News - Joliet and Will County

History of The Herald-News: Mistake leads to first ‘Juliet’ paper

You’re reading the results of a mistake made 175 years ago.

When a small printing press was sent to Ottawa, Ill., in error, the shipper didn’t want to pay the expense of sending it back, so it was put up for sale at a bargain price.

Thirteen local investors pooled their money to buy the press and had a team of mules haul it back to Juliet, as the town then was known.

The first issue of the Juliet Courier rolled off that press on April 20, 1839.

Four years later, the paper became the Joliet Signal. It changed to the True Democrat in 1847, the Joliet Republican in 1862, the Joliet Record in 1870, and the Joliet Sun in 1872.

The Joliet News replaced the Sun in 1877 and was succeeded by the Joliet Herald in 1904.

Nine years later, Colonel Ira Copley bought the Herald and later acquired the printing equipment and circulation lists of the News. The Joliet Herald-News appeared for the first time June 1, 1915.

“We play our game on the square and print no harmful gossip and scandal except after one or the other has become a matter of court record and then we print it no matter who is involved,” the colonel wrote in the first edition.

Of equal importance, Cop-ley continued, “is our general policy of neighborliness. Friendliness with the people of Joliet and every other community where our newspaper is circulated is a careful rule.”

Making a name for themselves

John Lux was a teenager who volunteered to post baseball scores for Copley’s new paper.

By the following year he was the star news reporter and the year after that he was city editor. World War I interrupted his stellar rise, but he returned to report again.

Edward “Tex” O’Reilly, one of the first managing editors, would throw anyone who complained about the newspaper down the front stairs, according to a story that ran April 21, 2004, in The Herald-News. O’Reilly was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and Boxer Rebellion who had ridden with Pancho Villa before becoming a Texas Ranger.

“A reporter extraordinaire ... he would often trade his pencil for a rifle of machine gun,” was how O’Reilly was described. He left the paper to join the French Foreign Legion.

In 1924, The Herald-News moved into a new building on Scott and Van Buren streets downtown. Pneumatic tubes carried copy and messages throughout the building.

After 20 want ads had been typed by the staff, they’d be rolled into a tube and sent to the composing room on the third floor, recalled Nancy Mahalik, who worked in the building in the 1970s.

“There was never any parking around there. Salesmen and reporters had to keep feeding the meters.

“One time, a cop showed up with an arrest warrant for an ad salesman who’d gotten an incredible amount of parking tickets,” she said.

The first floor held the advertising and circulation offices, the second floor had the publisher’s office and the newsroom.

John Whiteside recalled a horseshoe-shaped desk where the editors sat with a drawer in the middle marked “Truffles”

“It clinked when they shut it and they opened and shut it often,” he told staffers at a 2004 office party.

Copley made Lux the publisher in 1932. Lux used the pen name “Jack Thorne” to write a popular front page column titled “I See By The Papers.” Thorne would share tales of the sassy “Girl on The Cass Street Bus” and the homespun wisdom he’d learned from “Ma and Pa.”

Lux’s friend Albert Tolf drew Sunday cartoons for The Herald-News for a dozen years in the 1940s and 1950s before moving to California where he did some of the original artwork at Disneyland.

Robert Novak started as a freelance sports reporter in 1947 while attending Joliet High School and covered news during breaks from college and military service over the next seven years. Within a few years, Novak had moved to Washington, D.C., where he would write the longest-running syndicated political column in American history.

You must remember this ...

While the Daily Planet had Clark Kent in the newsroom, The Herald-News had Jack Azman in advertising for 33 years. Azman was never seen at the same time as “Mr. Want Ad,” a costumed character who promoted the classified section around the same time as “Batman” was on TV in the late 1960s.

“We had some bedsheets printed with want ads on them and a seamstress who made a costume. Anything for promotion,” Azman recalled.

Another idea was scented ink for advertisements such as the downtown Ford dealer, who proclaimed “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” one spring.

“Guess that never caught on,” Azman said.

The social turbulence of the 1960s led to the first-floor windows being replaced with glass block, which made it pretty warm in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer, staffers said.

