved from using typewriter-like equipment to photographic methods to laser printers.

In the 1970s, Sagan’s newsroom became the testing location for North American Rockwell, a government space contractor that was trying to use the computers developed for the space program for commercial purposes. And so into the newsroom came these strange looking television sets with keyboards.

Meanwhile, newspaper lithographic press­es were becoming bigger and faster and capable of printing good color photographs. The Hyde Park Herald printed its first color picture June 26, 1969. It was a photo of the Museum of Science and Industry taken from the Wooded Island across the lagoon. The computer and the larger presses made possi­ble the spread of the technologies to newspa­pers all over the world.

The Herald played a direct role in the cre­ation of the national newspaper. The story is told in a book published in 1994 about the New York Times, Behind the JULY 28, 2022 ¬ SPECIAL INSERT 19

The Chicago Reader and the Chicago Independent Media Alliance would like to congratulate Bruce Sagan for this 70-year legacy in Chicago’s local media!

We look forward to the good work that will come from the merger of Hyde Park Herald and South Side Weekly.

Our family has enjoyed working with you!

Best of luck on your new endeavors!

COYNE

TRANSPORT LLC

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Times, by Edwin Diamond, a professor of journalism at New York University.

Diamond was a former Hyde Parker and hus­band of a Herald editor from the 1950s, Adelina Diamond. In his book, Diamond points out that the New York Times company once owned the patents on facsimile transmission, the sys­ tem that every office fax uses, and the sys­ tem national newspapers now use to send their newspaper pages to printing plants around the world to get simultaneous distri­bution.

Diamond writes, “In 1956 the Times enterprisingly published an experimental elec­tronic paper using the fax technology during the Republican National Convention in San Francisco.

News pages made up in New York were transmitted to San Francisco via phone line, and then printed for distribution around the convention hall and at the delegates’ hotels. Today orbiting satellites have supplanted phone lines for longdistance pub-­lishing: the much-heralded communications revolution. The principle involved is no different from the Times’

1956 experiment.

“Having helped start the revolution, how­ever, the Times walked away from its first benefits… About this time a Chicago newspaper publisher named Bruce Sagan kept turning over his mind the impli­ cations of the 1956 Times convention ven­ture. Sagan was just 27 years old and already publishing a string of weeklies in the Chicago area. The Times, he reasoned, was producing a valued daily paper, strong in national and international coverage, and one that Sagan had read when he was growing up and later used to buy as a college stu­dent at the University of Chicago bookstore (it was delivered by air mail, three days late).

“Sagan reasoned that the Times’ fax technol­ ogy—plus his own printing presses—could together create a successful new product for these regional markets. On July 29, 1959, he mailed off his proposal to Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

‘Your company has developed a process for sending over wire composed pages and receiv­ ing at the other end the information on an off­set negative,’ Sagan

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wrote. ‘We have recently installed a 16page Vanguard offset newspaper press which we are using in the experimental printing of one of our weeklies.’ Sagan then made his pitch: ‘it is perhaps time for someone to try a national daily newspaper... Do we have anything to discuss?’ On August 4, Sulzberger replied, in full: ‘As I understand your letter of July 29th, your question is whether or not we would be interested in using the facsimile method of reproduction to make the New York Times available in other communities. The only answer I can give you at the present time is no.’

“The Times didn’t revive the idea of a nationally distributed edition until the late 1970s, well after the Wall Street Journal had demonstrated how to reach a national market with the technologies of facsimile and space satellite. Following the Journal model, the Times used a satellite to link a network of printing plants (some owned by the Times, some under contract) through facsimile tech­ nology.

In the Chicago area, the Southtown Economist, Inc., Bruce Sagan’s company

won the contract to become the Times’ printer.” Sagan set up the first region­ al location for the Times and worked to develop the procedures that were subse­ quently followed for the national edition.

Diamond’s book continues, “On April 24, 1980, after the Times signed its facsimile-­ transmission agreement with Community Newspapers, Sagan sent Punch Sulzberger a bantering note, attaching photocopies of the letters Sagan had exchanged two decades before with Arthur Sulzberger. Punch Sulzberger replied as his father had, by return mail.

