Posted: 6/12/02

Ink-stained hands sealed Lellman's future

Earl Lellman
Former Times Publisher

Iíve had a personal association with several of the Times publishers during the 88+ years that Forest Lake has been my home town. The first was Loren D. Meade, publisher during the 1920ís. It was my first visit to the Times office. I was 10 or 11. I went with my dad, who had been a pressman at a printing plant in Minneapolis before he was forced out of the trade because of TB.

Mr. Meade was pleased to show the ex-pressman and his son some of the equipment. I was fascinated with the proof press. Mr. Meade let me try working the roller over a galley of type and by the time we left, I had managed to smear thick black ink all over my hands and my good shirt. Sort of a ritual anointing by printerís ink into my destined field of endeavor.

When I was a junior in high school, Jim Elwell and I put together three or four issues of the Forest Breeze, the first ever FLHS school newspaper. The school had it printed at the Times plant, where John Anderson was then publisher.

When summer came Mr. Anderson agreed to pay me by the column inch for a weekly column which I called ìSummer Breezes.î At 17 I was a paid professional journalist!

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, I was hired as a Times reporter and columnist by Palmer Gilbertson, who had bought the paper from Chester Swanson and Harold Anderson, cousins, who had taken it over during the Great Depression.

In December 1941 I left the Times, went to work as night editor at the Owatonna daily paper, was drafted into the Army from there, served 3‡ years, then returned to the news desk in Owatonna.

By then Newell Barnard had purchased the Times from Gilbertson and in the spring of 1946 Barnard invited me back to Forest Lake to serve as editor, reporter, advertising salesman and bookkeeper. The bookkeeping I never got around to because it developed that there were only 24 hours in a day.

Gilbertson had moved to California where he published the Temple City Times. On a vacation visit in Forest Lake, he made Barnard an offer to buy back the Times, on which he was still holding a sizeable contract.

Quivering Tummy

To quote the entry in my wife Dorisís journal on August 11, 1947 ó ìMy hands are still trembling and my tummy is quivering over the knowledge that we are 40 percent owners of the Forest Lake Times. Only this morning Newell Barnard, Palmer Gilbertson, Earl and Sid Anderson got together and signed the agreement to transfer the property.î

I remember that morning very clearly. After Palmer came out of Newellís office, gleaming, Sid and I joined him at Wagnerís Hamburger Shop to share the news. Barnard would sell for about $26,000. The building was not included in the deal. It was owned by local pharmacist Richie Petersen.

We three formed a corporation capitalized at $20,000. Between savings of our own and loans from friends and her father, Doris and I raised the $8000 for our 40 percent share. Gilbertsonís 40 percent was covered by the balance still owed him by Barnard and he loaned Sid what he needed to cover his 20 percent share.

It had happened so fast, it seemed like a dream. It was indeed the fulfillment of a dream ó our own newspaper business in my home town!

By engineering the deal, Palmer Gilbertson was able to fulfill a hope he had expressed many times when Sid and I were his employees ó to help us get a start in publishing the way he had been helped by a publisher back when he was ready to buy his own first newspaper.

He was especially pleased to be fulfilling this hope now, since three years earlier he had offered us the same opportunity and we were unable to accept. I was in the Army and had just been reclassified for overseas service. Doris was willing to take over the editorial reins until my return but the war clouds were darkening and we decided, with regret, that the time was not right to enter the business world. He then sold the Times to Newell Barnard and the building to Petersen.

We took over the Times on Monday, Sept. 1, 1947. We had two Linotypes, a Miehle newspaper press, two or three job presses, a folder, saw, paper cutter and the usual equipment for general letterpress printing.

Palmer went back to California. Sid and I went to work with enthusiasm as employers, he in the plant, I in the front office. Now it was up to us to show that the business could produce sufficient income to pay our salaries and those of the employees we had inherited.

The post-WW II boom was on. The wartime shortages of domestic goods were being filled and a spirit of optimism reigned. It was a heady time to be entering the commercial world.

