Posted: 9/11/02

Gilbertson left his mark on FL's newspaper

Earl Lellman
Former Publisher

One day in 1935, in the dark days of the Great Depression, an enterprising 33-year-old weekly newspaper publisher from Lake Crystal, MN drove into Forest Lake and checked out the town.

He talked with a number of citizens and the consensus was that the town was too small ó barely 1000 population ó and too close to the Twin Cities to support a local newspaper. Those were the reasons, it was believed, that publisher after publisher had struggled and eventually sold out.

ìA handy alibi if I try and fail,î he thought, as he stopped at the plant of the Forest Lake Times located in a cold, dark, bare one-time saloon building at the south end of downtown.

Palmer Gilbertson introduced himself to publisher-editor-printer Harold E. Anderson, who virtually single-handedly and somewhat miraculously was managing to get a paper out every week. The Linotype had been repossessed and the remaining equipment was old and sparse.

It was a rough go for Harold. He paid $20 a month rent to the Minnesota Brewing Co. He sent all his news copy to a plant in St. Paul for typesetting, which Harold recalls cost about $4 a week.

He printed the paper on newsprint which came pre-printed on one side with features and ads. This so-called ìboilerplateî filled up the four inside pages and in addition Harold bought printing plates of syndicated comic strips and even a continued story.

The rest of the space was his to be filled every week with rural correspondence, what few ads he could sell and a minimum of news reporting.

He was hanging on alone as he had been since his partner Chester Swanson pulled out months earlier.

In the statement that was required for a newspaper to retain its legal status, Harold remembers that he claimed 200 copies. However, he says, he'd be surprised if more than a dozen of the subscriptions were paid, even at a dollar a year.

He says Bob Johnson, a high school student, tried selling subscriptions for him one time and Harold remembers that Bob came back with some steaks and chickens but no cash.

So when Palmer started talking about buying the paper, Harold listened. Even with his maximum effort, there seemed to be little future prospect of escape from the endless struggle to keep the paper afloat.

They settled on a price of $400 and Harold recalls his relief when he went to work for Palmer at $5 a week.

Slowly items of used equipment began appearing, the first being a Linotype which meant hiring an operator. Haroldís brother Sidney completed the course at Dunwoody Institute and took over the Linotype job.

Then Palmer began a series of plant moves, first, Harold recalls, a few doors north into the Ernie Finberg auto garage, next to Hendricksonís Cafe.

The wood floor sagged and had to be reinforced with posts in the basement to hold the heavy newspaper press. Harold says the floor boards would move back and forth with the motion of the press and eventually a wide gap appeared in the boards.

Type salesman with ideas

Palmer had been a type salesman, calling on printing plants with samples of new type styles and ideas for using type aesthetically and profitably.

His head was full of ideas about modern newspaper make-up and the drab struggling Forest Lake Times would become a perfect laboratory for putting his ideas into practice.

He moved the plant again, this time to the center of town into much more pleasant quarters ó the basement of a building that had been an early home of the Forest Lake State Bank. Upstairs was the office of Dr. G. M. Ruggles.

Type cases began filling up with fonts of the latest type. Various items of used equipment began moving in ó a cylinder press, a folder, job presses, a paper cutter and office equipment.

Palmer once made the claim that after five years in Forest Lake, only a stapler remained of the equipment he had started with.

Those early years were a struggle but he was a master at juggling his finances. He quickly made friends among the leading Forest Lake business owners, some of whom responded favorably when he needed a loan to buy a piece of equipment or to tide him over when another loan came due.

I started working part time for him two years after he'd come to town. Many years later, as we were reminiscing, I mentioned that I thought I had started at $6 a week. He protested that it couldnít possibly have been $6 because back then he was paying his full-time printers $7.50 and the business was lucky to take in $50 a week.

Vogel remembers

Elsie Vogel has this recollection of Lonnie Hendrickson who was my immediate predecessor in news gathering. Lonnie had just graduated from FLHS and she was thrilled to be earning $4 a week for calling people and writing the ìComings and Goingsî column.