No one who worked at the newspaper in the early 1970s could forget another incident that resulted from heating the building. The press was housed in the building next to the offices, which had a pipe running outside so the tank in the basement could be filled with ink.

Around the corner from that pipe was another valve for oil to heat the building, which confused a substitute deliveryman one Saturday and led to a tank full of oil instead of ink.

“The pressmen were surprised when they found the inkwell was full and they weren’t expecting a delivery, so the press foreman and the maintenance supervisor had a meeting after they sniffed the ink,” retired saleswoman Diane Argodelis recently recalled.

“There was some concern the friction would set the press on fire and some concern if it would stick to the paper” she said.

The Sunday paper was printed without acknowledging the new formula, which prompted a lot of calls to the gas company when people noticed a funny smell after bringing their paper inside.

“Then the ink started coming off on their hands. Monday morning people burned up the phone lines in the office and they drained the tanks,” Argodelis said.

Changing times

Preparing for a move west in the 1960s, publisher John Lux had purchased land for The Herald-News at the corner of Jefferson Street and Joyce Avenue. By 1975, publisher William Blackburn, who took over when Lux retired in 1966, traded that to the developers of the Jefferson Square Mall in exchange for advertising commitments and more acreage on nearby Caterpillar Drive. Blackburn’s staff would end up working on the same land he’d farmed as a boy.

The new building boasted a moat in the common area that was soon filled in with plants after people kept falling into it.

Sometimes, the news came right to the paper. Azman and others came to work one morning to find a car in the pond outside the publisher’s windows.

“Some guy had tried to rob stores in the Jefferson Square Mall and got caught in the ceiling one night. He made it to his car and tried to get away from the cops, but drove across the field between the mall and the paper and drove right into the water,” Azman said.

John Whiteside came to The Herald-News as a reporter in 1971. A few weeks into the job, Whiteside learned about a farmer who’d gotten arrested for firing a gun at the trespassers who kept stealing his corn. The story of the victim being punished more than the criminals caused outrage. The story became national news, the charges were dropped and Whiteside got his local vegetables at a discount for the rest of his life.

Whiteside and reporter Lonny Cain investigated local corruption and scandal. When readers complained about open prostitution downtown, they paid for a hotel room to interview the working girls. A vaguely worded memo somehow got them reimbursed for the expense, Whiteside recalled years later.

In the late 1970s, Whiteside and Cain began investigating the 1957 disappearance of reporter Molly Zelko, who worked for the weekly Joliet Spectator. Zelko’s whereabouts remain a mystery, but the case has remained in the local consciousness.

For nearly 25 years, Whiteside wrote three columns a week – frequently spotlighting local heroes and military history. He considered the Taylor Pirc video project to install cameras in police cars to record drunk driving arrests, and the honor guard at Abraham Lincoln Cemetery to be the best things that came from his work. His columns describing his final battle with cancer also were praised following his death in 2005.

The Herald-News continued without “the Franchise,” as Whiteside was known, as new media platforms were utilized to bring local news in faster and different ways. Photographer Rob Sumner illustrated “Downtown Voices” to showcase the architecture and faces seen downtown in print and to hear their stories online.

In April 1997, the afternoon paper went to morning delivery seven days a week in an attempt to get the news to readers faster. The economic collapse a decade later hit the newspaper as well.

Layoffs took the newsroom staff from more than 30 to six within a few years, and the Caterpillar office was sold. Production moved to the former printing plant on the north side of Plainfield, and the frequent visits of readers stopping in to say hello, pay bills and place ads virtually ceased.

Readers reacted badly as local content was sacrificed to company directives to appeal to the Chicago market.

Yet The Herald-News was considered an asset because of the loyalty of advertisers and readers. The paper was purchased by Dixon-based Shaw Media in January 2014 with several veterans returning and new blood ready to make their own mark in Will County.

The newsroom staff was increased to 16: five news reporters, an editor, news editor, features editor, features clerk, photo editor and second photographer, sports editor and two part-time sports writers, and two copy editors, with plans to add another full-time position in the near future.