The 'Diamond Jubilee'

The year 1949 was the 75th anniversary of the founding of Forest Lake as a governmental entity. When I came across this fact, I began promoting the idea of a ìDiamond Jubileeî celebration for the community. Committees were formed and ambitious plans were laid to turn our traditional harvest festival into a one-day historical holiday.

The Times went into high gear to produce a special edition. There was no existing history of Forest Lake but bits and pieces could be gleaned at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, where I began making regular visits.

I put out a call for pictures, letters, clippings and reminiscences from our readers. By diligent digging and with help from many folks in the community, I collected a surprisingly large amount of material, challenging my ability and available time to sort through it and begin writing.

Fortunately, by this time, two years after taking over the Times, I had an editorial assistant and a part-time advertising salesman, making it possible for me to devote a considerable amount of my time to the pursuit of our history.

Ordinarily the Times came out in two tabloid sections totaling 12 to16 pages. For the special edition we had material enough ó editorial and advertising ó for 64 pages in eight sections.

However, our newspaper press could print only four pages at a time ó on one side. Then we ran this sheet through the press again, printing on the reverse side. Every sheet was fed into the press by hand. When each eight-page section had been printed on both sides, it had to be hand fed into a folder.

The celebration date was Wednesday, Sept. 21. Our publication date was Thursday, Sept. 15. By Wednesday night we had only five of the eight sections completed, so we missed the Thursday mail. We worked all day Thursday but we still had one section to print and again missed the mail.

We began to hear complaints from advertisers, so we knew we had to wind it up. We cut the final section to four pages, gathered the eight sections into a 60-page paper and got it out on the street during the day Friday, two days late. The material that we left out went into the next weekís paper.

The result of this tremendous effort was an edition that dwarfed anything the Times had ever done. We even doubled the regular press run to 2700 copies.

National Prize Winner

The celebration was a memorable event, the Times received much favorable comment and the special edition took first place in the National Editorial Associationís annual competition among papers under 1500 circulation. The judges especially praised ìthe wide variety of content and the digging it represented.î

The award ó a gold loving cup ó was presented at the associationís annual meeting in Providence, RI. and we were invited to send a representative. Since we didnít attend, they shipped us the trophy which we then displayed proudly on a pedestal in our front office.

When we sold the Times in 1968 we left the trophy as well as the many framed certificates that we had won in state and national newspaper competition, believing they were part of the Times heritage. Sadly, two years later, they were all lost in a fire that destroyed the building.

More history

A few years after we had formed our three-way corporation, I began corresponding with Gilbertson about purchasing some or all of his shares. He wrote that he knew this time would come but he was not expecting it so soon.

In April 1953 we agreed on terms of an installment sale and Doris and I became 80 percent owners of the Times.

The Peach Is Born

As our stake in the Times doubled, we were filled with new enthusiasm and we took a step which turned out to be a major milestone ólaunching the St. Croix Valley Peach.

Bob Shaw, who was our whirlwind newsman, photographer and ad salesman at the time, had talked with a few advertisers who expressed an interest in reaching out beyond the newspaper's coverage area. We decided to test the waters by launching a free shopper every other week to several thousand postal boxholders in the tri-county area.

I liked the peach-colored paper that the Minneapolis Tribune was using for their sports section and, while it was more expensive, I ordered a supply of peach newsprint. The Peach was born. The first issue came out on Tuesday, March 31, 1954.

We used a lot of photography, including one timely photo that filled the front page each week, usually promoting an event in one of the several towns that we served. We launched contests of various kinds and tried to make each issue a step above the usual ads-only shopper.

The Peach was a hit from the start and we had many requests to expand the circulation into additional territory. However, production was badly restricted with our old hand-fed Miehle press.

The answer ó improved equipment. The birth of the Peach turned out to be the seed that started a gradual expansion of our plant, setting us on the road to ever more efficient and speedier means of production.

Our first big move was into ìwebî printing, the process of feeding into the press a continuous roll of newsprint for simultaneous printing on both sides of the sheet, eliminating the slow, tedious hand feeding of single sheets.

