A January Swan Song

I sent an email to my editor last week. I told him that the January 31st issue of The Republican newspaper will be my last. How strange that is. My history with the newspaper has been long and arduous, and comes after my father’s experience, my mother’s, two brothers, my grandparents, my grand-uncle and aunt, and my great-grandparents. I am the last Sincell to add to the paper, after 129 years of at least one of us involved, if not several at any given time. And I don’t mean to imply that our family is all that special or anything. It just has been the lifework of several of us over the century-plus, and there has been a family member there since B.H. Sincell bought The Republican in 1890, when he was all of 21 years old. I imagine him sometimes, there in the office, working alone, making fairly meager money but enough, gathering county news and putting on the pages. He was so young. I’m nearly certain he never thought his newspaper would stay in his family for more than a century. He just needed a job, and he saw an opportunity. Through our family that thread has remained, until now.

But it’s okay because nothing in this life is really that important. At least, nothing like companies or materials or papers; offices or desks or pencils. In the entire scheme of things, a family business can be noble, but not indispensable. After wrangling it around in my brain for quite some time, I am sure now that it is okay to let it go. Traditions can be burdensome. Familiarity and ease of known surroundings and tasks can tuck a person firmly into a rut, which over time can become a cave, with little light or room to stretch. I am sure it is time for me to stretch. Life is indeed short, and there is a time to stay in familiar surroundings, and there is a time to leave them.

There are so many stories about the family biz, though. So many to tell. So I have created this subset of writings all about the family business, the newspaper, The Republican, so named in honor of Abraham Lincoln a mere 12 years after he was murdered. The paper began as a re-do of the Garrett Gazette, bought in 1877 by Captain James Hayden, a Civil War veteran who fought at Gettsyburg and who revered the late president. Hayden lived in Mountain Lake Park, at that time an up-and-coming vacation spot with a Chautauqua feel. City folks traveled by train to the little village during the summer months, escaping the heat and bustle of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., to spend a few months on the top of the mountain ridge. Classes were available throughout the cool summer weeks in art, archery, Bible studies, cooking, bicycle repair, and anything else one might dream up in the 1870s. The huge 5,000-seat Mountain Lake Park Amphitheater offered plays, acrobatics, all sorts of music, and rousing evangelistic preachers shouting their Good News to the rafters. So was life in Hayden’s little town.

After 13 years of publishing, the captain was ready to move on, and sold his little operation to Benjamin Sincell. The story is, Ben turned 21 on the day he published his first issue of The Republican. He was working out of a building located along Liberty Street at that time, but in a few years he and his brothers went together to build a structure along Second Street that would house a law office for Edward, a haberdashery for brother Harry, and the newspaper and print shop for Ben. Oakland was just a baby still, having been founded just in 1849. The streets were dirt, of course, and often traversed by livestock. Cows, chickens, and pigs were herded down the road in town, and of course horses were the mode of transportation. (When the Civic Club of Oakland was founded some years later, one of the women’s first orders of business was to lobby for an ordinance to keep the pigs off Second Street.)

The Sincell brothers built their homes a few blocks north, also along Second Street. The houses were huge, with plenty of room for families to come. I now live on a street perpendicular to Second. When I come out of my house and step onto Pennington Street, I can see B.H.’s house, my father’s childhood house which is just across the road, and Harry’s home. I can look southeast up on a hill to see the edge of the Oakland Cemetery, where all these folks are buried. I can even see a spire that marks one Sincell plot involving six little cousins of mine who were Richardson siblings — of my great-great-aunt and uncle, I think — who all died within the same year of some childhood illness like diphtheria or influenza. And all these deaths are reported in The Republican. Such a circular route I have traveled, following them here, being surrounded by them. I didn’t plan it. But there it is.

