-By Richard R. Shaw

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.

	Reporter Wayne St. Germain banging out a story at the old Exchange Street Office.

“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.

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.

	The Bangor Daily News escaped the Great Bangor Fire of April 30, 1911, but was not so lucky three years later. A fire discovered by a customer destroyed the four-story building at 150 Exchange St. Several NEWS employees on the top floor barely escaped with their lives. Bangor News Fire - Exchange Street - Jan. 28, 1914

April 30, 1911, was one of those sparkling early spring days when people left whatever they were doing and took to the streets on foot, in carriages, or in one of the new “horseless buggies.”

“I always had to remember not to drop a lighted cigarette down through the cracks onto the third floor,” said “Mim” French, who later worked as a proofreader in composing. “That was where they stored the huge rolls of paper.”
After surviving a double baptism by fire, the Bangor Daily News could do without another inferno.

“On the night of August 2, 1923, I was awakened by my father coming up the stairs calling my name. I noticed that his voice trembled. As the only times I had ever observed that before were when death had visited our family, I knew that something of the gravest nature had occurred.”

In his usual understated manner, Calvin Coolidge described the night he was thrust into the presidency after the sudden death of Warren G. Harding.

The NEWS surprised no one before the election of 1924 when it endorsed the Vermont Republican whose personal simplicity won public adoration. Happy days were here again for “Silent Cal”, who won the election by a landslide.
Many danced the Charleston and quaffed bathtub gin while the pro-big business president made public statements that encouraged reckless stock market speculation later in the decade.

Composing room workers sport ties and vests in photo taken about 1920 after the NEWS moved to 170 Exchange St.

In Bangor, whose population had swollen to 28,576, those who weren’t squandering their money could invest it at any of the city’s two national banks, two trust companies, two savings banks, and a building loan association.
At the NEWS, J. Norman Towle, freed from the onus of running the grain business, set out to build circulation in rural Maine. As president and treasurer of Bangor Publishing Co., as well as publisher of the Bangor Daily News, Towle had increased circulation to 23,000.

Fred and Lillis Jordan, still living near Boston, followed Bangor activities in the pages of the family newspaper.
Mattie Crawford, a traveling faith healer, held services in Bangor in 1925, and soon afterward was investigated by the Bangor Ministerial Association which took a dim view of her “many wonderful cures.” Undaunted, Crawford returned in December for a “vindication meeting.”

Billy Sunday got a warmer welcome two years later when he preached at the Bangor Auditorium. At one sermon he bellowed, “...The man who buys bootleg liquor is just as guilty as the bootlegger.”

Violent crime took a jump in the 1920s. The NEWS reported in 1925 that two masked gunmen held up a streetcar at Westland Park. Soon afterward, another masked man burst into a State Street filling station and shot the attendant five times with a .38 caliber revolver.

On the national scene, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover reported that business was free from fear of a violent cataclysm.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler, while serving time in prison for engineering the unsuccessful Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, dictated “Mein Kampf” to Rudolf Hess.

And in Nicaragua, five U.S. Marines were killed and 23 wounded as they battled insurgents.

“Whole civilized world anxious to honor Lindbergh,” trumpeted the NEWS headline on May 23, 1927, in one of the decade’s biggest stories. “The Flying Fool” had just become the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris.
In the second-floor publisher’s office later know as the “Red Room,” J. Norman Towle sat at his desk. The year as 1929, a crucial one for the NEWS and the nation.

“I remember that people in the first-floor business office said they could hear Mr. Towle walking around upstairs with his cane,” said Virginia Glidden, who began work in that office in 1942. Towle had contracted polio many years before.

“Black Thursday,” Oct. 24, added to the gloom at 170 Exchange St. On that date the stock market crashed after a flurry of activity on Wall Street. Thirteen million shares were traded that day alone.

The nation panicked. The bubble burst. The honeymoon was over.

In Massachusetts, Fred Jordan’s life was about to change. Mr. Towle was stepping down and wanted his son-in-law to take over as manager of the paper’s day-to-day operation.

Fred, Lillis, and their 8-year-old daughter, Joanne, packed their bags at their Cohasset, Mass., home and in 1930 Jordan was settled into the second-story office. He later decorated in Chinese red with blue trim, and hung Currier and Ives prints on the wall.

“I had lots of friends down there and lots of dogs, a pony and went horseback riding,” recalled Joanne Van Namee. “But it wasn’t too hard to move to Bangor because I had been up there many times visiting Nana and Grampa Towle.”

Fred Jordan, a Bangor native, had come a long way from his days as office boy at Merrill Trust Co., “who polished the glass and ran errands,...and polished the windows to a dazzling brightness,” said the NEWS.

Virginia Glidden was in awe of Jordan, “who looked like a doctor,” she said. He might as well have been Franklin D. Roosevelt himself holding court in the Red Room.

Then she saw the philanthropist hidden behind the exterior that some found gruff.

“He would have lunch at the Penobscot Exchange Hotel across from the NEWS,” said Glidden, who grew to admire Jordan. “There was a hatcheck girl there who didn’t have much money and Mr. Jordan always made a point of giving her a good tip.”

Glidden said Jordan was always well-groomed and that a barber would visit the Red Room regularly to trim his hair and
moustache.

Marion Flood French, who started with the paper after World War II, recalled a wartime story that further proved Jordan’s generosity.

