We are celebrating our 10 year anniversary as the Weekly View and last week’s front page article by Ethel gave you the story of our start. I’d like to fill you in on what happened in the beginning. The Eastside Herald started in 1935. It was independently owned for 70 years by various owners. One of our co-owners Judy started delivering the newspaper in 1999 and later became a salesperson too. Ethel started as copy editor in 2004. I was working as a graphic artist at the Star doing retail ads from 1996 until I was asked if I’d like to manage the Eastside Herald which The Star/Gannett had purchased along with several other community newspapers in 2005. I lived in Irvington so I was familiar with the newspaper and decided to give it a try. The former owners gave me a week of their time to learn the ropes. The newspaper was done on a PC with a Pagemaker program and I had always worked on a Mac in Quark and was just learning the new InDesign program. Luckily the Pagemaker pages converted to InDesign with few issues, but for several weeks I had a computer that was both a PC and a Mac by the switch of a button. It was all very labor intensive to convert all the ads to the new program and to figure out the whole system.
I remember going home many late hours with tears in my eyes wondering what had I gotten myself into. I was working 75 hours a week and on top of everything else I had to keep the place clean (no budget for cleaning services). It was an old block building (3,000 sq. ft.) with a flat roof, glass block windows and nasty tile floors. I would come in on the weekends and mop for an hour and the mop water would be black.
The other ladies in the office didn’t like me much since I represented the corporate world that had taken over their family owned business. We grew to respect and cherish each other’s talents.
The Herald had been a community newspaper with some unconventional business practices like advertisers paying the bill with home grown green beans which I thought was great (I love fresh green beans), but the Star frowned on the practice. One month as a joke I filled a big brown envelop with fresh green beans and mailed it to the Star accounting office which I don’t think they thought was very funny.
We did well despite issues like the basement flooding, getting a brick through a window, the flat roof leaking right on top of my computer and the air conditioning going out and it getting to 96 degrees in that old building with no windows you could open. I had a mouse crawl into my printer and die which was not pretty. It was a colorful neighborhood we were in and I’ll never forget the naked lady running down Michigan Street in February.
In 2007, the Star moved us to Irvington Plaza next to the Marsh. The Star didn’t bother to send a truck, they just loaded everything on a flatbed trailer, tied it all down and rolled thru the alleys to the new location only a couple miles away. I followed in my car to make sure nothing flew off. It reminded me of the Beverly Hillbillies sitcom of the 60s.
Before we left the old location, I realized there were old copies of the Herald boxed up in the basement. I contacted my supervisor wanting him to help me save them for the archives, but he didn’t want to bother. We had just a few days left at the old location when I called Steve Barnett (Irvington Historian and now also the Marion County Historian). He came right over and took a look at the situation. The newspapers were in archival boxes which were damp from the river of water that ran through the basement from a leaking toilet upstairs. We were moving out on a Thursday and I had to turn in the keys Sunday night, so we had three days to get those newspapers saved. Steve carried all the boxes upstairs (dozens) and he and his wife Sue cut open the boxes and aired out the musty newspapers on the floor of that huge empty building. My son had just moved back home to go to college and I said “do I have a job for you!” Between Steve and Sue working days and my son and I nights, we sorted and saved all the newspapers we could. They are now at the Bona Thompson Memorial Center in good hands with Steve.
We survived until 2009 when The Star/Gannett decided to close all the community newspapers they’d purchased. Our readers and advertisers were very upset as were we. We had six weeks to sell our advertisers into the Star (no one wanted to switch) and in that time we ladies decided we had been doing this on our own, so let’s start our own newspaper — and the rest is history.