Many, many times I have walked down the alley between B.H.’s house and my dad’s on my way to work at the paper, and I have felt them there, or sensed their long-past energies. I worked in that same building that they built along Second Street for about 26 years. And I grew up going there, trudging up those steps (there are something like 24, I think), to be met by my grandparents and grand-aunt Tink (Adeline). They would gush over me and give me hugs. My grandfather Mose (Donald) Sincell would be standing in the back shop, running a printing machine. He would grin and wait for me to come stand by him. Then he would dig in his pocket for a minute and inevitably produce a quarter, which he would press into my hand. A quarter was a lot. I could go right downstairs to Proudfoot’s Pharmacy and buy candy or gum with that. Or I could keep it, rolling it around in my hand, feeling rich. My grandmother was pointier than Mose. She loved me, sure, but she was not as pillowy. She had sharp elbows and a sharp nose, and often a sharp demeanor. But she was kind and funny, too. Aunt Tink was extra soft, gushy to me, and forever just on the edge of sadness about her many miscarriages that kept her from mothering. She so wanted to mother. She called me “lamb” and thought everything I did was spectacular.

My mom was there, too, first operating the Linotype machine, which was a fascinating and complicated monster. It melted its own pigs of lead, which then were piped into molds right there in the thing’s innards, and then at the touch of Mom’s fingers on the keys — where were not laid out in the “QWERTY” style, by the way, but rather some higgeldy-piggeldy fashion long forgotten — lead column-width pieces would drop down, spelling words backward so as to be printed forward. I would stand for quite a long time watching the pigs (crudely cast bars of lead) sinking into the hot cauldron, slowing drowning into themselves, going from loaves of lead to molten silver it seemed. My dad could run it, and then at least two of my brothers learned. My great-grandfather had written a letter to his betrothed, my great-grandmother Tay (Lillian), back in 1893 after he attended the Chicago Exposition. He had seen this wonderful machine there, the Linotype, which intrigued and thrilled him, and he said he would have to get one sometime soon. And he did so, I believe before the turn of the century. When I was a kid, there were two in nearly constant use at the office. The last one sat for many years untouched, until we finally had to haul it away for scrap. The march of technology is never sentimental, that’s for sure.

As I grew up, my dad took over most of the work at the paper as his father aged. My grand-uncle George Hanst, grandmother Elsie’s brother, was the editor for decades, following B.H. Brother Don took on that role in the 1970s. George’s wife Polly, a tiny, energetic spitfire of a revolutionary woman, wrote columns in the paper, and also wrote regularly for the Farmer’s Wife magazine. So all around me were writers, journalists, and wordsmiths. I was steeped in it all, from the beginning. It is no wonder that I ended up joining the crew myself, which I did in 1990. I hadn’t meant to, really… I didn’t start out thinking, “Oh, I will make my career in hometown news reporting.” But I was 28, married to my love John who for better or worse had agreed to living in my home county, and we were hoping to start a family. A writing job opened in the newsroom, and there I went. Now, nigh on 30 years later, I am walking away.

I really left a year ago, mostly, after we sold the company to NCWV Media, a Clarksburg-based newspaper company. We came to that decision over years of wondering what we were going to do. Newspapers are on the wane, and have been for quite a while. And the print shop had struggled for years. Everyone does their own printing, or goes online to find the cheapest available. The days of the local friendly printer have gone the way of the local haberdasher, shoemaker, and wheelwright. We could have continued to publish the paper — which had become quite arduous as getting the materials to do it was getting more difficult and costly— until we all three just dropped over dead. Instead we searched for someone who might want to buy an established, long-running publication, and keep it going. We were lucky to find that someone in Brian Jarvis, the owner of NCWV. But selling a family business is not without pain and angst.

I worked for a few months as the editor, but my philosophy of county journalism, drilled into me over the decades by my family, did not weave well into the new company’s ideas. We all have our beliefs in how things should be done, and to alter mine to fit the new folks’ vision was, in the end, impossible. So I left as editor, but remained as a writer of the arts activities of the Garrett County mountaintop, and as a columnist once a month. For a bit longer than a year I have done that, diligently. But it is time to go. I have put a great deal of energy and hard work and dedication into my job. I think I have done well. And it is now time to put it to bed, and to wake up to something new. I once wrote a column about the difficulty of transition — in childbirth, and in life. This is one of those times. Letting go of such a significant piece of my heritage is bittersweet. I do not miss the stress or the in-office spats. I do not miss the unreliable equipment that could so frustratingly interrupt the flow of our day. I do indeed miss the people with whom I worked to get the paper out each week. I miss the newsroom chats on politics or the news of the day. I miss the feeling of producing something each week that did help people of my community in many ways. I think I did okay with it over the years. I know I did, in fact. And so, now I must let it sleep.

On I go.