Publisher Marks

50 Years At The Newtown Bee

By Nancy K. Crevier

He had set his eyes on becoming a lawyer, but after three years in the US Marine Corps, marriage, two children, and four years working part-time as a draftsman for Millivac Corporation in Schenectady, N.Y., while attending Union College, R. Scudder Smith returned to Newtown the weekend of July 7, 1961. He came back to his hometown to follow in the footsteps of his father, Paul Smith, editor of The Newtown Bee, and his grandfather, Arthur Smith, the first in the line of Smiths to publish The Newtown Bee.

This year marks his 50th year at The Bee Publishing Company, which publishes The Bee and the internationally distributed Antiques and The Arts Weekly (A&A). It has been a half-century of changes, some external, others internal. The appearance of the newspaper itself has undergone only subtle changes, remaining within a half-inch of the original broadleaf paper it was when the first Newtown Bee under the direction of Arthur and Allison Smith rolled off the press in 1877. “Every time someone suggested changing the size of The Bee, I’ve said no,” Mr Smith said. “I didn’t want to change the size of Antiques and The Arts Weekly. We use the same paper for both. I don’t like the way newspapers have gotten skinnier. And we look different on the newsstands,” he pointed out.

But even with times and technology transforming the world of the newspaper business, R. Scudder Smith’s mission has remained the same: bringing local news to the residents in a fair and straightforward manner. Sensationalism has never been a driving force behind The Newtown Bee, he said.

“I think what we are always trying to do is to clarify the complex issues that come up in town, and we are bringing opinions to others,” said Mr Smith. Letters to the editor are one example, he said, where Newtowners can grind an axe or publicly give thanks. “We print so many letters, compared to other papers,” he said, “and the thing is, those letters are often as informative as news stories, and bring out different viewpoints.”

Mr Smith grew up in the newspaper office. As a young man, his father kept him busy washing floors, making pigs (lead forms for making type), collating papers, and delivering them to the post office.

In July 1961, his father happened to be looking for someone in the composing room, he was looking to make a change, and his career with The Bee began. “All I needed was an apron and a line gauge,” he said. “We put the ads together, put pages together, and organized all the type,” Mr Smith said.

Before long, he took on the role of staff photographer, making the rounds of all of the schools, going to every fire and accident in town, and photographing highlights of the town meetings. “I was self taught. I never took photography. I had to write down all the cutlines [captions] for those photos, and pretty soon I started doing a few other stories,” he said, including the “Pooch Paws” column, “written” by his dog, Tiquer, the predecessor of his cat, Mountain, who continues to posthumously write the column, “Top of the Mountain.”

Since the time of Tiquer and Mountain, The Bee has been the work-day home of many Smith family dogs up to the current team of office canines, golden retrievers Starr and Rosé, who belong to Mr Smith’s daughter and Bee Business Manager Sherri Baggett and her husband, Scott, and a chocolate lab, Tique, who belongs to Mr Smith’s son and A&A Managing Editor David Smith. “We’ve always had dogs,” commented Mr Smith.

Mr Smith’s duties at The Bee gravitated to the business end of running the paper when his father suffered a stroke. By the time Paul Smith passed away in 1990, R. Scudder Smith held the position of editor and publisher, and had built the circulation of the paper up from a few thousand to a high of nearly 30,000 at one time, before A&A was separated from The Newtown Bee and became its own publication.

Antiques and The Arts Weekly was R. Scudder Smith’s idea. It has become known and respected worldwide since its inception in 1963. “I love antiques and folk art, and I told my dad that I thought this was something that was going to be popular,” he said. “We already had a lot of auction ads in The Bee, and ads for the early flea markets, like Antiques in the Cow Pasture in Salisbury, which was the first flea market in the country. Then we started running antiques articles by Ken Hammitt, called ‘Furniture in Your Area,’ and we got more and more antiques ads,” Mr Smith said. “A&A was part of The Bee, originally, the back pages of the B section. Then A&A took over the front pages of the B section and advertising picked up. It really grew.”

By 1979, A&A was its own paper.

Currently, The Newtown Bee and The Bee Extra Shopping Guide are circulated to 14,300 households. A&A has an international circulation of 11,000.

The circulation of The Newtown Bee has fluctuated over the past 50 years, Mr Smith said, due not only to the impact of A&A, but because the paper at one time covered 26 towns in the area. “Those other towns — Monroe, Sherman, Oxford, Seymour, Bethel, even Kent — were covered by mostly women who reported from them. Gradually, the other towns began to get their own papers and at some point, we found it was taking up space for not a lot of readers. We phased out the other towns as the reporters grew older and retired or died. Some of those ladies were so faithful, though,” Mr Smith said.

