J. Norman Towle had no champagne bottles to uncork on the morning of March 5, 1900. Bangor had been a dry town since 1851 - on paper, at least - and anyway, the 36-year-old publisher of the Bangor Daily News wasn’t given to public celebration.
But while the carrier boys hawked the NEWS up and down Exchange Street, things would never be the same in the four-story brick block, originally numbered 86-92 and renumbered 150-152 in 1895, where the paper had been born 11 years earlier.
A creative headline writer might have written this pearl: “BANGOR FLIPS ITS WHIG AS NEWS WINS LONG-FOUGHT BATTLE.”
Sprinkled throughout the 12 pages of the March 5 edition of the NEWS, priced at 3 cents an issue, 50 cents a month, or $6 a year, were Page One coverage of the bloody Boer War, a Sawyer Dental Co. advertisement for $8 dentures carrying a 10-year guarantee, and a financial report of the Eastern Trust and Banking Co.
Its capital: $171,900. Its surplus profits: $150,000.
Tucked away in the upper left corner of Page 4 was a change in the paper’s masthead that might have gone unnoticed had not the Whig and Courier clued in readers of its own demise two days before.
A Whig editorial explained that it was being merged with the NEWS because of costly printing, too many employees, and plummeting revenues in a “field not sufficient to support two papers”.
This followed months of negotiations between Towle, representing Edward Blake and himself, and Charles Boutelle, the Whig’s owner who, in failing health, threw in the towel, admitting that the two operations should become one.
Blake and Towle bought the Bangor Publishing Co., which had owned the Whig. The company acquired the Whig’s subscription list and all advertising contracts, but the Whig alone was responsible for settling its obligations to correspondents who had been given their notice.
Along with Bangor, the Whig had taken a roller coaster ride through the boom and bust years. The “Little Queen”, as the lumber capital of the world then was known, was incorporated as a city in 1834, the same year the Whig was established by William E.P. Rogers to espouse the principles of the embryonic Whig Party.
The Whig and Courier never wavered from its conservatism, and when the Whig Party was dissolved after the presidential election of 1852 and the Republican Party created two years later, it climbed aboard the bandwagon, backing Abraham Lincoln and his running mate, Maine’s Hannibal Hamlin, in 1860.
When the 80-year-old Hamlin became one of the NEWS’ first subscriber in 1889, announcing to the business staff, “You have not come to me for a subscription, so I have come to you,” perhaps the Whig, showing little foresight by not moderating with the times, was already in trouble.
“...AND THEN THERE WERE TWO,” a headline writer may have announced at the turn of the century as the NEWS faced its only remaining competition, the Democratic Bangor Daily Commercial, an afternoon paper founded by Marcellus Emery in 1873 and described, not totally honestly 10 years later as “a smart, newsy journal” that “keeps pretty clear of partisan politics, it being the design of the conductors to make it a popular business paper, and to make money.”
The NEWS and the Commercial sparred over money and politics for decades, amusing and piquing readers with stories written in the heat of competition.
The first decade of the 20th century offered plenty of news for the two papers to fight over. Residents didn’t know it, but they were witnessing the last days of Bangor in full flower before the Great Fire of 1911 laid waste to the magnificent city and way of life that never would return.
“What impresses me about Bangor during that period of prosperity after the close of the Spanish-American War was that it was both rural and sophisticated,” said James B. Vickery, a Bangor historian. “It had a kind of quiet gentility. You had the lovely elm trees along State Street, the Boston Boat, the Bar Harbor Express (a popular railroad train), and the Niben Club (a Pushaw Lake establishment for the ‘dirty rich’),” said Vickery.
Bangor had “political wallop” during that period, so much so that President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 and William Howard Taft in 1910 made courtesy calls. The NEWS covered the visits in detail. Vickery is skeptical about the reporting of one incident involving Roosevelt and a face in the crowd by the Bangor House.
“I can’t prove it,” he said, “but when Roosevelt looked into the sea of faces and said ‘Oh, there’s Bill Sewall’ it seemed to have been just a setup staged for reporters.”
Sewall, Vickery suspected, had been “planted” in the crowd and made to listen as the president spoke. As a young man, “T.R.,” in poor health, had lived the good life in Island Falls, where Sewall was his companion and guide.
Even in 1902, it appears, politicians manipulated the media.
“Bangor tried to maintain the status quo during this time,” said Vickery.
But it was losing the battle. Long-term businesses such as E. Buck, boots and moccasins, on Park Street and Bangor Stoneware Co. were folding when their founders died.
With increased editorial and composing room staff, some of whom, like telegraph editor Nathan Tefft, came over from the Whig, the NEWS was looking better than ever, with increased use of “cuts” (line drawings and photographs) and colorful reporting.
Behind the scenes, the NEWS resembled a metropolitan paper, too.
“ON Sept. 3, 1901, a determined little group of men - and one woman - affixed their signatures to a charter, and Local 446 came into being,” wrote the late Winfield Costigan, a NEWS compositor, in 1972.
The newest local in the Bangor Typographical Union voted for representation at the NEWS. Costigan said the workers had a fine relationship with Towle and Walter B. Reed, the paper’s business manager, who worked with “the crew” with only verbal agreements, which Costigan said were rigidly adhered to.
“The early years were when a ‘tramp’ printer would come to town, show his union card and work for the NEWS, sometimes for just a day or two,” said John LaFountain, a printer since 1947.
Printers hustled as NEWS reporters wrote about the local political scene, where an aging F.O. Beal was fighting for his political life. They also reported on the great flood of 1902, which delayed publication of the NEWS edition when the lights went off and the press room was flooded to the ceiling.
As in the spring freshet of 1923, which also flooded the press room, workers put out the paper between tides.
The NEWS published two extra editions after President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and in 1906 it sent its star reporter, Lawrence T. Smyth, to Glenburn where Minot St. Clair Francis, an escaped convict, was captured in a barn after a long manhunt.
“...When he felt the irons snap about his wrists,” wrote Smyth, “Francis looked at his captors and cried, with a note of agony and despair in his voice: ‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you shoot me before this?’ It was a victory of the powerful forces of the law - many well-armed, strong and well-fed men, over a hunted convict, half starved, unarmed, penniless and scarcely able to stand...”
On July 4, 1910, crowds choked Exchange Street in a tradition that continued for decades. They sought news of a title bout between Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson. With the Penobscot Exchange at their backs, which was the only hotel in Bangor that would put up the black fighter during a previous visit, crowds numbering 3,000 to 4,000 turned the street in front of 150 Exchange St. into a kind of village square while awaiting early bulletins of the boxing match.
The year before, J. Norman Towle received news that meant little to most readers but which changed his life forever. His father, Josiah, had died, leaving Norman in charge of the family’s grain business.
Norman dutifully took control of the business, but he had his priorities in order. His first love was the newspaper he had nurtured into a force to be reckoned with.
But Towle’s baby was about to be tested by two fires within a five-year time span.