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    Local News
    Thursday, October 31, 2024

    Notably Norwich: Reflecting on a bygone age of journalism at The Bulletin and beyond

    My friend, Mike DiMauro, the sports columnist for The Day, wrote a column recently celebrating the re-opening of New London’s iconic Dutch Tavern after a pandemic-related closure of more than a year. In describing The Dutch’s cozy interior, he pointed out, among other qualities at this fine establishment, that there is no Wi-Fi.

    “But there are several newspapers,” he wrote, adding parenthetically “A newspaper is a printed publication issued daily and commonly contains news, sports, features, commentary and advertising, in case the word is unfamiliar.”

    As is often the case, DiMauro was writing with tongue firmly implanted in cheek. Or was he?

    With the advent of the internet and social media, newspapers have suffered through dramatic declines in their circulation and, by extension, advertising. With less ad revenue, newsroom staffs have shrunk, and so has the size of newspapers, large, medium-sized and small alike throughout the world. With frightening frequency, newspapers are being purchased by investors who are more interested in their bottom line than in breaking big stories. The result is less coverage of towns, and news stories that sometimes take longer to see the light of day. Some don’t get xovered at all.

    Some police log entries are published more than a week after an arrest, instead of daily. With smaller staffs, reporters are required to cover more beats. Editors and photographers are spread equally thin. Deadlines for the printed product are earlier because the papers are often printed off-site, sometimes even in another state.

    There is also far less investigative reporting, and you’d be hard-pressed to find many young people these day who even read printed newspapers — or any newspapers, for that matter — let alone subscribe to them.

    My first job after college was as the Willimantic reporter for the Norwich Bulletin (now The Bulletin). I had graduated from Eastern Connecticut State College (now university) on a Sunday afternoon in 1977 and began work that very day, covering my own graduation ceremony that featured then-Gov. Ella T. Grasso as our commencement speaker.

    In college, I had been editor of the weekly school paper, The Campus Lantern, and been the Eastern correspondent — a “stringer” — for the Hartford Courant’s Willimantic bureau. The Courant job paid no salary; just 35 cents per column inch. Bureau chiefs George Gombossy and, later, Jim Ross, were good editors. Over-written stories that would have brought a few extra bucks were artfully tightened.

    The editing made me a better writer, but the paychecks would barely cover Thursday night beers at Blarney’s.

    John Peterson, a no-nonsense, newsman in his 30s who had done award-winning investigative work earlier in his career as a reporter at The Day, was the managing editor at The Bulletin, and hired me to my first fulltime newspaper job. He worked in a small, glass-enclosed office in a front corner of the newsroom, overlooking Franklin Street.

    An invitation to what was called “The Fish Bowl” could be congratulatory for a good story or, more likely, an admonishment for what he deemed sloppy, lazy or anything other than objective, thorough, excellent reporting. Peterson set the bar very high for his reporters, editors and photographers, and there was hell to pay for anyone who disappointed him.

    Working at The Bulletin then was not easy. My starting gross weekly salary in 1977 was all of $150. The Willimantic bureau on Main Street was a one-story, two-room building that had no air conditioning or even windows that could be opened. Temperatures in the dead of summer would occasionally exceed 100 degrees. I competed against The Courant with three full-time reporters and one part-timer; the Willimantic Chronicle with roughly the same level of staffing, and two full-time newsmen at radio station WILI.

    Still, there was no excuse for getting beat on a story, even on days when I had filed four or five of them. When The Courant and Chronicle were delivered to the Bulletin newsroom, I could sometimes expect an angry phone call from my suburban editor Don Bond — “Bondo” — asking why we didn’t have a story that one of the other papers had published.

    “Good afternoon, Norwich Bulletin Willimantic bureau,” I would answer when the phone rang around 2:30 on those afternoons.

    “Good afternoon yourself, you (expletive, expletive) rookie wimp,” Bondo would reply. “Would you mind explaining why our competition has this story in today’s paper and we don’t?”

