Even as a kid I was interested in history. Not sure why; maybe because family was such an important part of my life growing up—and my family on my maternal grandmother’s side had been here since before the French and Indian War.
Then during the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976, I discovered I could write things that people enjoyed reading. As part of the publications committee of the Kendall County Bicentennial Commission, as I wrote and co-wrote and helped edit monographs and a new county history, I became fascinated with local history, something I found that few knew much about. But the topic increasingly interested me, particularly how national and international history affected folks living here in Illinois’ Fox River Valley. So I started looking into what was happening around these parts during the fur trade era, the nation’s various wars, the era of settlement, and the area’s growth and maturity from a frontier farming community to burgeoning suburbia.
Then, thanks to a cascade of health problems, in the late summer of 1977 I found myself out of work and looking for a part-time job. At the same time, Dave Dreier was looking for a couple columnists to punch up the Fox Valley Sentinel, one of Oswego’s two weekly newspapers.
Dave had started the Sentinel in 1973 as competition for the Oswego Ledger, which had been published since 1949, and was the new paper’s editor and publisher. He and I went to elementary school together before his family moved to North Aurora during the summer between fifth and sixth grade. But we still knew each other, so when I pitched the idea for a column on local, county, and state history, he said he’d take a chance and see what I’d produce. He asked me to write three columns of about 900 words each and he’d let me know his verdict after he read them. I later discovered that three-column thing was a good way to gauge how serious someone is about becoming a columnist. Just about everybody has one good column idea. Some people have two. Very few have three—a lesson I took to heart a few years later when budding columnists would pitch their ideas to me.
I dropped the columns off and Dave read them and said he liked what he saw. His one serious question was whether I thought I’d have enough material to keep the column going for a full year. I said I was pretty sure I would.
And, in fact, I’ve now been writing about local history in all its odd, wonderful, and sometimes startling twists and turns each week for four decades. Oh, I’ve missed a few weeks here and there for occasional hospitalizations for ulcers, installation of a new hip and a new heart valve, and whatnot, plus a few other pitfalls of adult life, but in general, I’ve churned out my average of 1,000 words, week in and week out, since Dave printed that first Fox Valley Sentinel column on Sept. 1, 1977—just 40 years ago today.
So at one paper or another, I’ve been covering the news, both contemporary and historical, for longer than I ever would have thought possible.
Forty years not only seems like a long time; it IS a long time. In January of 1977, Jimmy Carter had taken the oath as President, and things, unfortunately, pretty much went downhill from there. Carter’s Presidency wound up with Iranian religious fanatics seizing 52 American hostages. His administration’s handling of that crisis even had an impact on the Fox Valley Sentinel.
The flag of the late, and still lamented Fox Valley Sentinel, which ran upside down during the Iran hostage crisis, much to readers’ confusion.
The banner with the newspaper’s name at the top of the front page, in journalismese, is called, the flag. Dreier, in a patriotic gesture, decided that we would fly the Fox Valley Sentinel’s “flag” upside down (the international signal for distress) until the hostages were released, something we all agreed would be a wonderful expression of American solidarity. Little did we know the crisis would drag on for 444 days. Week after week, we printed the Sentinel’s flag inverted, and week after week we fielded calls from puzzled readers wondering whether we noticed part of the front page was printed upside down, to the point that we quickly started adding a note at the top of page 2 informing readers that, yes, we know the flag is upside down, and explaining the reason for it. After the Farrens bought the paper, Oswego’s era of upside-down journalism ended. And now you know, if you happen to look at microfilm copies of the Sentinel from those years, the upside-down flag is not exactly a mistake. Miscalculation, yes; mistake, no.
Returning to the kind and decent Jimmy Carter for a minute, he has definitely turned into our nation’s finest ex-President.
