The 120-Year-Old Bee

"The Newtown Bee" was the creation of John T. Pearce, a man some described as eccentric, whose nose for news far outperformed his other senses - especially his business sense.

Mr Pearce set up shop above Sanford and Hawley's store on Main Street in 1877. On June 28 of that year, the first small newspaper bearing the banner The Bee was circulated hand-to-hand around Newtown. Subscriptions were $1 a year, and ads sold 75-cents an inch.

The main offering on the front page of the first issue was a florid tale of romance called "Love or Pride?," which started with the encounter of a young couple in a moonlit churchyard and ended with a kiss. That fictional flight of fancy, along with some whimsical jottings about shoeing colts, broken carriage axles, a temperance address at the Methodist Church in Sandy Hook, and other local happenings, apparently had enough appeal to get requisite number of subscribers to give the paper its start. People seemed to like the paper, if not for its journalistic probity, for its distinctly local take on life's banalities.

Mr Pearce's enthusiasm for publishing a local paper was erratic. He would suspend an issue whenever he felt like it, and sometimes he would turn all his duties over to someone else, only to reappear and take them all back. On any given week, readers never knew what they would find in the paper, or if they would find the paper at all.

By 1880, The Bee's viability was teetering on the brink. All The Bee's goods and chattels where heavily mortgaged to the village merchant Henry Sanford. In addition, John Pearce was facing tough competition from the upstart Newtown Chronicle. His best option seemed to be to sell out before he washed out on a tide of red ink.

Meanwhile, Reuben Hazen Smith, one-time editor of The Waterbury Republican, was growing unhappy with his job as exchange editor on the Springfield (Mass.) Republican. A brother told him about the ailing Newtown Bee, so Reuben came to Newtown and bought the publication, saving Mr Pearce from his inevitable failure.

At the outset of Reuben's tenure as editor, the challenges of reviving The Bee were daunting. The type for the old Washington hand press was worn and white with lye. It took four weeks to get out the first issue under the new management, and the paper that was eventually published in April of 1881 was almost illegible. But with the news and the ancient type Reuben assembled a team of family members and friends who helped prepare and mail the paper. So when the first paper came out, work began immediately on the next issue, and the chain of weekly publication of The Bee has continued unbroken to this day.

Reuben Smith set about to build the newspaper's stature in the community and the region through door-to-door contact with subscribers and advertisers, peddling the paper and picking up news wherever he went. He traveled a circuit of all the towns around Newtown by horse and buggy, making new friends and keeping up with old friends. He was so well liked that the paper grew and prospered in large part by sheer force of his engaging personality and initiative. By the end of 1881, the newspaper's near-extinct subscriber list had been revived with 600 paying subscribers.

Reuben bought a new Campbell press and new type immediately improving the appearance of The Bee, and in a shrewd move to cement the position of his paper in the community, he bought out the competing Newtown Chronicle. The Bee also moved to new quarters over the Post Office on Main Street in the building that once housed Newtown Academy, which stood about where the Newtown Savings Bank is now.

After a decade of newspapering in Newtown, Reuben was ready for new challenges, and like so many young men of his time, he packed up his family and headed to California.

Fortunately, Reuben had two younger brothers who were interested in carrying The Bee into the new century. On October 7, 1892, control of the paper passed to Allison P. Smith of Springfield, Mass. and Arthur J. Smith of Bridgeport. "A.P." took up the editor's duties, and "A.J." took over the business end of the newspaper.

The talents of the two Smith brothers were well matched. Their partnership would continue 42 years until 1934, when Allison died. The combined news and business sense of the team of A.P. and A.J. put The Bee in good position to grow and prosper. The two soon learned that The Bee was in a very good position - literally.

At the turn of the century, Newtown was a crossroads for a number of busy regional railroads that had recently merged into the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. In addition to the trains, the Newtown-Woodbury Stage Line and the Bridgeport-Newtown Turnpike brought people in and out of Newtown at a steadily increasing rate. The Smiths saw to it that many of those people left town with a copy of The Newtown Bee under their arm. Quite often, A.J. boarded the train himself and rode the rails in search of advertising in Bridgeport and Danbury. Meanwhile, A.P. would travel the surrounding hills and valleys in a horse and carriage canvassing for news, subscriptions, and advertising.

The Bee's reputation grew, and so did its staff and its need for space. By 1903, it was clear that the newspaper could no longer cope in the cramped space in the old post office building, so a new building was constructed that year on Church Hill Road. The long and narrow building formed the backbone for the many additions and expansions that would follow later in the century, creating what is the current home of The Newtown Bee.

