1955-1965: A little town begins to grow up

a dozen — not including Fannie White, mother of editor and publisher

Harold, whom Sproul described as a "surrogate mother" to the rest of

the crew.

"In the 'old days,' The Sun was an informal, loosely-structured place

where everyone did a little bit of everything, and where ad selling and

reporting and feature writing were often blended into a single job,"

Sproul reminisced in a 1976 memoir piece. "It was a place where there

was an office dog; and a place where we all crowded, twice a day, into

a small kitchen to drink Fannie White's coffee, eat sweet rolls or hot

buttered toast, and laugh and tell jokes."

The paper, published every Thursday, was sold by single copies, at a

dime a pop, or by subscription, which went for $3.50 a year.

Hired over the phone in February 1955 ("The Sun didn't even have

application forms back then," she noted), Sproul was taken on board by

Harold White, who told her, "We'll see what you can do."

Running the paper with his wife and business partner Eva, Harold wore nearly every hat in the house at that time.

"In addition to being a reporter, writer, editor, ad salesman,

collector of bills owing to The Sun, general fixer of everything

mechanical, overall manager, publisher, etc., he was, naturally, the

personnel manager," Sproul wrote.

The front page of the paper offered stories ranging from notices of

upcoming club meetings and accounts of birthday parties to stories

about house fires and pending public improvements. The last issue of

November 1963 was led off by a photograph of the post office flagpole

at half-staff, and an inside story shared some of the reactions of

Naperville schoolchildren to President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

But mostly the coverage throughout the paper's third decade remained

intensely local, often including announcements of townspeople

undergoing surgeries at Edward Hospital and mentions of who had visited

whom the previous weekend.

The news hit particularly close to home in the issue of May 10, 1956,

which had a description of the fire and explosion at the newspaper's

Washington Street offices. The unfortunate outcome of the meeting of a

clandestine cigar break — taken out back by a high school boy hired to

do custodial work part time — with a barrel of highly flammable solvent

used for cleaning the printing press, the fire caused damage that was

sobering, but it could have been worse.

"Fire was a constant worry in the old building, and with good reason,"

Sproul wrote. "Lead was kept liquid for the Linotype machine with

open-flame gas burners; and cast type was melted down again in another

gas-fired furnace. Practically everyone smoked, and the clutter of

paper was everywhere."

Still, the paper went out the following day, according to a subsequent issue.

It was three and a half years later when one of the city's most baffling events took place.

Making their way to an early-morning practice on Labor Day 1959,

members of the North Central College football team came across the body

of 26-year-old Renaldo Duncan Arantes, captain of a visiting Brazilian

rowing team. The body bore powder burns on one thumb that contributed

to the theory that the single .38-caliber shot through the heart, fired

at close range, had been discharged by the deceased himself. Cloaked in

mystery and rampant speculation including a love triangle involving a

blonde, the victim's rumored aspirations to defect, and his connections

to an illegal firearms deal, the case was never solved. The coroner's

jury, comprised of six Naperville residents, returned an open verdict,

meaning the members were unable to determine whether the death was a

homicide, a suicide or an accident.

"No matter what pet theory, it seemed that the whole affair involved

only the Brazilians, and that no Naperville people were implicated,"

The Sun reported 10 days after the athlete died. "The South Americans

advanced homicide possibilities just far enough to sidetrack the

suicide possibility."

The period was not without its modern innovations around the office.

Press production switched from Linotype copy and hand-set ads to offset

printing in the middle of 1962. The new building at 9 W. Jackson Ave.

was dedicated with a new offset web press on March 5, 1965. On Nov. 4

of that year, a commemorative "souvenir section" of the paper marked

its 30 years in the news business.

Subscribers numbered 5,500 by that time. The staff included one of the

nation's first female sports editors, Ora O'Donnell, who had joined the

team in early 1964, and Dee Pasternak, who would leave her mark as a

champion of the arts in the city over the ensuing four decades.

Also among the crew members by 1965 was Cleo Keller, initially hired

that year to deliver tear sheets to the downtown advertisers who

purchased space in the paper. Keller, who moved all the way up the

advertising department ranks during her 27-year tenure on the paper's

staff, recalls a close-knit community.

"It was a small downtown," Keller said one recent morning. "The paper

was small, but it was local, as opposed to now. Everybody knew

everybody, and everybody knew us downtown.

"It was a personal experience — the staff and everybody, and of course

the Whites. They treated us as family, and we treated them as family."

She loved her time at the paper, she said, particularly the early days,

long before the Whites sold their business to the Copley family in 1991.

"It didn't change for quite awhile, while (the town was) small," Keller

said. "It seemed to be the same paper until it was sold. But the town

was no longer small, either."

The mission of the paper remained unchanged, but already some of the

homelike spirit of the newsroom's "old days" was gone for good. Sproul,

in the 1975 memoir, described her mixed feelings on the day in 1965

when everything was finally cleared out of the old headquarters on

Washington Street. Sitting on the dusty floor in the abandoned office

space, Fannie White's cherished African violet her only companion, she

wept, hard, "for all the crazy days of hard work that would never come

again ... nothing would ever be so much fun again."

That was her most vivid recollection of her first decade as part of the

paper's staff: "Only 'fun' can describe what it meant to work on a

small weekly newspaper in a small town from the mid-1950s to the

mid-1960s."

Coming Friday: 1965-75

Issues of social change, including the civil rights and women's rights

movements and the Vietnam War, are framed locally in the Sun's pages.

City Council candidates are concerned about growth, traffic and

commuters. But the paper still devotes columns to social doings — who

is visiting whom, which pilots fly where.

7/14/05