Dreier had perennial problems trying to keep reporters on staff—he was a first-rate journalist, photographer, and page designer, but not so good at actually running a business—and so one day when I stopped down at the Sentinel office to drop off my latest column (no email in those days), he asked if I’d be willing to cover some public meetings and write news stories about them. I told him I’d never taken a journalism course in my life and had no idea how to write news stories.
No problem, he said, plucking an envelope out of the wastebasket by his desk. “This,” he said drawing an upside-down pyramid on the back of the envelope, “Is an inverted pyramid. It’s how you write news stories, with the most important things at the top, and moving down to the least important things at the end. That’s so the editor can cut the copy if necessary and the most important things will still make it into the newspaper.”
But how do you write news, as opposed to the columns I was doing? Dave said the two styles were pretty much the same; include the things you think readers need to know, make sure of your facts, and do your best to explain them in plain English. He concluded by remarking the two basic things everyone wants to know about any local governmental issue are how much will it cost, and who’s going to pay, a bit of wisdom I carried with me the rest of my newswriting days.
The Ledger-Sentinel flag flew over the “Reflections” column from 1980 until the name of the paper reverted back to its pre-merger Oswego Ledger last year.
With my first and last journalism lesson under my belt, I ventured forth with some trepidation to cover Kane County government (where I learned how knowledge of parliamentary procedure can be used as a political weapon) and the West Aurora School Board. Later I added the Montgomery Village Board, the Oswego School District, the quasi-governmental Boulder Hill Civic Association, and the Oswego Village Board. I was destined to cover Oswego’s school board for more than 25 years all together, something that gives me a somewhat different perspective on the perennial questions that arise about public education than most folks.
In the summer of 1980, finally deciding there wasn’t enough advertising revenue in Oswego to support both his Sentinel and Jeff and Kathy Farren’s Oswego Ledger (subscriptions just about cover the cost of printing a newspaper, but nothing else, including personnel, office rental, utilities, or equipment), Dave decided to sell the Sentinel to the Farrens.
The columnist-editor-reporter on a Wednesday morning in 1989 helping publish the Ledger-Sentinel using the latest Mac and TRS tech.
Jeff, who started working at the Kendall County Record when he was a teenager (back when type was set on a giant Linotype hot-lead machine), and Kathy were both Northern Illinois University journalism grads and were then publishing the Record in Yorkville, the Ledger in Oswego, and the Plano Record. They asked if I’d stay on as the new Ledger-Sentinel’s part-time editor. I reminded them that I had no editing experience, but I agreed to give it a try, starting out as the paper’s reporter, editor, and columnist.
It’s been quite a ride, this past 40 years has been. While chronicling the area’s history, I’ve seen Kendall County’s population balloon from 1980’s 37,000 to today’s estimated 130,000. In fact, the population of my hometown, Oswego, is larger today than the entire county’s population in 1970. The county was still overwhelmingly rural in 1977. Today, the number of farmers and farms continues to shrink as farms get bigger and bigger even as residential and commercial subdivisions gobble up additional hundreds of acres of once-productive farmland every year.
Fortunately, Dave Dreier’s fear that I might run out of history to write about didn’t come to pass. But times did change. Dave’s heart failed and he died in 2011, and my friends Jeff and Kathy Farren sold the Kendall County Record, Inc. to Shaw Media in 2016. Even the Ledger-Sentinel itself has changed again, its name reverting to the Oswego Ledger that was on the flag when Ford Lippold started publishing it on a Mimeograph machine in his basement back in 1949.
Not sure how much longer I’ll keep writing about local history, but it’s so much fun and so interesting that I don’t plan to quit any time soon. There’s always something new to learn, new people to learn about, and new clarity to bring to how our local communities came to be what they are today. So unless life intervenes (which, I’ve learned over the years, it has an annoying habit of doing) I’ll continue writing “Reflections” for the Ledger and the other Shaw papers in the Kendall County Now group, as well as in this space for History on the Fox, occasionally marveling that blogging didn’t even exist when I started writing and doing local history in 1977. I can hardly wait to see what happens next.
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