A&A influenced not only the pages of The Newtown Bee and its circulation, but also how stories were assigned to staff. “Everybody did everything when I started here,” Mr Smith said. When A&A came along, though, reporters who excelled at antiques reporting were not so apt at sports or news reporting necessarily. “So we hired a sports editor. We got people who sort of specialized in an area — the schools, entertainment, features, or the news. There was so much more to do as the town and schools grew. Newtown was only about 3,000 people when Helen and I came back here in 1961,” he said.

The Newtown Bee and A&A have earned numerous journalism awards locally and regionally for excellence in reporting and community service during the 50 years R. Scudder Smith has been involved. In 2006, he was awarded the prestigious Award of Merit by the Antiques Dealers’ Association of America, for his contributions to that field. In previous years, he was recipient of the Rotary Club’s highest honor, the Paul Harris Fellow Award, and at one time was named the Jaycees Man of the Year.

One of the best known “community service projects” undertaken by R. Scudder Smith and wife, Helen, is The Pleasance. Located at the corner of Main Street and Route 302, the garden park was opened to the public in 1997.

The Smith family had hoped to take down the old Lovell’s Garage at that site and build an office/printing plant on the grounds. After five years of trying to get the plans through Borough zoning, however, the project was deemed too costly and that idea abandoned. They toyed with the idea of restoring the old garage into a sort of farm/garage display filled with antique implements, “But we weren’t sure Newtown was ready for that,” Mr Smith said.

The Pleasance park builds on the Smiths’ love of plants and flowers, and was a way to share their beliefs of the importance of green places open to the community. The garden and park continue on the opposite side of The Pleasance entrance off of Route 302, with tree specimens and a children’s garden.

The Pleasance is an example of The Bee delivering more than just news to the town. “The Bee has to be a part of the community,” stressed Mr Smith. “We’ve gained a lot of respect by doing that — but that’s not why we do it.”

Mr Smith is honored that in the time he served as editor and publisher, The Newtown Bee has been the recipient of awards at regional newspaper contests for photography, stories, its classifieds section, and for editorial writing. In 1997, as The Newtown Bee celebrated its 120th Anniversary, then-governor John Rowland issued an Official Statement to the paper for exemplifying excellence in journalism.

The Newtown Bee has also been recognized over the years for its support of organizations like the 4-H Club, Soap Box Derby, and Newtown Football.

A Dedicated Staff

As much as The Newtown Bee and publisher R. Scudder Smith have been recognized, it is only because of the dedication of his family and employees of the paper that it has maintained its high standards of excellence, said Mr Smith.

Helen Smith was office manager for The Newtown Bee for many years, and still continues to do the bookkeeping. His daughter Sherri now serves as business manager, and her husband, Scott Baggett, works in the production department. His son David wrote and photographed for A&A for several years before being named managing editor in 2007.

Until 2007, it was always a Smith who held the position of editor at The Newtown Bee. That year, R. Scudder Smith stepped down and appointed Curtiss Clark as his successor in that position. Mr Clark started working at The Bee in 1973 and served as editor of The Weekly Star, a Bee Publishing Company publication serving eight towns in Litchfield and New Haven Counties. He supervised the news departments at both The Bee and The Weekly Star until the latter was sold in 1992.

The Weekly Star was a Bee Publications venture undertaken by Mr Smith in 1985, which turned out to be far less successful than A&A. Disappointed by the advertising revenue generated by The Star, he sought to increase it by buying The Town Times in Waterbury when it went up for sale. “We sold ads in all three papers. Ultimately, both the Star and The Town Times continued losing money, though, so we sold them,” Mr Smith said.

“Curtiss has been with us a long time, starting as a reporter. When we sold The Star, he continued his work at The Bee as managing editor. The late Kim Harmon, who was a phenomenal sports guy, and Andy Gorosko, both superb reporters, came to The Bee then,” Mr Smith said. In naming Mr Clark editor, Mr Smith said at the time that he was sure that his father would approve of the choice.

“Working with Scudder Smith for nearly 40 years has been, for me, a real education in counter intuition — learning that small stories can sometimes be your big stories, that fair reporting is not just an exercise in disinterest, but also requires a deep interest and a caring attitude toward the community as a whole,” said Mr Clark. “Anyone who speaks with him at length knows that Scudder holds a distinctive view of the world. I kid him sometimes by telling him, ‘They broke the mold before they made you,’ but the truth of the matter is that the whole bundle of idiosyncrasies that is Scudder Smith has over time benefited Newtown tremendously,” he added.