    Being out-numbered was no excuse, In fact, nothing short of being on your death bed was acceptable, and even then Bondo would probably want to see a doctor’s note.

    Still, I did well enough during that first year in Willimantic to earn a promotion to the main newsroom in Norwich, where I was a general assignment reporter, covering various stories ranging from politics and government to police and fire departments. It was exciting being in the main newsroom, where I’d be working with reporters and editors I had previously known only by name and solid reputation: Peterson, Mal Morse, the editorial page editor; Kelly Anthony, and, later, Bob Staley, the city editors; other editors like Jim Docker, Roger Baker, Dick Schnaidt, Andy “Kingfish” Thibault, Tom Oat, Ken Guile, and Art Matson; Liz Callahan was the dayside editor; Harry “Geraldo” Phillips, the well-known police reporter; Ed “Mick” Mahoney, who covered courts; David “Judd” Sparling, who covered state government and gaming; Anson “Caveman” Smith, who covered utilities, Roberta “Robbie” Burke, who covered education, Denis Morin, who covered general assignment/investigative stories, and the prolific Dennis Riley, who could make a few phone calls on a Sunday afternoon, bang out three or four stories and practically own the Monday morning edition.

    In the next room was what then was the finest sports department in the state, headed by sports editor Tim Tolokan, and staffed with great sportswriters like Chuck Banning (now sports editor at The Day); Maurice “Mo” Mitterling, Tom “Tiny” Perry; Hal “Spider” Levy, Jim Malone, Jr., and others.

    In addition to Willimantic, The Bulletin had numerous bureaus from the shoreline to the Massachusetts border then: New London, which was staffed by Sue McCaslin; Groton, which put out the daily, now-defunct Groton News, was led by Steve Urbon; Putnam, where Tim Connolly worked; Danielson, manned by Bill Neagus; Plainfield, which was covered by Marian Prokop; Jewett City and Montville.

    The towns were covered by what was affectionately called the “Kiddy Corps,” a group of hungry, young reporters, most of us fresh out of college: Kathy Keegan in Colchester; Diana Kelly in Ledyard; Nancy Gallinger was in Preston; Yvonne Chilik covered Franklin, Lebanon and Bozrah. There were others whose names have faded over the years.

    If pictures were in fact worth a thousand words, the great photographers, Jeff Evans and Carol Phelps, would have produced numerous volumes.

    Filled with cigarette smoke and many colorful, hardened, competitive characters, it was a wildly exciting place to work. There were rarely enough typewriters, so I finally brought in my own lead-based, 1930s-era black Royal typewriter that was so heavy, no one borrowed it.

    There were no computers, not even electric typewriters. Wire stories would still come over on a machine that printed them for newsroom staff to tear off and send out to be typeset. The paper was laid out on large tables in a wide-open composing room, then headed by Ken Keeley, who would later own his own printing company.

    (Ken and my dad collaborated on the popular “Once Upon A Time” book series that chronicled history from Norwich and surrounding areas. After dad’s passing in 2010, Ken published books of his own about local history, and continues as the area’s unofficial historian).

    The Bulletin was owned then by two local men — Donald Oat and Harrison Noyes. Their offices were away from the newsroom, which was probably just as well, lest they be exposed to some of the eccentric, sometimes rowdy behavior in the newsroom. Besides the blue cloud of cigarette smoke, there was a lot of noise — including occasional profanity — and what could best be described as organized chaos.

    It was colorful, romantic, dramatic, competitive, and sometimes downright harrowing. The operations and production of the paper were entrusted to general manager Bill Cruikshank, a stately, sophisticated gentleman who could instill order in the newsroom merely by walking in.

    After work, many from the newsroom staff would retreat to one of the downtown watering holes — Billy Wilson’s Ageing Still, which was next door to The Bulletin; The Shamrock, a two-block walk; or Chelsea Landing, a short drive away if we wanted a more upscale change of scenery.

