The Origins of Southside Neighborhood News

This story was written by the founder of the Southside Neighborhood News, the original name of The Hartford News, for the paper's 10th Anniversary issue in 1987.

In the fall of 1976, I was appointed staff person of a newly-created organization which would come to be called SINA. It was the brainchild of Ivan Backer (then an administrator and community relations person at Trinity), who has been so instrumental in our history and the history of many of the other neighborhood organizations in the areas we cover.

My job was to work with neighborhood block clubs, organized by HART, to see what types of assistance the SINA institutions (Trinity, Hartford Hospital, Institute of Living) could offer. My background had been as a teacher at Northwest Catholic in West Hartford where I had the good fortune to work under a most creative educator Rev. William O'Keefe, now president of South Catholic.

O'Keefe, among other things, allowed me to organize a special class with which, in 1973, I published How the Other Half Lived, an Ethnic History of the Old Eastside and South End of Hartford. So I was very familiar with the Hartford neighborhoods I'd be working with for SINA. I had also been publisher of a small newspaper in Rangeley, Maine between 1973 and 1975, so I'd had some limited newspaper experience.

As it turned out, one of the first projects HART block club members suggested to me was the development of a neighborhood newspaper. Asylum Hill had the Hill Ink, the West End had the Westender, the Northend Agent and Hartford Inquirer covered the Northend of the city, El Observador concentrated on the Hispanic Community, and, of course, the suburbs had the Courant. There was no community newspaper in the neighborhoods south of Capitol Avenue.

So we went to work. A "newspaper committee" was set up. Anne Zekas, Bud Emanuelson, Sid Wainman (Hartford Hospital), Steve Salky, Helen Plourde, Sandi Garfi and Jack Santos were among the original members. Everybody agreed-the need was there. But how to finance it, how to get it off the ground, how to prevent it from eventual failure, how would potential advertisers receive it - those were the difficult questions.

I remember one extremely cold Saturday when Bice Clemow of the West Hartford News, who had volunteered to help us out, Steve Salky, and I conducted our version of a market study of prospective advertisers. We dropped in on businesses in Parkville, Frog Hollow, and the South End. Everyone was very receptive to Clemow, who, they had seen on TV so often, but not so uniformly receptive to the idea that a community newspaper could survive. They were for it, but whether they'd advertise in it was another matter.

That afternoon over lunch at the Washington Diner, Clemow, though he liked our spirit, lectured us about the difficulties of a venture such as this and made it clear that it would be socially irresponsible to start a paper doomed to failure. So we went on.

Salky, then a recent Trinity graduate and neighborhood resident, was instrumental in putting together some of our original funding proposals. He, and others like Backer, pushed the idea to corporate contributors, and launched a charter subscription drive. We needed start-up money - and it didn't look like a lot of advertisers were going to jump aboard immediately.

Meanwhile, a Board of Directors was formed. Along with several of the original "newspaper committee" numbers came Sid Wainman, a Hartford Hospital administrator and SINA board member whose business planning expertise was absolutely critical to getting the paper off the ground and keep it going during the first several years. The Board met in the winter of 1977 to select a name for the paper - Southside seemed more acceptable than South End or Frog Hollow because it gave us a broader potential advertising base. Then we selected our first editor, Lee Paquette who had been a colleague of mine at Northwest Catholic. Early on, Paquette made it clear that the Southside News would be an independent newspaper, responsive to the community but, not a mouthpiece for HART or any other group. That's a policy we've been proud to adhere to for the past decade.

By then we had raised a few thousand dollars, Madelyn Colon, Christine Palm, and Kathleen Foster, that spring had managed to persuade a few advertisers like Carlos Lopez of Luis of Hartford, and Steve and Florence Crist of Capitol Jewelry to go with us when and if we got off the ground. Peter Waite designed our front page masthead. Most of the Board was very itchy to get started, but we had barely enough cash to put out one issue. Then one night in the late Spring of 1977 it came to a head. There was a regular Board meeting at our 660 Park Street office. It seems that it had gone on for hours. One side argued to hold off, wait for some substantial corporate or foundation funding, play it safe so we'd have less chance of failing. After all, that was Bice Clemow's advice. The other side said go ahead and they prevailed. Clemow's comment after hearing of the decision was that we wouldn't last three issues. I like to remind him of that.

Our first issue hit the streets on August 3, 1977. It seems that all of our staff and volunteers stayed until after midnight the day before we went to press. Juan Fuentes of El Observador, our typesetter in the early years, handled the formidable task of dealing with our poorly presented copy and our lofty ideas about journalism. Shortly after the first issue was put to bed, I vomited from nervous exhaustion. Maybe Bice was right, I certainly couldn't keep this up.

Our baby arrived a few days later, and as our weary, bleary-eyed staff looked it over and saw errors and so many things we could do better, Board President Anne Zekas who was such a strong source of encouragement, support and good sense during those early years, showed up with a few bottles of champagne. We sat on the floor and drank it, exhausted and exhilarated at the same time. And we went on to the next issue and the next and...