In his travels, Allison P. Smith discovered a number of people in the towns surrounding Newtown who seemed to know everything that was going on in their towns, and soon The Bee's columns were filling up with accounts of local life throughout Western Connecticut written by these "correspondents." The tradition of hiring part-time local correspondents in the sweep of little towns from Middlebury to New Fairfield continued in The Bee well into the 1970s.

As the Smith brothers grew older, they found the demands of publishing a weekly newspaper paid no heed age. Arthur's son, Paul S. Smith joined the staff in 1932 to help his father and uncle with the business.

By that time, the younger Smith had some useful experience under his belt, having worked first in the publicity department of General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., and then for McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. in New York City in the years following his graduation from Amherst College in 1924. When his uncle Allison died in 1934, he settled quite naturally into the editor's chair, where he would guide The Bee and influence Newtown for the next 39 years.

A.J. Smith stayed on as business manager until his death in 1944.

It was in the 1930s that the first addition to the original Bee building was constructed, running along the west side of the offices. More room was needed for the for machinery and people - though not many people. There were linotype machines and a large Goss flat-bed press that could print 3,500 copies of an eight-page section in an hour, in addition to a growing accretion of shelves, heavy type tables (known as turtles) to hold the 90-100 lb type chases, counters, desks, file cabinets, and mail bags. As late as 1942, however, when it came time to take the company photo on the front steps, just ten people lined up for the camera.

Paul Smith carried on the tradition of promoting Newtown and its newspaper started by his father and uncles, for many families throughout western Connecticut, reading The Bee became just as much of a tradition. As the popularity of the paper continued to grow, Paul Smith knew that the company would have to keep pace by acquiring new and better equipment. He also needed a better place to store paper than the old shed at the rear of the building. So he contracted with local builder John Stefanko to build a large addition at the back and on the east side of the existing building. The project was completed in 1950, just in time for The Bee to embark on a sustained period of innovation and growth.

Just ten years after that photo of ten employees on the front steps in 1942, The Bee's staff jumped to 19. In 1953, The Bee had the largest paid circulation (5,513) of all of Connecticut's country weeklies. In 1956, the newspaper became the first weekly in the state to install a teletypsetter, a devise that enabled a linotype to set type mechanically from a tape.

Special supplements began to appear in the paper, including a special real estate section in 1958 that featured on its cover a large housing development in Sandy Hook known as Great Ring Acres. The Bee even helped Woodbury celebrate its tercentennial with a special section.

By the early 60s, the newspaper's circulation had hit 7,000 and was still growing. Just as his father had done three decades earlier, R. Scudder Smith returned to Newtown from college and a job in New York state to help out with the growing workload at The Bee. After a couple of years in the composing room, Scudder took on some editorial duties, bringing a keen sense of fun and personability to the job.

During his early years on the staff, Scudder created a column called "Let It Bee Known," which examined the smaller delights of small town life as played out by Newtown's often-colorful citizens. "Let It Bee Known" later evolved into a column, again on small topics, written by his ancient and beloved mongrel Tiquer, which in turn was taken up by his scruffy-but-wise cat Mountain. Mountain continues to live out his nine lives, in spirit anyway, in The Bee's popular "Top of the Mountain" column written collaboratively by Bee staffers.

Of the many traditions that prescribed life at The Bee, none was more entrenched than the way in which the newspaper had been printed. Flat-bed presses were the standard when The Bee first came into being, and by the mid-60s The Bee had been printed on the same Goss Comet flat-bed for 40 years. But in 1967, the cold type sea change in newspaper technology finally washed into The Bee's basement in the form of a new Goss Community web offset press. While, The Bee's classifieds were still produced by linotypes for several more years, the rest of the newspaper went to cold type, speeding up production and the rate at which papers came off the press.

The old Goss Comet could produce 3,000 impressions on eight pages in an hour. The new Goss Community raised that rate to 12,000 impressions on 12 pages. As it turns out, this sixfold increase in capacity came just in time for a journalistic venture that would turn into a nationally recognized success.

Ever since his return to Newtown to work on the family newspaper, Scudder Smith found it hard to contain his enthusiasm for antiques and folk art. His interest began to show up in the pages of The Bee. For years, antiques galleries and auction houses had run small ads in the paper, and regular columns on antiques by Thomas Ormsbee and Addison Metcalf were featured. But after establishing contacts with the many antique shops and galleries in the area, Scudder Smith launched, with his father's forbearance, four pages in The Newtown Bee on June 28, 1963 devoted to antiques.

