New publishers, old traditions

David H. Crowe founded The Enterprise in 1884. This picture was taken six years later when he was editor of the Milford Tidings in Otsego County.

ALTAMONT — In the bright July sun, the three new publishers of The Altamont Enterprise took turns, in pairs, carrying a nine-foot desk down Main Street, and around the corner to 120 Maple Ave., the newspaper’s new home.

Agnes Armstrong had purchased the desk 30 or 40 years ago when Jim and Wanda Gardner were modernizing the news offices at 123 Maple Ave. It held piles of research papers in her Victorian home, its hand-turned pine legs still sturdy.

When she read our editorial about the sale of the paper, she offered to sell the desk to us for the same price she had paid, $200. We were delighted to reclaim this bit of Enterprise history and proudly placed it in our new home.

My husband, Gary Spencer, and co-publisher Marcello Iaia hoisted the desk over her stair railing and angled it down, oh so carefully, step by step, until it was out the open front doors. We then started our procession through the village, feeling triumphant.

I looked at the two men hefting the desk with great admiration. Both of them are steady and committed, and in our new venture for the long haul.

The Enterprise has always been a practical place, so it was no surprise that someone had covered the top of the desk with marbled green linoleum, itself probably a century old.

When Jim Gardner saw the desk in our new place, he recalled that Lansing Christman had written on it. Lansing was the Enterprise editor during the Great Depression before he went on to a career in the nation’s first television news station, in Schenectady. Lansing was also a poet and, before his death, wrote a column for The Enterprise, “Countryside Gleanings.”

 

Main Street procession: The new publishers of The Enterprise take turns carrying an heirloom copy desk from the original Enterprise offices on Maple Avenue back to a new home on Maple. Gary Spencer is in front, Melissa Hale-Spencer brings up the rear, and Marcello Iaia took the picture. The Enterprise — Marcello Iaia

 

I loved working with Lansing in the early part of this century. He lived then in South Carolina and would mail his typewritten column, often with heartfelt notes attached. When I cleaned out my office at 123 Maple — 30 years of papers that mostly went to the dump — I saved the notes from Lansing. His words came to me across the miles and through the decades, much treasured advice in a job that often made me feel alone.

“I love the way you are handling the news reports coming from your writers and reporters,” Lansing typed in 2000. “Telling the truth, the way it is, builds the recognition of The Enterprise as a real newspaper.”

When my dear friend and co-editor, Andrew Schotz, left to write for a daily, Lansing wrote me about the farewell column I’d written, “It was a gem, so moving and loving, touching the heart...If only all people could write from the heart as you did, expressing their emotions openly, both those of sorrow and those of joy.”

When we announced the sale of The Enterprise, it felt as if floodgates had opened. I was bowled over by the calls and cards, emails and letters we received.  It was clear that people cared about The Enterprise and they had a sense of ownership about it. A card from the Lounsburys of Berne said, “I read of your bold decision to purchase The Enterprise with a mixture sadness and joy — sadness was due to the departure of Jim and Wanda, joy because the new owners bring courage, vision and passion for truth and the written word.”

We’ll try to live up to the expectations so many have expressed. We have a small, dedicated staff:  writers Jo E. Prout, Anne Hayden Harwood, and Elizabeth Floyd Mair; graphic designer Christine Ekstrom; photographer Michael Koff; illustrator Carol Coogan; Cherie Lussier, selling ads; and office workers Ellen Schreibstein and Holly Busch. We are grateful to have, as well, a cadre of diverse and talented columnists.

One of the calls came from Timothy Albright, a New Scotland farmer and historian, who admonished me for an editorial announcement he considered inadequate. “You need to write an in-depth history of The Enterprise,” he told me. “This is an historic event,” he said of the paper changing hands.

So here it is, the best I could patch together, much of it from early editions and the centennial celebration issue in July 1984.

“No use for life preservers”

David H. Crowe founded the paper in 1884 as The Knowersville Enterprise since that was the name of the village at the time. The Enterprise has been covering Guilderland, New Scotland, and the Hilltowns in Albany County, New York since then.

