Jack Sanders, right, is retiring after nearly five decades. Jake Kara, left, has taken over his role at The Press. —Thomas Nash photo
A community journalist who guided The Ridgefield Press as it chronicled the town’s growth and changes over nearly five decades, Jack Sanders, is retiring.
The desk in his office overlooking Bailey Avenue will become the workplace of Jake Kara, who’ll take over as managing editor of The Press.
A grandson of Ann and the late Edward Erskine of Ridgebury, Mr. Kara is the son of longtime Ridgefielder Tricia Kara of Bethel.
Mr. Kara started with Hersam Acorn Newspapers in 2010 as a reporter for The Darien Times and became a reporter at The Press in March 2011. In March 2013, he became editor of Hersam Acorn’s Monroe Courier, and was transferred back to Ridgefield in February to begin learning the managing editor’s duties. He lives in Bethel.
Mr. Sanders will continue to assist The Press in a variety of roles, writing columns, putting on workshops for staff and community groups, overseeing The Press’s editorial records.
“A lot of history in the files here,” he said.
And Mr. Sanders has chronicled much of it.
“I started here in 1967 — Jan. 1, 1967,” he said last week. “Close to 47 years.”
He and his wife, Sally, have lived in Ridgefield nearly all of that time, and raised their two sons, Ben and Michael, here.
After growing up in Danbury and going to Fairfield Prep, Mr. Sanders graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and started as a reporter for The Wilton Bulletin in 1967. He was transferred to Ridgefield that summer, and became a co-editor of The Ridgefield Press with publisher Karl Nash in 1968.
“I don’t see the town having changed all that much,” he said. “Probably the big change is the town’s becoming an increasingly large center for the arts. When I started here there was the Aldrich Museum and we had a theater group, the Workshop for the Performing Arts; I don’t remember if the Guild of Artists was started.
“Now there’s the Ridgefield Playhouse and many art galleries. When I started here the orchestra was called ‘The Symphonette,’ all amateurs, mostly local people. Now it’s a big, professional orchestra that draws on a wide area. Many of the churches have concert series. The library is much more active than it used to be, putting on many more things. It’s just become a very active community in the arts.
“But otherwise, it really hasn’t changed that much. It was, I think, 19,000 people then. What is it now, 24,000? Over 40 years. In the 10 years before I came, the town had doubled in size, but I arrived at the end of that huge burst of growth.
“Of course, back then there was lot of concern about that — schools being built left and right. And then they started closing schools, and then they started opening schools again, and now they’re talking about closing schools.
“Because of the growth and hiring teachers, there were more battles over budgets than there are now. It was not unusual to have an Annual Town Meeting and three referendums to approve a town and school budget.
“There were pretty much the same zoning concerns back then. I think the town has maintained its beauty. It’s been very carefully zoned and planned. Mistakes were made, but mostly in the 40s and 50s,” Mr. Sanders said.
A changing business
Over those 47 years the Nash family’s small, Ridgefield-based newspaper group, Acorn Press, grew, adding papers. It included just three papers when Mr. Sanders started: The Press, The Wilton Bulletin and The Redding Pilot. Eventually it merged with the Hersam family’s New Canaan-based papers, and expanded further into the 16-paper Hersam Acorn Newspapers of today.
The Ridgefield Press and its sister papers went through generation after generation of change in production technology — from hot lead to offset printing to early computer-based technology to today’s fully digital operations.
“I consider it kind of fortunate that I lived through and worked through so many changes in the way a newspaper is produced, and it helped make the job more interesting because there were always new changes, new things happening,” Mr. Sanders said.
“When I started in this then one-story building, we were producing the newspaper the same way, in ’67, that newspapers were produced 100 years earlier — lead type.
“The headlines were all put together by hand. The stories were done on Linotype machines. We had three of them that used hot lead to create the type. If you looked down on the type all the letters were backwards — it was a mirror. There were pots of molten lead to feed those machines.
“Then we switched to offset, which got rid of the hot type and made us a photographic system of producing type on paper. It was very expensive. It now seems very primitive, but it was sophisticated then. There were a lot of chemicals involved that required special disposal. But it enabled us to convert a story from a typewriter to newspaper type more quickly.
“In the 80s, with the arrival of computer terminals, we started writing directly to a computer. It was punch tape, and that was put into the computer that produced the stories on paper. And that paper was waxed and then pasted up.
