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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.
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