“The pilot is at the wheel, the launching has gone on merrily, and is ominous of success,” Crowe wrote. “We shall have no use for life preservers.”

Crowe — an auctioneer, churchman, Odd Fellow, prohibitionist, sometime farmer and teacher, would-be preacher, and fulltime booster — printed 300 copies of the first Enterprise, from a hand press at 154 Church Street, today’s Maple Avenue. He saw the newspapers as guests.

“Today a guest visits the citizens of Knowersville,” he wrote. “An unknown, strange guest. Not a visitor of flesh and blood but a silent speaker of true things that will each week go to every home where its presence is welcomed.”

Crowe also asked, “Will the people of Knowersville and the surrounding towns support and sustain a journal which is ready for a square knockdown with wrong each week?”

 

The first Enterprise office was at 154 Church Street (now Maple Avenue), on the north corner of Church and Jay streets. Using a hand press, David H. Crowe printed the first edition of The Knowersville Enterprise here in 1884. The Enterprise — Melissa Hale-Spencer

 

The first Enterprise office building, on the north corner of Maple Avenue and Jay Street, produced a very broad broadsheet: four pages of seven 20-inch columns. Editorial content was thin and advertising was thinner.

Like many papers in that era, the outer two pages were a purchased wrapper with the inner pages devoted to local news. Crowe had two local columns, one for comings and goings, and the other for business.  The writers of local news were correspondents who did not use their names. Most simply signed with an initial. The Quaker Street correspondent called herself Callisto after one of Zeus’s girlfriends.

The correspondents covered the news both great and small. The Guilderland Center correspondent reported on a fellow there being “handed the mitt” after church by his girlfriend but he recovered well and walked someone else home. The first issue carried news that the citizens of Gallupville were raising money to prosecute a local murderer who had fled.

The early Enterprise was nonpartisan but disapproved of corruption or incompetence in either party.

Crowe set out his policy in his first issue: “The Enterprise either through its Editor or correspondents will not discuss political parties, platforms or candidates; neither will it meddle with the local religious or secular societies. Its columns will be open to all matters relating to any and all, so long as the communications are such as shall inform the readers but not offend.”

Crowe served as editor and publisher for just nine months before John Hilton and Jay Klock succeeded him in the management and continued the paper another year. Klock’s father, the Rev. N. Klock, had been the owner and publisher of Knowersville’s first paper, the Golden Era, which was printed from 1877 to 1882.

Hilton is manager for a year

Hilton ran The Enterprise, appearing on the masthead as manager. Correspondents’ columns, listing activities of residents at a variety of locales, flourished in the year he had the paper. The paper abandoned pre-printed patent covers and, from May 8, 1885 on, the editor controlled every page.

Writing on the paper’s first anniversary, Hilton said, “We have endeavored to make the Enterprise a model local paper...The patent outside was at once discarded.” A May 9 front page featured pictures, an extravagance the paper couldn’t often afford, but it broke the mold drastically.

Hilton also boasted of typographical and editorial changes: “The print is plainer and brighter; the village news is fuller; the vicinity news surpasses that of any of our contemporaries both in completeness of detail and conciseness of style; our editorial columns are always original and readable, never being loaded down with dissensions and monologues on dry and uninteresting topics.”

Also in May, Hilton outlined his editorial philosophy: “It is the chief aim of the local newspaper to give its readers news from their own homes — the births, the deaths, the marriages, the little happenings which go to make up life. And we doubt not that when the villager or farmer goes home with a copy of his local paper in the same pocket with a more pretentious metropolitan journal it is the former which first catches the eye of his wife or daughter even though the latter were filled with news of war in Europe or announce the deadly illness of the greatest general of the age.”

The year 1885 was an eventful one in Hilton’s personal life. In June, a long notice in The Enterprise detailed his passing the post office civil service exam with a score of 96.84 percent, the highest ever recorded in Albany, allowing him an immediate job as a clerk.

On Sept. 23, Hilton married Lena Crounse at the bride’s home in Albany; The Enterprise called it a quiet wedding.  The couple planned to settle in Albany after a brief trip.

