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Bee's Publisher Honored With 2006 ADA Award Of Merit

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Bee’s Publisher Honored With

2006 ADA Award Of Merit

PHILADELPHIA, PENN. — R. Scudder Smith, editor and publisher of Antiques and The Arts Weekly and its sister publication, The Newtown Bee, was presented last weekend with the 2006 Award of Merit, an honored presented annually by the Antique Dealers Association of America. Mr Smith was honored at a dinner hosted by the ADA on Saturday, April 8, at the Philadelphia Antiques Show. Past award winners Albert Sack, Elinor Gordon, Wendell Garrett, and Betty Ring were all in attendance.

“This was an easy decision. Scudder is very deserving of this award, which acknowledges individuals who have made a major contribution to our field,” ADA president Skip Chalfant said when the award was announced in December 2005.

“In his understated and thoroughly professional way, Scudder has been an enormously positive influence in the antiques business. Antiques and The Arts Weekly supports the common interests of dealers, collectors, curators, museums, historical societies, auctioneers and show promoters,” said Arthur Liverant, vice president of ADA and an organizer of the awards dinner.

R. Scudder Smith joined The Newtown Bee, a newspaper founded in 1877 and acquired by his grandfather and two great-uncles in 1881, in 1961. With its roots in the farming communities of western Connecticut, The Newtown Bee had long carried notices of estate auctions and house sales, along with small notices for flea markets and fairs. As a young newspaperman who began collecting antiques while still a student at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., Mr Smith recognized the media potential of an increasingly popular pastime.

Describing the genesis of Antiques and The Arts Weekly during the ADA Award Dinner on April 8, Mr Smith said, “I saw a bunch of seeds scattered through the pages of The Newtown Bee and decided to put them together and make them grow. Those seeds were the ads that Frances Phipps and Betty Forbes, Russell Carrell, Nuttall-Bostick-Wendy, Ivan Justinius, Clearing House, Josko, Pari, Maison and others were placing in The Newtown Bee.

“I put the ads together with copy that was interesting, informative and supportive of the business,” he continued.

Working for his father, Paul S. Smith, The Newtown Bee’s editor from 1934 to 1973, Scudder Smith developed the newspaper’s antiques content, selling advertising to dealers and auctioneers throughout New England and soliciting stories from authorities such as the late Woodbury dealer Kenneth Hammitt.

Mr Smith increased The Newtown Bee’s antiques coverage to four pages a week by 1963. Circulation, about 7,000 subscribers in the early 1960s, quadrupled over the years, and readership became international.

In 1969, antiques accounted for an entire tabloid section of The Newtown Bee. Antiques and The Arts Weekly was launched as an independent, self-sustaining publication in 1976. Scudder Smith has managed both newspapers since 1973, when his father retired.

(This story includes the reporting of Laura Beach of Antiques and The Arts Weekly.)

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