She was fascinated with the news business and, though she had to take a lot of teasing from Palmer, she enjoyed the work ó until one day a friend, Brick Roush, called her ìSnoopy Liz.î

Elsie says thatís when Lonnie turned in her resignation and terminated her newspaper career.

In 1938 Palmer moved his plant for the last time ó into the new Times-Koester building which he and shoemaker George Koester had built on the west side of Lake St.

To the rear of the new one-story brick and stucco front, Palmer attached a two-story frame structure, the former Faith Lutheran fellowship hall, which he purchased and had moved across the railroad tracks. This generous space now housed his growing array of printing equipment, supplies and paper stock.

He had the upstairs of the big wood building finished as an apartment, and for a time he and his wife Dorothy lived there. Later various employees, including Sid and Dorothy Anderson, occupied the apartment.

Photos of People

Palmer had started out in printing, not journalism. But he was brimming with ideas about what makes an attractive and profitable community newspaper. He knew that pictures of local people had a magic attraction, so as he went around town promoting business and gathering news, he often carried his camera.

He started a photo feature, ìLife of the Times,î a single column of pictures along the left side of the front page, every week using four or five of his snapshots, usually posed, mostly of familiar faces in familiar places around town.

The photo with this article, of the two of us outside the new Times/Koester building, is typical of the snapshots he used in this photo series, this one taken by a bystander.

He began another photo feature, ìOur Juvenile Corner,î in which the picture of one local youngster was used each week, also on the front page. Some of these photos were contributed by parents, others were taken by Nick Mitsoff, a local professional photographer.

I think itís likely that these were the first local pictures ever used in the Times ó certainly among the first. But this venture into photography was not cheap in those days of letterpress printing.

Photo prints had to be sent out of town to have zinc halftone plates made and mounted on type-high wood blocks. Hence, in the 1930s local photographs were a rarity in most small papers. However, Palmer was convinced that a first-rate newspaper would pay off in increased readership and eventually in advertising revenue.

He also started a very popular personal column, ìRoviní Round Forest Lake,î in which -ó as Elsie Vogel wrote in one of her ìReflectionsî features ó he ìteased, cajoled, snooped and even stretched the truth at times.î

Easy readability was his goal from the start, whether in streamlining the page makeup, the use of attractive type faces or the paper stock itself.

When he asked his paper supplier to develop a light green tinted sheet with a smoother finish, they created what they called ìPalmer Eye-Easeî newsprint.

Though it cost slightly more than white, it became the standard stock on which the Times and some other papers were printed. It added distinction and gave sparkle to the paper, with better reproduction of photos.

National feature

The face lift and dramatic improvement given the Times by the one-time type salesman was featured in an article in the February 1941 issue of the national publishersí magazine, ìThe American Press,î with reproductions of sample front pages, one from 1933 and one from 1941, to show the contrast.

The earlier front page carried no pictures, used only one-column headings in small type and much of the news consisted of notices of meetings and church services, social items from Forest Lake and surrounding communities and filler.

The 1941 front page carried four photos. There were three two-column headings and one five-column headline in stunning ìStymieî type of various sizes, breaking up the gray monotony of the single-column makeup.

The ìAmerican Pressî article reported that by the end of 1940 ìthe Times has 1200 paid subscribers at $2 a year; advertising receipts averaging close to $150 weekly and enough job printing, much of it out of the Twin Cities, to keep four printers busy. The increase in business has been greater than Gilbertson ever dreamed was possible when he took over this white elephant in 1935.î

In addition to its profitability, the Times had become one of the outstanding small papers in the state. It was being used in classes at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism as a model in typography and make-up. Photos of pages from the Times appeared in journalism textbooks as examples of attractive layout.

In Weekly Newspaper Makeup and Typography by Thomas F. Barnhart, there are reprints of three different entire pages from the Times and several pages of text devoted to Palmerís innovative inclusion of the school paper, the Forest Breeze, carried as a page in the Times every week.

