Born at 86-92 Exchange St., Bangor, Maine, June 18, 1889: One newspaper, the Bangor Daily News. The handsome infant is tiny but brash, friendly but not afraid of adventure. It is unintimidated by competition and will try anything to get attention. Although it sees everything in black and white, it has a colorful imagination.
And it is given to braggadocio.
On its first birthday the paper boasts, “The News elected Mayor Blake;...it brought about cleaner streets;...it reorganized the police force; it made the Fourth of July celebration last year a success; and it always has and always will encourage every enterprise that can be got to locate in Bangor and increase our local industries.”
A century later it rewrote the book on newspaper publishing in Bangor, “The NEWS” is still going strong, but its bragging days are over. One of THE success stories in Bangor history, it has stood tall in the wake of floods, fires, depressions, family deaths, and the caprice of ever-changing technology.
“The NEWS and Bangor have gone through a great deal together,” said Richard J. Warren, publisher of the Bangor Daily News, whose great-grandfather, J. Norman Towle, purchased the paper in 1895 and probably saved it from a premature death.
Six years earlier the paper was established by several New York newspaper men, organized as the Union Publishing Co. It was virtual twin of James Gordon Bennett’s outrageous New York Herald, which was first published in 1835 and later described as “saucy, risque, piquant, (and) full of odd surprises and solid chunks of information.”
In fact, two former Herald editors, one of them the talented George Miner, were brought to Bangor to pilot the NEWS. The company’s principal stockholder was Thomas J. Stewart, a Bangor shipping magnate whose one-time foray into politics ran aground. In 1888, he campaigned against Charles Boutelle, a former sailor himself and owner and editor of the Whig and Courier, Bangor’s morning Republican newspaper.
When the Whig endorsed Boutelle for the 4th Congressional District race, dismissing Stewart and his ilk as “turncoat Republicans,” the Democratic Bangor Daily Commercial, the afternoon paper, back Stewart.
Stewart lost big in 1888 but laughed last a year later when he helped found his own newspaper, the moderately Republican Bangor Daily News. Presumably it was purely a business venture and Stewart, who died in March 1890, took scant interest in its editorial content.
“It was not unusual for newspapers back then to have those kinds of beginnings,” said Richard J. Warren. “It was happening all over the country.”
From the start, the NEWS wowed Bangor. In retrospect, its modern typography was more reflective of the 20th century than the 19th, and, unlike other papers, Page One stories were refreshingly Maine-oriented.
The first page of the first edition, which cost 2 cents, was free of advertising and carried stories about the Brewer City Council, a Seventh Day Adventist meeting in Carmel, improvements at the Bangor race track, and the names of arrivals at the Penobscot Exchange Hotel.
That was in addition to stories off the New York Herald telegraph wire - the NEWS being the first paper in New England to receive the Herald’s daily cablegrams - that reported the death of comedian John Gilbert, floods in Kansas and West Virginia, and a Chicago murder.
“There was plenty of money for everything in those early years of The News,” recalled Lawrence T. Smyth, a veteran editor, in 1934. “If a story cost money, even big money, never mind! The News got it.
“Stories that other papers were afraid to print were played up with a flourish in The News. And the public ate them up. Pictures, too - chalk plates. No photo engraving then...”
The city staff appeared larger because its four members seemed to have had printer’s ink in their blood. After the cornerstone of the Bangor City Hall was laid on July 4, 1893, Smyth and Sam E. Connor, the only reporters, labored for hours scribbling 16 newspaper stories to the printer. (The first newsroom typewriter didn’t arrive until 1894.)
But something was awry at 86-92 Exchange St. Bangor was booming when the NEWS was founded, the same year the Bangor street railway began rolling, but in 1893 the economy crashed. Money couldn’t increase circulation beyond the NEWS’ original 2,200, and after the Herald editors left town, T.J. Stewart’s sons, minor players in the newspaper world, gamely took control.
“The New York Herald typographical style was discarded, the money-burning stopped, and, as hard times rapped at every newspaper door, expenses were cut to the bone,” recalled Smyth.
Scuttling the sensational “fire-alarm” headlines, the paper reverted to straight news in a fight for its life. It was obvious that Bangor, whose population was 20,000, could not support two morning newspapers. The battle was on for the relatively few subscribers in the Bangor area and the fewer advertisers.
“Greatest of all the troubles...was the problem of newsprint...,” recalled long-time reporter Oscar Shepard in 1938. “Without it the paper would die, the loss of a single issue would be fatal.”
But paper makers demanded cash on the barrelhead, so the NEWS purchased the paper in small quantities, two or three rolls at a time. Even then, however, each day’s issue required three-quarters of a roll.
One day a paper salesman dropped by the NEWS and offered to sell a carload on credit - 40 rolls of about 1,200 pounds each.
The railroad car pulled into the Washington Street station and the paper was hauled up Exchange Street to the NEWS. Soon afterward the company wired the NEWS:
“CREDIT NOT SATISFACTORY. RETURN CAR.”
The NEWS’ wire was similarly terse:
“TOO LATE: IT’S ALL UNLOADED. BUT YOU WILL GET YOUR MONEY.”
But not until 1895, when fate stopped dealing the Bangor Daily News jokers and handed it a pair of aces.
Their names were Edward Blake and J. Norman Towle.