“And then when PCs, personal computers, became more common we switched to using those. So typewriters went out and everybody wrote on a PC. But it still had to be plugged into a printer to print out the type, and we waxed it and pasted it up.
“It wasn’t until the 1990s, I think, that things went all digital so you wrote stories on a computer, you sent it electronically to another computer of the person who put together the page, and pages were laid out electronically.
“And because I was a gadget geek, a computer geek, and a very early user of computers, with my kids, I was involved in setting up a lot of the systems here in the 1980s and early 90s. But now they’ve gotten so sophisticated that it’s gotten beyond my ability.
“With my son, Ben, we were very early users of the predecessors of the Internet. In the early 80s we had set up a bulletin board system of genealogy and other things, and used that knowledge and technology to set up a bulletin board for The Press.”
People used a modem to log on and send in news.
“The whole system operated on a computer with two floppy disks — didn’t even have a hard drive,” Mr. Sanders said. “Pretty amazing.
“Then we set up the first World Wide Web site for The Press in the 90s — one of the first newspapers in Connecticut, weekly or daily, which had a website.”
The website made it easier for people to send things in. And it allowed The Press to post news — particularly obituaries, in the early days — on the Internet, reaching people out of town.
With Mr. Sanders often pointing the way, that grew into the newsy, multi-feature websites that The Press and other Hersam Acorn papers offer readers today.
He has been a prolific user of Twitter to inform the public of emergency news, particularly in the weeklong outages that followed storms Irene, Alfred and Sandy.
Community journalism
Though the way news is recorded and delivered to an audience has changed dramatically over the years, much has remained the same.
Over the years he helped pass on the craft and values of community journalism to dozens of reporters who were hired, often with little or no experience, to write for The Press.
“It has nothing to do with me,” he said. “This has been a place where the news has always been encouraged — good newspapers, news emphasis. That’s because of Karl and Betty Grace Nash, who were consummate community journalists.
“Karl was very strong on making sure government was covered, and Betty Grace was strong on the ‘people’ side, the human side.
“They knew what community news is all about, and they instilled that in all the people who worked for them. Thomas Nash is the same way, a strong belief in community news and having good newspapers.”
For many readers, Mr. Sanders’ columns on nature and local history have been his distinguishing contribution. “Wildflower World” added folklore and traditional uses to basic scientific information on flowers that bloom on roadsides, in swamps, all around. “Bird Notes” combined the sightings and news reported by local bird watchers with biology and the observations of a serious naturalist.
Two of The Press’s most successful special sections, 100 Things to Do and the Ridgefield Answer Book, were his idea and they continue today with the answer book concept being used in The Press’s sister newspapers. In 2000, he embarked on a major history project: Notable Ridgefielders, an 88-page special section with biographies of people who made news in Ridgefield in the 20th Century. It contained a timeline of major town news from 1900 to 1999.
He also looked into local history: Ridgefield Names traced the origin of the town’s place names; The Diary of Jared Nash explicated the daily reflections of a local farmer whose diary from the 1860s had been found and brought to The Press. More recently, Mr. Sanders’ “About Town” column has offered historical background to local events.
Branching out
Several of the columns evolved into other projects.
“I’ve always been interested in nature and history,” Mr. Sanders said. “Karl Nash, who hired me, got me interested in Ridgefield history.
“Betty Grace Nash encouraged me to do something with my interest in nature. I was involved in a 1970s census of Ridgefield wildlife and my specialty was wildflowers, so she got me to start writing a wildflower column, And that grew into a book called Hedgemaids and Fairy Candles, The Life and Lore of North American Wildflowers, and that was published by McGraw-Hill.”
Helping get the book published was former Ridgefield Press writer and editor Tom McCarthy, who’d gone on to work for McGraw-Hill and then Globe Pequot, which published an expanded version called The Secrets of Wildflowers, which, to Mr. Sanders’ surprise and delight, is still being printed and sold.
“That book has been in print since 2003. It’s kind of amazing,” he said.
For several years he’s also had a blog, called naturegeezer. “Short essays about suburban nature and local history, the way people lived in the old days,” he said.
Ridgefield history is also his subject in a few books.
“Five Village Walks is a self-guided tour to the center of town that I did for the Ridgefield Historical Society, which they sell to raise money,” Mr. Sanders said. “And I also did a book called Ridgefield 1900 to 1950, which is old postcard pictures of what the town was like during that period.
“But all of that grew out of my work here,” he said. “And I hope to do some more of that kind of thing. I hope to write more local history, write more about nature.”