“He gave all of the women nylon stockings, and believe me, that was quite a treat in those days. Nylons weren’t easy to get then,” she said.

The nation and the NEWS faced a long haul during the depression years of the 1930s, but Fred D. Jordan was up to the challenge. His years as a stockbroker in the hurly-burly Boston business climate were not wasted.

“I never say a man take over a newspaper business in 24 hours and be such a success,” said Lillis Jordan.

Every night after work Fred sat down from dinner and updated Lillis on the paper’s latest grim financial news.

“My husband felt that women should know a lot more about business than my father,” recalled Lillis Jordan.

With a strong woman by his side, Jordan was ready to do battle with the problems of the day. First order of business: To save the NEWS from bankruptcy.

It was around 7 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 12, 1937 - Columbus Day. John O’Connell, managing editor of the NEWS, turned to Dan Maher Sr., the paper’s chief photographer, and said, “Let’s go home to bed, Dan, nothing’s going to happen here.”
The two had spent the night in a car parked in downtown Bangor near 25 Central St., the location of Dakin’s Sporting Goods, which sold sportswear, bicycles, and guns.

Ninety minutes later a shiny black 1937 Buick sedan rolled to a stop near the store. A man got out, entered Dakin’s and asked about the submachine gun he had naively ordered the week before.

When he resisted arrest, hell open up while an FBI trap was sprung on Central Street and the man’s two gangster pals, one of them Public Enemy No. 1 Al Brady, were shot dead by federal agents.

“I have no idea how O’Connell knew about the trap set for the Brady Gang,” said Lillis Jordan in a 1981 interview. “But the night before the shooting John called Fred at Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York.”

While out of town on business with his wife, Jordan had an emergency appendectomy.

“John told Fred that he knew that there were 19 G-men in Bangor and that something was going to happen at Dakin’s, but he didn’t know just what,” recalled Lillis Jordan.

“They’re scattered all over town so as not to attract suspicion. I’ll keep in touch,” John said.

“The next day, immediately after the shooting,” she continued, “John called Fred and told him the news. Doctors came rushing into the room after Fred became so excited everyone thought he had suffered a setback.”

Jordan had every reason to be excited. The slaying of Clarence Lee Shaffer and Alfred James Brady was arguably the biggest news story in Bangor history. Although O’Connell and Maher never saw the bullets fly, their paper published an extra edition shortly after noon with startling photos of bodies lying in pools of blood.

Because the afternoon Bangor Daily Commercial had full city and composing room crews already in house, it beat the NEWS by minutes with its own extra, but without photos.

Oscar Shepard, an award-winning NEWS reporter, tapped out his best work on an office typewriter.
“(Brady and Shaffer) crumpled upon the car tracks in front of the Dakin’s Store,” he wrote. “Blood ran along the car tracks, trickled toward the curb. It spread in an ever-widening, crimson lake. The street seemed full of it.
“The man who was to make Dillinger look like a piker had met Dillinger’s end. He lay grotesquely on his back- a human sieve, his flesh torn into shreds.”

In 1938, history was made at 170 Exchange St. Wirephotos were coming to Bangor.

“Dad and I drove a portable three-quarter ton panel truck all over Maine with the bulky wirephoto equipment inside,” recalled Dan Maher Jr., a retired NEWS photographer.

Maher, who was in his mid-teens in 1938, said he and his father could cover a fire or other breaking news, drive to the nearest telephone, connect the portable unit and transmit photos to Bangor or any place they desired.

“Dad would instruct the operator, ‘DO NOT MONITOR,’” recalled Maher. ‘Whenever one of those country gals broke in to find out why she wasn’t hearing voices, only strange noises for 10 minutes, the connection would be broken and we’d have to start all over again.”

The impact of the wirephoto was staggering in an era when the Bangor Daily News was shedding its old clothes and becoming a truly modern newspaper.

O’Connell and Jordan realized the potential of wirephotos as the winds of war blew over Europe. Hitler had already annexed the Sudetenland while Britain and France did nothing.

The band news from Europe may explain why good news breaking in a camp near Stacyville enchanted readers across the nation in July 1939. Donn Fendler, a 12-year-old New York Boy Scout, had stumbled out of the woods after being lost near Mount Katahdin for nine days.

Eddie Baker, a NEWS photographer, and Wayne St. Germain broke the story. Both had just climbed Mount Katahdin and, receiving word at a park station, wire closer to Fendler than the other reporters back in Millinocket. They hiked seven miles to see the emaciated Fendler at a camp.

St. Germain later wrote, “I don’t think I shall ever forget the thrill I got when standing in a woods camp (I watched) Donn talk on a telephone to his distraught mother and say: ‘Don’t worry mommy. I’m OK.’”

A week later Baker and St. Germain scooped the nation again.

“A B-17 bomber overshot Dow Field and running out of fuel the pilot tried landing in an isolated section several miles from Lee,” wrote St. Germain. “All nine aboard were killed. Eddie and I trekked for two days to get to the scene and...we beat the Army in...I found the pilot at least 150 feet away. He had been thrown from his ship still strapped to his seat.”

Back in Bangor the NEWS’ composing room prepared more big, black headlines as the Nazi Army marched into Poland. Readers hoped for the best, and Franklin D. Roosevelt told mothers in Boston that he would not send their boys into any foreign wars. But by then, everyone knew it was only a matter of time.