Andy Gorosko agreed. “Newtowners who have read The Bee for decades may not realize what a unique publication it has been and remains. While rooted in the tradition of local newsgathering dating back to 1877, The Bee also is advancing into the digital age, providing an increasing amount of timely news posted on its website in the form of text, still photos, video, and reference documents. Scudder has ably overseen this ongoing transition from ink-and-paper journalism to the hybrid world of print/digital news,” Mr Gorosko said.

“I’ve always felt that we’ve been fortunate in the people we’ve hired,” Mr Smith said. “Our employees are the last thing I worry about. It takes half the worry away from running a business when you have good employees.” he said.

Pam Ashbahian, production director, has been a longtime Bee employee, Mr Smith said, as has Bill Leibold of the prepress department.

Ms Ashbahian has worked with Mr Smith for 30-plus years as production has moved from standing side by side with him in front of the light table used for layout to computer-generated layouts. “It is an honor to work with an excellent editor and see what he has accomplished,” said Ms Ashbahian. “Scudder works with people not as a boss but as a fellow worker to get the job done. The end result was always what counted. Putting aside the professional man, he is a very warm human being,” she said, often going out of his way for workers. “But one of his best qualities is his great wit. He is a prankster at heart,” she said, “and he tells jokes to almost anyone who will listen.”

Marni Wood, the wife of artist Harrie Wood, who drew the eagle that spreads its wings on the banner of A&A, was a good friend of the Smith family, and one of A&A’s original writers, said Mr Smith. “Marni did all the lead stories for A&A at first. She was the one who wanted to put arts in that paper. She told me, ‘Eventually you’re going to end up with galleries advertising,’ and she was right.”

Ms Wood traveled about the region every Friday with Mr Smith, gathering news from the arts and antiques world. “We visited artists like Eric Sloan. We got in a lot of doors, and got to know where every collection was.”

Ray Jandreau was another Bee employee who remains solidly fixed in Mr Smith’s memories of the past 50 years. “He was terrific. Ray was our Rube Goldberg. If something broke on the machines, he could fix it with a paper clip. He worked here for over 50 years, and his wife, Rosa, worked at The Bee as a bookkeeper,” he recalled.

Another memorable employee from his early days was Irma Nichols. “She did everything here, but she was mainly our classifieds lady. I think my dad liked her because she was just as thrifty as he was. When we cleaned out her desk, after she died, we found about 50 pencils, each one no more than 2½ inches long, all bound up in a rubber band. She had been here for years,” said Mr Smith.

His management style is one of understatement: making known his opinions, offering direction — and a few bad jokes — but allowing staff to use good and trusted judgments to cover stories and get the paper out on the street each week. “That’s one thing about this place. If people are unhappy, they leave quickly. If they are happy, they stay here forever. We have good, loyal people,” he said.

An Unusual Workplace

Not just the faces have changed in half a century at The Newtown Bee. The building itself at 5 Church Hill Road has undergone several makeovers.

Adding color to the drab, all-green office space was a goal achieved bit by bit by Mr Smith, widely known for his brilliantly colored shirts and collection of colorful bowties.

“I think Sherri gave me my first bowtie, a long time ago, and I decided to wear it. I thought, ‘Hey, this thing is nice. There’s nothing to spill on,’ like the ties I usually wore. So I got a couple more, and a couple more. I like color,” he said. Now, his bowtie collection numbers more than 300, most purchased from specialty stores in Vermont and New York. “Colorful shirts, bowties, and pretty girls — that’s what I like,” joked the veteran editor.

“When I got here, everything was painted green. There were no carpets, and old metal desks. It was real efficient, and real sterile, like any other office you would go into. Helen came up with the color scheme, mostly reds and greens and yellows. I changed things around with the walls and the doorways. My office [located immediately to the left off of the foyer] housed three other workers then. We added on the space where Helen’s office is now [to the right of the foyer] and the extension to the editorial space. Job printing — we had three presses, a Heidelberg and two handfed presses for printing tickets, programs, and the Newtown Congregational Church bulletin — was upstairs in what is now the A&A offices. A&A was upstairs in the front, along with sales, in the original part of the building. What is now a production room [down the hall from the editorial addition] was the printing press room when I started here. Every Friday, you could hear it pounding away.”

Visitors to The Newtown Bee offices today compare it to a museum. There is not a wall that does not play host to some piece of art or antique find carried back from a show, framed autographs, prints, or awards. Knickknacks and artifacts are tucked into nooks and crannies in every room. “We collected too much stuff over the years for our house, so The Bee was my overflow space. I like it. It allows me to see the stuff more than I would if it were at my home,” he said. Most notable is the collection of bee paraphernalia that has been built up during Mr Smith’s tenure.

“I thought it would be fun to have bee stuff, so every time I went to an antiques or art show, I would look for something and bring it back. There are four cases full now. I had to stop,” Mr Smith said.