He thanked Sagan for the ‘won­ derful’ correspondence, and made a little joke about the Times’ deliberate ways: ‘Dad put a committee together 21 years ago, and they just reported out.’” ¬

Dear Bruce, You’ve been publisher of the Hyde Park Herald our entire lives, and that’s true for almost anyone who lives in Hyde Park, because you’ve been publishing Chicago’s oldest community newspaper for 69 years.

The Herald has embodied what it means to fulfill the critical role of journalism in a diverse community and a healthy democracy. Readers have counted on it for news about everything from local politics to neighborhood groups and activists working to improve the community, from local arts and theater events to little league scores, and from listing religious services to what was on sale at Mr. G’s and the Co-op, or on the menu at Valois. Under your leadership, the Herald has worked diligently to document difficult issues fairly and accurately, as well as to highlight all the good and positive that has always been a part of Hyde Park.

Thank you for your stewardship of this special paper and for finding it a new home so it may continue to serve as an important community resource. And thank you for being a wonderful role model for our ever-growing family.

Love, Alex & Paul Sagan JULY 28, 2022 ¬ SPECIAL INSERT 21

Digging up a Piece of Hyde Park History

BY AARON GETTINGER

T

wo sisters, decades removed from having lived in the neighborhood, have brought a piece of Hyde Park history home. Last month, with 21 boxes in tow, Janet Szilagyi and Susan traveled from Akron, Ohio to drop off a collection of Hyde Park Heralds spanning nearly 40 years, going back to 1955. The papers belonged to their father, John Ramey, who maintained his subscription to the newspaper decades after his work took him out of the community.

John Ramey was born in Bexley, Ohio, an inner suburb of Columbus, and went to Ohio State University for his bachelor's and master's degrees. His 1949-50 field placement for his social work degree was at Chicago Commons, now located at 515 E. 50th St., the

22 SPECIAL INSERT¬ JULY 28, 2022

social service organization and former settlement house, which has had a long association with the University of Chicago and South Side communities.

After marrying his wife, Carol Ramey, they moved back to Chicago, and he worked at the commons for another two years.

Ramey became the executive director of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club (HPNC) in 1954. Janet Szilagyi was born in 1956, and her sister, Susan Ramey, was born in 1959.

Szilagyi remembers the Hyde Park of her childhood as a booming neighborhood: "I thought that was the way the world was: great, multiracial, multicultural, multi-religious, multiethnic." She remembers her father

being brought in to integrate the HPNC and consulting to help integrate the neighborhood at large. His colleagues participated in civil rights protests in the South.

Carol Ramsey was a musician, an organist, and Szilagyi played piano.

The family worshiped at the University Church, 5655 S. University Ave.; both parents sang in the choir, which Carol Ramsey directed at one point. Szilagyi and her sister attended the U. of C. Laboratory Schools, as their parents found the local Chicago Public Schools overloaded due to the number of baby boomers enrolled at them.

John Ramey was at the HPNC for 11 years before taking another social work job in Cincinnati in 1965. Great Society-era block grants were drying up four years later, and he took a job at the University of Akron, where he developed a social work program.

All the while, he kept up his subscription to the Herald.

"Part of his heart was always in Hyde Park," Szilagyi said. "He loved Hyde Park. He loved the people. He was always curious and interested to see what was

going on, how things were developing.

I'm sure at first it was just to stay in touch with the people they knew when they moved to Cincinnati, but then I'm sure he read it and used it as part of his teaching material. Even if he kept the papers intact, he would maybe Xerox a copy or take it into school and talk about it and put it in its rightful place."

Her parents would talk about articles and goings-on after each edition arrived; Szilagyi said part of their hearts remained in Chicago. "I think it was a combination of the people that they met at the club and at University Church, and the good work and contributions to society that they were able to do while they were there," she said.

The papers were delivered well before the Internet Age; the subscription functioned "as his own little internet archive," Szilagyi said. "Some of them were folded open to articles of interest so he could find them quickly."