Hilton’s management ended with his marriage. The Sept. 26 edition carried a notice that Junius Ogsbury had become the active manager, “having become part proprietor in ownership and good will.”

 

After the great fire of 1886 on Church Street (now Maple Avenue) destroyed much of the village’s business district, The Enterprise moved to 198 Main Street in J. F. Mynderse’s store, the building that today houses The Home Front Café. The Enterprise — Melissa Hale-Spencer

 

The Ogsbury era

Ogsbury, as Hilton’s partner, and later with his second cousin, John D. Ogsbury, during his tenure, which lasted until 1914, helped to broaden the editorial scope of the paper and increase its circulation.

“Mr. Ogsbury is so well and favorably known to all our readers that we need say nothing by way of introduction,” The Enterprise reported. “He is a practical printer, and under his endeavors the Enterprise is sure to reach the degree of typographical excellence toward which it has been steadily progressing ever since it came under its new management.

Junius Ogsbury had moved to Knowersville with his parents and siblings — he was the oldest of seven — in 1865, when he was 8, they built one of the first houses in the village.

He married, twice, and had four sons and a daughter.  When he died at 81, he was one of the oldest residents of the village. He proudly claimed to be the only one left who remembered the first train to come to the village, the start of the rail service that put Knowersville on the map.

On Oct. 24, 1885, The Enterprise announced in its News Summary: “We cannot attempt to give every instance of crime, rascality or impudence, which teem in the columns of the daily papers and are forgotten by everyone one hour after they are read. But we can and will keep our readers informed on all the important movements of men and nations.”

Junius Ogsbury’s Enterprise obituary in 1938 emphasized his contributions to Altamont’s civic life — as first secretary of the fair association, one of the first members of Altamont High School’s board of education, a charter member of the Altamont Hose Company, a one-time mayor and water commissioner, and a member of the Lutheran church and Noah Lodge.

In April 1886, a great fire destroyed much of the Church Street business district. By December 1886, The Enterprise had relocated to 198 Main Street in J. F. Mynderse’s store, where Cindy Pollard’s Home Front Café is today. Over the next 15 years, The Enterprise moved three more times on Main Street — each time, to the building directly next door — before finally returning to Maple Avenue in 1901.

 

The new Pangburn store, at the corner of Maple and Main, became the Enterprise headquarters in 1888 — the newspaper had offices on the top floor on the side of the building next to Maple Avenue after J. F. Mynderse was appointed postmaster and The Enterprise was forced out of his store. In 1889, however, John Pangburn was appointed postmaster and, once again, the presses had to make way for the postal boxes. The Enterprise — Melissa Hale-Spencer

 

When Mynderse was appointed postmaster, space was needed for the post boxes, and The Enterprise moved next door to the corner of Main and Maple, with its offices on the second floor. In 1889, John Pangburn was appointed postmaster and The Enterprise had to move again because of the post boxes, this time to the basement of the Snyder store at 186 Main Street. The basement, however, was wanting for space and light, and, in 1886, John and Junius Ogsbury moved the business to 182 Main Street, later the home of the Altamont Pharmacy.

But, once again, post boxes took precedence over presses. In 1901, Dayton Whipple was appointed postmaster and secured a lease at 182 Main Street for the post office. So, in June 1901, the Ogsburys purchased the property at 123 Maple — once a tin shop, then a stove shop, then a hardware store — and printed the first issue at the new location in 1901.

The Enterprise wrote of the transition, “We have moved to a new location...a trying experience especially for a printing operation...Those who know of our first efforts with a hand press in small, uninviting quarters and have witnessed the growth of the paper will appreciate our pride...

“The building has been raised up on a cellar and an additional building connected at the rear giving us 1,300 square feet of larger and finer rooms than is usually found in a country paper...We have aimed to secure ample light from plenty of window space and a Colt Acetylene Gas machine installed by Fred Keenholts will illuminate the night as the day...

“With all equipment we now have a model printing plant...We are not boastful but speak in a spirit of achievement long labored for...We trust to improve and make the paper more worthy of the generous support already accorded us.”