His own office is a fantasyland, from the brightly colored Steven Huneck-design hooked rug on the floor to the unusual collection of ornaments suspended overhead. In between, the walls are covered in artwork. It is the work of Mr Huneck, the late American woodcarving artist, who also designed and created the life-sized man and dog sculptures at The Pleasance, that dominates the room. A large double-door chest painted with Labrador retrievers nose to nose fills a good part of the far wall of the space. The stand of the floor lamp is a line of colorful fish, carved and painted by Mr Huneck. Fish drawer pulls decorate the front of a small wall chest, and guests seated in the two tiger maple chairs lean back against yet more carved and painted fish.

“I got into carousel figures, too,” said Mr Smith. The creatures, purchased at various shows he has visited, generate much attention from new visitors to the office. The editorial offices house three carousel figures; a curly tailed pig, a lumbering elephant, and a bee. “The bee was actually made for us by a craftsman in Middlebury,” Mr Smith said. In the downstairs conference room can be found a prancing goat. He is most proud of the razorback hog carousel figure that is squeezed into his office, though.

The World Through A Local Lens

Mr Smith has published the newspaper through many national and world tragedies, beginning with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and including the assassinations of Senator Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King in 1968; the 1980 assassination of John Lennon; the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle; the death of Princess Diana of England in 1997; and 9/11. Although the focus of The Newtown Bee is on the town and its citizens, the paper has not turned a cold shoulder to major events.

 “The Bee’s approach to national news is to focus on how the town reacts to these things, rather than the incident itself,” said Mr Smith. “We’re not going to bring anything new to 9/11, for instance, that hasn’t already been reported by national news. We try to get people’s reactions and how the incident affects people in Newtown. Do businesses close? What do people think? 9/11 hit particularly close to home, as we had a former employee whose son was killed in that event,” he said. “But,” he continued, “I think it was the assassination of JFK that set the office more abuzz than anything ever had before, or has since.”

Helen Smith said that her husband’s dedication has also played a great part in the success of The Newtown Bee. “I don’t even know where to begin,” she said. She recalled the years and years when “Wednesday nights, deadline night, were not a night to plan to do anything or be anywhere, except here, at The Bee,” said Mrs Smith. “He would be here until one or two in the morning. It was a lot of work to get the paper out in those earlier years,” she said.

The long hours were self-imposed, said Mr Smith, when he abruptly inherited his father’s positions as editor and publisher. “I was used to all of the things he had been doing, but I hadn’t actually been handling them. When he had his stroke, I was suddenly shoved into the driver’s seat,” he said. It was long hours — 5 am to 7 pm or later — that got him through that big change at the paper, he said, hours that he kept for many years.

“Scudder sets the bar for all of us,” said Newtown Bee Associate Editor Shannon Hicks. “A few years ago he announced he was going to cut back his hours, but I haven’t been able to see that. He returns from antiques shows and gets right to work processing photos and writing his stories. He also remains hands-on with putting the pages for A&A together. He is equally involved with The Bee, attending many of our editorial meetings, offering story suggestions, and occasionally taking photos for the paper. He works hard and maintains great standards,” she said, and despite disagreements that may have cropped up in the more than 20 years she has been with the paper, “He always has had my respect.”

The newspaper industry has undergone drastic changes, particularly with the popularity of online news. But Mr Smith has maintained a calm demeanor as print papers flux and, at times, disappear.

“I don’t think I’ll ever see a time when there is not a print Newtown Bee,” said Mr Smith. Keeping the focus on Newtown has made for a strong paper. “We built up the sports and school coverage, and we are not overlooking the grassroots things going on. Those are the readable things. I think there will always be a place for a local newspaper,” he said. And, said Mr Smith, The Newtown Bee is supportive of its advertisers.

Over the years, having ceded much of the day-to-day operations at The Bee to his staff, Mr Smith moved more into involvement with A&A, remaining to this day as the editor. Even with A&A, though, he said, his schedule has wound down somewhat. “I do a little bit less of everything that I used to do, now,” he said. For him, that means attending only 20 antiques shows a year, as opposed to every weekend.

Seated in his office earlier this month, Mr Smith glanced down at his personal time capsule that takes up a fair amount of floor space. The ball of tinfoil, too big to put one’s arms around, is made up of years’ worth of foil from his sandwiches (he does not go out for lunch), gathered together in a sphere. “It kept growing, and I had to move it to the floor,” he said. Hidden within the foil ball are some notes, a few coins, and even a dollar bill or two, he said.

“My theory was, when the ball got too big to fit through my office door, it would be time to retire. But I don’t feel like retiring, so,” he said, “I’m not going to try it. It’s always been fun here at The Bee. Otherwise, I don’t think I would have lasted this long.”