For years, local businessman Sam Bell would run ads in the Herald with locals in a gag or community service situation for his Shell Oil Company gas station. A U. of C. professor stood

Bruce, Congratulations on a job well done!

Barbara Flynn Currie A Leader...

Amongst Achievers

A Leader...

“Our family will be forever grateful to Bruce Sagan for his business acumen in the art of newspaper publishing. He was expert in establishing advertising accounts (especially in the classified section of the Southtown Economist), con“Our will be forever grateful toat Bruce for his version tofamily computerized typesetting the Sagan Printing Center business acumen in the art of newspaper publishing.

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Amongst Achievers

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Mr. Sagan was always available to shareofhis extensive Goss Metroliner Press. Mechanized inserting circulars to promote City andwhich Kmart allowed were frosting on the cake. knowledge andFord creativity many publications to survive, prosper and serve their communities.

Mr. Sagan was always available to share his extensive knowledge and creativity which allowed many publications

Onlytopeople have opportunity survive,who prosper andhad servethe their communities. to work with him, understand his profound influence on countless lives Only people who have hadofthe opportunity to work with by promoting every aspect human endeavor - education, him, understand his profound influence on countless lives business, religion, healthcare, theatre arts, law enforceby promoting every aspect of human endeavor - education, mentbusiness, and annual media dinner theatre with government officials.” religion, healthcare, arts, law enforcement and annual media dinner with government officials.”

Albert Silinski, Publisher

Albert Silinski, Publisher BRIGHTON PARK BRIGHTON PARK

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through the sunroof of his Volkswagen in one captioned "Hyde Park-Kenwood eggheads scramble for service at Sam Bell's." In another, the manager of the Hyde Park Co-op and Bell posed in Boy Scout uniforms with the caption "Hyde Park-Kenwood shells out for Boy Scouts."

The HPNC, then as now, did a lot of fundraising. One year, they ran an adaptation of the Pied Piper legend as a play; Ramey gamely appears as the Pied Piper in an ad (despite not playing the part in the play) with seven jacketed (it being March) kids in the back of a convertible. Szilagyi is among them alongside two of former congressman Abner Mikva's daughters: Laurie, now a professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and Mary, now a judge of the Illinois Appellate Court.

Ramey ended his subscription when he retired in the 1990s, after 20 years as general secretary of the International Association for Social Work with Groups. When he passed away in 2014, his obituary ran in the Herald.

But the family still has lingering ties to the neighborhood. Their membership number at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave., is so low that it shocks staff.

The Herald has maintained its own internal archive since 1953, when outgoing owner Bruce Sagan took over the paper, but it’s “not this comprehensive and well preserved,” said Jason Schumer, the Herald’s publisher. Schumer has been working with Sagan and former General Manager Susan Walker to recover the Herald’s archive from a Greektown basement. Some decades are well preserved, Schumer said, but others are incomplete or damaged.

“The great thing about this collection is how complete it is,” he said. “And the fact that it’s arranged chronologically makes it very easy to find specific issues.”

Twice in the last two weeks he’s had to dig into the archive for a specific issue.

The first came after someone from the University of Cambridge Press requested permission to reproduce a 1961 advertisement paid by the Chicago chapter of the nonprofit organization Fair Play for Cuba Committee “which attempts to combat the campaign of

slander against the Cuban revolution.”

The second was to find a 1958 Sam Bell advertisement that Sagan appeared in. The ad shows a 29-year-old Sagan at the station with Bell. The headline reads “Windbags Gas-up.”

Except for a handful of issues from the 1880s, the Herald’s archive is digitized and available for free; an 80th birthday gift for Sagan from his sons.

Schumer says he and the staff refer to the digital archive frequently for stories, “but there’s nothing like holding the paper in your hands.” ¬

JULY 28, 2022 ¬ SPECIAL INSERT 23

Weekly Board Bruce is a gentleman......