    After last call, we’d go back to the Bulletin in time for the first press run. There was no better professional feeling than being handed one of the first papers off the press when you had a Page 1 byline. To celebrate, we would occasionally buy a case or two of beer from one of the local barkeeps and continue imbibing at the Norwich waterfront. This was affectionately called “Choir Practice.”

    Depending on who showed up and what the topics were, Choir Practice could go for an hour or until dawn.

    Once in the wee hours, one newsman drove off for a 10-minutes joyride with a Norwich police cruiser when a friendly officer had just stopped by to say hello. Needless to say, he was not friendly after his cruiser was returned. Another time, we all panicked when one of the editors whose car was still in the waterfront lot couldn’t be located. We searched frantically and were ready to call for help when the editor emerged from the dark, dirty waters of Norwich Harbor. He had decided to go for a swim on that summer evening, having even thought to bring a towel and bathrobe to dry off afterward.

    Those were fun, exciting, fulfilling times. Over time, we all went off to other jobs — some at other newspapers; others in other professions. Peterson would later become publisher of Shoreline Newspapers, a chain of weeklies, and was honored last year with the Yankee Quill Award, New England’s most prestigious journalism honor; he was succeeded as managing editor at the Bulletin by Anthony, who left the paper several years later and had a long, distinguished career as public relations director at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital; Mahoney would go to the Hartford Courant, where he has been one of its most seasoned and decorated reporters; Tom Oat would own and publish a newspaper in St. John, the Virgin Islands; Tolokan would become sports information director at the University of Connecticut, where he would become close friends with Hall of Fame basketball coach Jim Calhoun, and have a front-row seat for UConn’s historic rise to national sports prominence; Sparling would become Sunday editor at The Day, before going on to work at Newsday and The New York Times. Chilik would go on to work at Associated Press, then teach at Rutgers University; Thibault went on to become an author and freelance writer before settling back into newspaper work at the Waterbury Republican; Neagus did public relations work for the Connecticut Business & Industry Association and taught journalism at Quinnipiac University.

    Sadly, Donald Oat, Noyes, Cruikshank, Morse, Matson, Docker, Schnaidt, Baker, Guile, Callahan, Phillips, Bond, Burke, Levy and Perry have passed away, leaving legacies of good, solid, locally-based journalism and great friendships..

    Those were better times in the industry, when newspapers were locally owned by people who lived in our community and were staffed by many people who had grown up in the communities they covered; as my dad once remarked people who “knew the difference between Broad Street and Broadway.”

    There was actually such a thing as “Stop the presses” when a big story broke as the papers were being printed on large presses within the building. Such was the case when New York City police arrested Son of Sam serial killer David Berkowitz on the night of Aug. 10, 1977. The Bulletin was believed to be the only morning newspaper on the East Coast that had stopped the presses in time to include the story on Page 1 of most of its editions the next morning.

    The Bulletin, which once occupied the better portion of an entire city block at 66 Franklin St. in the heart of Norwich, now resides in the former train station a few blocks away, staffed by a small fraction of the large staff that once blanketed most of eastern Connecticut.

    Its reduced size is emblematic to what has occurred at other newspapers throughout the state, the country and the rest of the world. It makes many of us who are news junkies yearn for the past.

    Today, we live in an era of the 24-hour news cycle, driven more now by cable TV news and social media. In their rush to get the story out, the media get the story wrong more than they should. Major stories are sometimes based on a single anonymous source whose information is unverified and sometimes motivated by personal agendas.

    That may be fast journalism, but it’s also sloppy and subjective — two adjectives that have no place in the news-gathering business.

    It was fun back in the good old days, and it was better. We may have had ink on our fingers and a stack of old papers in the corner, but it was worth it to get timely, thorough, objective news that included even the simplest things like municipal meetings, daily police logs and baseball scores from the nigh before.

    Sure, we can read them now online or a few days later, but it’s not the same. Those who woke up with their morning newspaper or read the afternoon daily when they got home from work know what all that meant and all that it was worth — a lot.

    Bill Stanley grew up in Norwich and recently retired as a vice president at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital.

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