John D. Ogsbury steered The Enterprise through two financial crises — the recession after World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s — which destroyed hundreds of weeklies in New York State alone. Ogsbury was not a writer himself but he attracted two of the paper’s best writers in its long history: Lansing Christman, who also served as editor, and Arthur B. Gregg who researched and wrote about local history.

 

In 1943, Howard Ogsbury, left, the Enterprise publisher, and Lansing Christman, its editor, were among the newspapermen invited to participate in a broadcast, “Extra! Extra!” at WGY in Schenectady.

 

John D. Ogsbury recalled on his 80th birthday, as he reflected on the similarity of his name and his second cousin’s, “We were always getting our mail mixed up.” The cousins lived across Grand Street from each other. “Junius Ogsbury kept suggesting that I buy a half ownership in the paper to avoid confusion.”

So, on Dec. 6, 1886, John D. Ogsbury bought out John Hilton’s interest with $300 he borrowed from his mother-in-law. Later. he said jokingly that he’d felt he had paid  $200 too much.

He was a thrifty young man, born in 1856 on a farm on the Normanskill flats two miles south of McKownville. He helped his father with farm work until 1874, then took up the wheelwright’s trade; had a stint making spring beds in Buffalo; became a bookseller, traveling as far as California; worked in a laundry in Cleveland until it burned; came to Knowersville in 1883 to work in the undertaking and furniture business; and then took up carpentry.

In 1885, he married Mary Elizabeth Brunk, who had taught school in Berne; they met through their involvement in the Good Templar Order. With money from his wife’s mother, Betsy Brunk, Ogsbury bought Hilton’s share and worked at The Enterprise for the next 63 years, coming into the office until his last illness, five weeks before his death.

Ogsbury — J.D.O. as he was called at his office — was a cautious businessman. The Duplex web press, which printed The Enterprise until 1979, was bought secondhand and rebuilt.

In July 1904, with circulation at 2,400, the paper celebrated its 20th anniversary by doubling its coverage. For the rest of Ogsbury’s life, each edition of the paper consisted of eight large broadsheet pages of seven columns each.

As transportation improved, more people took a city daily. A weekly overview of the world news became less useful. During the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, The Enterprise carried comics, including those by Rube Goldberg, famous for his intricate imagined gadgets.

During the years when Democrat Junius Ogsbury was John’s partner, the paper stuck to its original non-partisan policy. When Junius left in 1914, the paper became solidly Republican.

“The political aspect of the Enterprise is strictly Republican,” said the 80th birthday interview in 1936 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was campaigning for the presidency, an office he won handily with the New Deal coalition backing him. “The entire family is Republican and so is Altamont,” Ogsbury was quoted as saying. “I don’t want to see Roosevelt elected again.”

John D. Ogsbury brought two of his sons into the business. In 1914, when Junius left, John announced that his son Merlin would be the associate editor and half-owner. Merlin contracted tuberculosis in November of that year and died in 1915.

In 1920, Howard, his fifth and youngest son, became a junior partner. He ran the paper during the last years of his father’s life and took over as editor and publisher after John D. Ogsbury died on April 13, 1943.

 

Jim Gardner sits at the Enterprise’s Intertype machine, which uses hot lead type. Using a keyboard (not the same configuration as a typewriter), he dispenses individual letters that form into a single row. He started working at The Enterprise in 1953 as a printer’s devil, carrying forms up and down the rickety cellar stairs, describing the process as being fueled by “brute strength and ignorance.” The Enterprise — Melissa Hale-Spencer

 

Enter James E. Gardner

A decade after Howard Ogsbury took over as publisher, James E. Gardner wanted to buy a car for his junior year of high school. The part-time job he got as a printer’s devil at The Altamont Enterprise turned into a lifelong commitment— first as a master printer and then, after a partnership, as the newspaper’s sole owner.

Gardner, born in 1937, was raised with his three brothers and three sisters on Siver Road in Guilderland where he learned to love hunting, fishing, and exploring the woods. He went to a two-room schoolhouse on Willow Street in Guilderland and then on to Altamont High School before graduating in 1955 as a member of the first class in the centralized Guilderland High School.

