Here & There Column 3-18-08

Art Was In A Newspaper Era We Will Long Remember

The obituary of Arthur Sugarman in last Tuesday's newspaper brought back to us many memories and some of the long standing history of the weekly newspaper industry and how much it has changed over the last 50 years.
Printers blood and the weekly newspaper field was introduced to me in the early 1950's when I would walk from the old Liberty High School on North Main Street in the Village of Liberty down to the Liberty Gazette & Sprague Brothers printing shop on School Street next to what was the location of the New York State Electric & Gas Corporation building.
My late uncle Cliff Sprague was the Linotype operator at the Liberty Gazette and I remember well watching him type using only two fingers on both hands. He could make that old hot-type Linotype machine just sing. He got me writing high school sports when I was a freshman in high school and that's where I got to really know the late Hazel LeRoy, wife of attorney "Nish" LeRoy and mother of my good friend and fellow musician in high school Marve LeRoy.
I have never known a woman so talented as Hazel was in getting items for her "local news" column.
But the Gazette was not the only newspaper in Liberty at that time. There was also the Liberty Register owned and operated by Harold and Clara Schue (hope I spelled their last name correctly) and their also was the Sullivan County Press (Liberty Ad-Visor) owned and operated by Harrison Krum. The Liberty News, printed in Monticello also was part of the weekly newspaper field.
The weekly newspaper industry in Sullivan County during that era (as much as we can remember) consisted of the Sullivan County Democrat in Callicoon, the Sullivan County Record in Jeffersonville, the Republican Watchman and Evening News in Monticello and the Livingston Manor Times in Livingston Manor. There was also a newspaper in Narrows burg and I think Fred Stabber Jr. mentioned to me another newspaper possibly being in the Bloomingburg-Wurtsburo area.
At one point in time there were 12 weekly newspapers in Sullivan County.
Art Sugarman was a popular and at times a controversial editor of the Republican Watchman and Evening News but he was respected and did a great job as editor of those newspapers. I had the opportunity to work with Art for several years of my weekly newspaper career which also took me to the Liberty Register, Livingston Manor Times, Sullivan County Press and of course my greatest journey of them all to the Sullivan County Democrat.
As the years went by weekly newspapers closed with some saying that there just wasn't enough advertising dollars around to keep them all financially sound.
During those years of the many weekly newspapers we met a number of well respected editors and publishers including of course Fred Stabbert Jr. of the Sullivan County Democrat, Richard "Dick" Rosenbaum of the Sullivan County Record and later the Liberty Register, Ruby Katz of Southern News York Publishers and the Republican Watchman, Evening News and Liberty News, Don and Emily Batty of the Livingston Manor Times and the Sprague brothers at the Liberty Gazette.
We thank those who were responsible for writing Art Sugarman's obituary as it reminded us of a great era of weekly newspapers in Sullivan County.