In the spring of 1955, we purchased a used Goss Cox-O-Type web press. Now we were able to broaden the Peach coverage dramatically, circulating in new areas including towns in western Wisconsin. In addition, we made the Peach a weekly publication.

The Times was growing in circulation as well and we also had launched the ìSummer Visitor,î a re-make of the Times, with news and ads directed to the occupants of the hundreds of summer homes around Forest and Clear lakes and visitors at the various resorts. We published once a month during the summer and hired kids for door-to-door delivery. In the mid-1960ís the cottages and resorts began disappearing until there was no longer a need for the summer paper.

Next Move ó Offset

Next we ventured into the field of offset printing, an old method but quite new in the newspaper field. Instead of the cumbersome process of printing from raised characters produced on lead slugs by the Linotype machine or from type picked by hand, offset made it possible to print from typewritten copy, drawings, clippings ó anything that the camera could photograph for transferring onto a thin aluminum printing plate.

Another advantage of offset printing was the superior quality in the reproduction of photographs.

We felt our way with a small offset job press and a Justowriter typewriter, then added other items of equipment, learning the process as we moved along but still printing the Times and Peach by letterpress.

Now we were quite crowded for plant space. So in July 1960 we purchased the Times/Koester property from the two separate owners, Richie Petersen and Mrs. Hattie Koester. This permitted construction of additional plant space and conversion of the Koester dwelling at the rear of the lot into a warehouse for the storage of newsprint rolls.

Finally, in the summer of 1961, we decided to take the biggest step so far. We bought a used two-unit Vanguard web offset press. This press was three or four times faster than the Goss and could turn out 10,000 four- or eight-page tabloid-size sections in an hour, completely folded.

We bought plate making, composing and darkroom equipment, going far into debt and turning our plant into a fully equipped modern offset establishment.

The Times became the second weekly newspaper in Minnesota with a web offset press and the third in the state to convert to ìcold type.î

Today there are few if any letterpress weeklies left anywhere.

This leap into a leading role in the field opened up great potential for us. We now had the capability to handle the printing of newspapers other than our own. As they converted to offset, we became the printer for weeklies in Osceola, Rush City, Cambridge and Newport/St. Paul Park. We printed a weekly TV news magazine out of St. Paul, a couple of shoppers, some school papers and advertising flyers. The layouts were brought to us in the form of camera-ready copy.

With our new equipment we could handle a large volume of work at competitive rates with about the same staff. Our little plant had taken a great leap forward in productivity.

Eventually we purchased an additional Vanguard unit which gave us the capability to print and fold a complete 12-page tabloid newspaper in one press run.

There was one problem. With an increasing number of web offset accounts, we began to see a growing dichotomy within our plant. Our regular commercial printing jobs too often were sidelined to accommodate the strict deadlines demanded by our newspaper accounts.

We hit upon a solution that worked to the advantage of both partners. On September 1, 1964 Sid Anderson and I split our business into two separate companies. For his 20 percent interest, he acquired all the job printing equipment except the Vanguard press and the tools to produce the Times and Peach.

Two of our printers, Bob Severson and Gene Fairbanks, went with him to form a new company, Forest Lake Printing. Doris and I became sole owners of the Times. The new printing company remained in the building and the two firms did work for each other and operated very amicably side by side for five years until the 1969 fire evicted both.

With the production capability we now had, we tried venturing into neighboring fields. We started ìWhite Bear Life,î patterned after the Peach; the ìSt. Croix Valley Peach Southî for the Stillwater area and the ìChisago Lakes Times.î However, we were too busy with our established activities to devote sufficient time and effort to these ventures and none lasted more than a few months.

Though it may appear that all my time was devoted to business affairs, my principal work ó and my passion ó was as editor and reporter. I had news to cover, editorials to write, offended readers and advertisers to placate and the thousands of other tasks that fill the days of a small town publisher.

Iíll cover some of these memories in the next installment.

Former Times Publisher Earl Lellman makes his retirement home in Forest Lake.

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