Gardner recalled, in a piece published for the paper’s centennial in 1984, how he stopped by the news office for the first time and met Howard Ogsbury in February 1953.

“Howard was sitting in an ancient wooden chair at a Linotype machine, setting type for the next issue. We talked briefly and he said, ‘Show up Thursday and you can have the job,’” recalled Gardner. “I was ecstatic.”

Gardner carried forms of lead type downstairs to the press in the cellar and back up again after each of the two press runs. After graduating from high school, Gardner, for a dozen years, divided his time between The Enterprise and Beebe Press in Rotterdam.

In 1956, he married Wanda Sturgess, who had been born in her parents’ Knox farmhouse during a snowstorm. She attended the Township one-room school through the fifth grade when it closed, and graduated from Berne-Knox in 1953, going on to Albany Business College for accounting.

The couple met when she was a bridesmaid for a friend who married James Gardner’s brother.

Gardner made the decision in 1968 to join a four-way partnership owning The Enterprise: Marvin Vrooman, James Pino, Ogsbury, and Gardner were the partners. After two of the partners retired, Charles Stewart joined the partnership in 1974. In 1980, Gardner became sole owner of The Enterprise.

Wanda Gardner started working part-time at The Enterprise in the early 1970s, paying bills and doing payroll, gradually increasing her hours and responsibilities until she became the full-time office manager. Their daughter, Gail, helped out, inserting and wrapping papers, and their son, Jim Jr., worked at the print shop as he still does today. He also now runs a photography shop.

 

Ed Cowley painted this oil of 123 and 125 Maple Ave. Jim Gardner owns both the painting and the buildings.

 

In 1983, Gardner purchased the building next door, 125 Maple Ave., which had long housed leather businesses. It was built in 1886 to replace the structure destroyed by the great fire.  Helen Becker, who ran a shoe repair shop there and was fondly remembered by Altamont children for her penny candy, had died in February 1983.

Gardner connected the two buildings, using the center part of the complex for copying, collation, and the mailing of newspapers. (While Jim and Wanda Gardner and their son continue to run the print shop, they are considering remodeling the rest of their complex into apartments.)

As technology changed, the newspaper changed with it. “The Enterprise had to change to survive,” said Gardner in his centennial piece when the circulation was over 4,000.

In 1979, The Enterprise became a tabloid printed by offset, off site. Its pages were filled with a wide variety of writing, much of it from dedicated volunteers. Robert Hagyard served as news editor joined by Bryce Butler in the centennial year.

Bryce, a theologian and an Altamont native who understood and wrote about the village with great depth and passion, worked for The Enterprise until his death in 2001. He wrote a poignant series of columns, which he headlined, “Dead man writing,” as he battled cancer. He filed his last story the week before he died.

Richard Schreibstein, who wrote an award-winning humor column for The Enterprise, ushered in the computer era as the Compugraphic machines where writers’ copy had to be reset were gradually replaced by computers on which writers could directly type their words for print.

At the same time, the reporting staff was expanded. Chris Sanford, as editor, wasn’t afraid of a good fight, and Andrew Schotz with Hale-Spencer focused on the heart of good journalism.

I relished writing editorials, new for the paper in the modern era, and coined the Enterprise motto: “We seek the truth and print it” — words we live by every week.

 

New day dawns

This past March, Marcello Iaia, my husband, and I sat with Jim Gardner around the Gardners’ old kitchen table, which we used for meetings at The Enterprise.

We had come to transfer the ownership of a paper all of us loved. Jim had a handwritten list of annual figures.

He spoke with a catch in his voice of the high regard in which Howard Ogsbury had held him, and how Ogsbury had sold him his share of the business for a dollar.

It was clear he was considering my quarter-century of labor and love for the paper with his asking price.

We shook hands all around; we trusted each other for the rest of the transfer.

Then, through tears, Jim and I hugged.

We all knew what hard work lay ahead in this era of sea change for newspapers, but, at that moment, I never felt luckier.

 

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