In another Barnhart book, Weekly Newspaper Writing and Editing, there is a wealth of examples of good ideas clipped from the pages of the Times.

Ideas abound

Besides striving for excellence at publishing his own paper, Palmer had other ideas racing through his head. One was to start a syndicate to supply features to weekly community newspapers.

He started by signing up Cedric Adams and Jimmy Robinson, popular Minneapolis Star columnists, to write weekly columns. Both men started contributing material which Palmer used in soliciting potential buyers among publishers of weekly papers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Sadly he found that there were few publishers as progressive as he or willing or able to spend money for outside material. He was able to line up very few takers, even at 50 cents a week, and the return for the two big city columnists was so meager that they soon lost interest.

For another idea Palmer teamed up with Nile Running, a local artist, to produce colorful plywood display boards bearing the legend ìAs Advertised in the ---,î to be personalized and sold to newspapers for distribution to stores for posting clippings of their current advertisements.

They were used in Forest Lake and they did develop a few outside sales but the idea withered for lack of time for promotion and selling.

A Great Prankster

In addition to being a sharp editor and publisher and an astute business man, Palmer Gilbertson was quite gregarious and a playful, fun-loving prankster as well. He was always ready to participate in a hoax or a practical joke. One of his favorite delights was to show uninitiated printing plant visitors the phenomenon of ìtype lice.î

ìDid you ever see type lice?î he'd ask, bringing out a galley of Linotype slugs and a glass of water. Making a little valley between two of the slugs, heíd pour in a small bit of water, then ask the visitor to look closely.

ìNo, youíll have to get closer,î heíd insist. Then, as you peered in, heíd snap the slugs together and youíd get a faceful of water.

Any kind of outrageous fun held a high priority with Palmer.

Occasionally, after the weekís edition was printed but with the forms still on the press, heíd have the printers re-make the front page with a banner headline in two-inch type and a fictitious, usually highly libelous and salacious, ìnewsî story he had written about someone, usually a fellow business man.

Heíd have the pressman run off a single copy and substitute it for the regular front page section of that weekís Times. Then, through collusion with a co-conspirator at the post office, heíd make certain the paper would be delivered into the victimís mailbox.

Harold Anderson recalls the time a team of University of Minnesota journalism students spent a week in Forest Lake, gathering material for that weekís Times as a class project.

One young lady seemed to Palmer to be especially naive. As he was working on repairing a piece of equipment, he asked her to go to the Herzberg Hardware store for a left-handed monkey wrench.

She dutifully consented and after a time came back with a large wrench which she handed to him. ìNo,î Palmer said in disgust. ìI need a left-handed wrench. I canít use this. Youíll have to go back."

So very obligingly she went back to Herzberg's where apparently the laughter gave away the ruse. Harold said he heard later that when she returned to the U. she transferred out of journalism.

On to California

After nine years of hard work building the Times into a profitable asset, Palmer found an opportunity in California that he couldnít refuse.

He purchased the Temple City Times after selling the Forest Lake Times on April 1, 1944 to Newell Barnard and his portion of the Times/Koester building to a colleague, pharmacist R. F. Petersen.

I related in another article an account of Palmerís often reiterated commitment to help Sid Anderson and me, his two long-time employees, to get our start as publishers, in the way that he had been helped by a weekly publisher when he bought his first newspaper at Lake Crystal.

So in the summer of 1947, back in Forest Lake on vacation, he negotiated a repurchase of the Times from Barnard and then Sid and I joined him in a three-way corporation.

In a few years we had paid him back and I had bought his shares, but we always acknowledged our continuing indebtedness to this larger-than-life guy who drove into Forest Lake that day in 1935 and left his mark of excellence on our newspaper, our community and our lives.

Eventually he sold his California weekly but he found it hard to retire. He kept a small printing press and several cases of type in his home to continue his fascination with typography, building a one-man business designing and printing high quality specialty items such as wedding announcements, business cards and stationery.

Palmer Gilbertson died in Sun City, AZ of heart failure in 1985 at the age of 82.

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