Members Celebrate And a gentle New Partnership man......... with the Herald My parents got the Hyde Park Herald delivered when I was a kid on the South Side, and now I get it delivered to my home. It's a part of my regular engagement with my neighbors and neighborhood. The partnership of these two great community newspapers is a way to ensure that the Herald continues to publish for another 140 years, and it's a way to strengthen local journalism and our city. Those are the reasons I joined the board of the South Side Weekly.

Ben Austen, Board Member Journalist, author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing and cohost of Some of My Best Friends Are podcast Publishing the South Side Weekly in its earliest years I got to witness, firsthand, how a community newspaper could change narratives about communities, and give rise to a community of engaged and talented journalists and artists.

Seeing the Weekly come together with a storied neighborhood institution like the Hyde Park Herald is so deeply exciting – for the neighborhood and city we love, and the future of local journalism. This merger means a stronger, more accessible infrastructure for local journalism on the South Side, and I can’t wait to see the community grow again.

Harry Backlund, Board Secretary Co-Executive Director, City Bureau When we moved to Hyde Park in 24 SPECIAL INSERT¬ JULY 28, 2022

the 1970s, I’m certain that subscribing to the Hyde Park Herald was one of the first tasks our parents completed. I cannot remember a time when the paper was not delivered to our home – as reliable as snowstorms in January – and it was read and engaged immediately. Today, the Herald and South Side Weekly are my local must-reads – I cannot do without either. I’m thrilled about the promise of this new partnership, and heartened about new ways that will emerge to build community, support dialogue, and push for justice.

Jill Petty, Board Chair Editor, educator, cofounder of The Clearing School

The South Side Weekly has flourished, in part, due to seeds planted by the Hyde Park Herald in 1882 and its approach to hyperlocal journalism. Over the course of its 140 year history, the Herald has elevated community voices, expanded its vision of newsworthiness, and has been the connective fabric of one of the most diverse communities in Chicago. As recent times have reminded us all that we can go further if we travel together, I can think of nothing more apropos, more exciting, or more promising in community reporting than the merging of these two great institutions of journalism.

Kirstin Williams Smith, Board Member Community developer and equity advocate

Maria Pappas Cook County Treasurer

Congratulations on 69 years of the Herald!

Looking forward to our continued partnership!

3242 Wireton Road, Blue Island, IL 60406

708-388-6352 • www.marchioneinc.com

A herald has been sent forward to announce the retirement of Bruce Sagan!

As a consummate business person, tough but firm and a great out of the box thinker; Bruce focused on business deals with an eye for detail without getting too lost in the minutia.

Known as a passionate advocate for inclusion and social justice.

LP JOINS WITH YOU IN CE LE BR ATIN G YO U R SUCCESS. CONGR ATUL ATIONS, BRU C E !

LPLEGAL .COM

2 N LaSalle St Suite 1300 Chicago, IL 60602 USA

© 2022 Levenfeld Pearlstein, LLC

We congratulate Bruce on 69 years of publishing excellence in journalism Ansonia Property Management, LLC 815 W. Van Buren #550, Chicago, IL 60607

(312) 818-2188

contact.us@ansoniapm.com

It is indeed a lifetime—69 years of a wonderful happenstance of my making “community” with Hyde Park by publishing the Herald .

That’s what a community newspaper does. It aids people in making the sense of place; It puts the word neighbor to the word hood.

For me it did the remarkable thing of teaching me how to publish: what audiences want, the methods of information communication, and how the economics of that process works.

And that Hyde Park education also gave me the knowledge to have a wonderful career in Journalism in the world beyond our neighborhood. I am most grateful to this community full of caring and involved people who give real meaning to Community.

Bruce Sagan

Wishing You All the Best For This New Chapter Leslie A. Hairston Alderman, Fifth Ward

773-324-5555 2325 E. 71st Street Chicago, IL 60649 ward05@cityofchicago.org

Congratulations Bruce

on 69 Years of Uplifting Journalistic Integrity parkwayelevators 2944 W. Lake Street, Chicago, IL 60612 mt@parkwayelevators.com 312-374-9995

Bruce Sagan Mentor, Business Partner Advisor Friend

Congratulations on 69 years of publishing!

Looking forward to many more years together!

Cook County Suburban Publishers, Inc