The antiques coverage was quickly embraced by area antiques dealers. As the word and reputation of The Bee's antiques reporting spread, they supported the effort in increasing numbers with their advertising. The growth in this particular area, was placing new demands on The Bee's letterpress shop that were becoming hard to meet. But when the offset presses started rolling in 1967, the biggest roadblocks to what would be the phenomenal growth of The Bee's antiques section were cleared away.

On October 24, 1969, The Bee unveiled a separate tab section devoted to antiques. That issue formally marked the birth of what later became the separate publication Antiques and The Arts Weekly, also known in The Bee's office shorthand as A&A.

The steady growth of The Newtown Bee was quickly overshadowed by the phenomenal success of Antiques and The Arts Weekly.

When A&A remained a part of the community newspaper, antiques enthusiasts from throughout the Northeast and across the nation were subscribing to The Bee just for its antiques section. The popularity of A&A was quickly inflating the circulation figures of The Newtown Bee, so the decision was made to offer A&A to readers as a separate publication.

At about this time, The Bee's local readership was changing too. While out-of-town reader loyalty persisted in Woodbury and Southbury, the market for community weekly newspapers in general was becoming more localized. Over a period of time, The Bee cut back the number of its far-flung correspondents throughout western Connecticut and concentrated its efforts in Newtown, Woodbury and Southbury.

In January of 1977, The Bee's 100th year, it opened a regional office over the Woodbury Flower Shop and maintained a small advertising and editorial staff there.

The nature of newspaper offices everywhere was changing, and that was true at The Bee, as well. In September of 1980, the incessant clack of typewriters fell silent and was replaced by the cool keyboard click of computers. Despite the grumbling of a few old-timers who had grown quite fond of their trusty Underwoods and Royals, The Bee made a quick and smooth transition into the computer age.

Not only was it much quieter in The Bee offices, but the air slowly began to clear. Newspaper work has always been notorious for its high-pressure habit of filling offices and meeting rooms with tobacco smoke, and The Bee had more than its share of heavy smokers. Scudder Smith, however, was never one of them, and he never took pains to hide his bias against tobacco, especially when someone was lighting up.

In the early 80s he decided to do something about it, paying a bonus - $100 at first, and later $200 to some diehard holdouts - to make The Bee Newtown's first smoke-free office.

Because of the new technology now at its disposal, The Bee's capacity for producing newspapers increased dramatically. And it was a good thing. The Bee was going strong and Antiques and The Arts Weekly was growing in size week by week. In the 1980s, The Bee Publishing Company went through a period of rapid growth.

From four modest pages in 1963, A&A had grown in size to 175 pages or more by 1985 and had a circulation of about 19,000. The Bee was turning out 9,000 papers a week, usually of 40 pages or more.

As if that weren't enough, The Bee Publishing Company decided that year to start a new publication that would dramatically increase its coverage in towns east of the Housatonic River.

On May 20, 1985, a total market circulation newspaper called The Weekly Star was launched in the towns of Southbury, Woodbury, Oxford, Middlebury, Bethlehem, Roxbury, Bridgewater, and Washington. It had a circulation of about 21,000.

The Star proved to be very popular with readers in the eight towns it served, bringing the comprehensive Bee-style reporting on community events and people to a market served mostly by dailies (Waterbury and Danbury).

Four years later, in August 1989, the company bought yet another newspaper, the Town Times, in Watertown, which had a circulation of about 10,000. It upgraded local coverage in Watertown and provided, once again, a publication that was well-received in the community.

By the end of the decade, The Goss Community presses in The Bee's basement were churning out more than 58,000 newspapers a week, and there were 100 people on the payroll.

With three community newspapers in its stable, The Bee Publishing Company tried to draw advertisers with a full menu of advertising options, allowing either a narrow advertising focus in a single community, or a broad advertising sweep in three separate counties.

The support for The Weekly Star and the Town Times among advertisers never matched that of the readers, and in 1992 both publications were sold to Prime Publishers of Woodbury.

All the dramatic growth of the 1980s was reversed with that sale, and the company "downsized" to allow greater profitability and flexibility for its other publishing projects.

In 1993, two of those projects were launched. Both were quarterly publications, one aimed at the area's active equestrian community and the other taking up health issues.

Horses of Connecticut debuted in March of 1993, and within a year it increased its frequency of publication to once a month. The name subsequently was changed to Horses Monthly as its coverage quickly ranged beyond Connecticut's borders. Like The Weekly Star, it won almost instant approval from readers, who craved news of equestrian events. (See separate story.)

Again the advertising support, did not keep pace with enthusiasm of the readers, and at the end of 1996, equestrian coverage was scaled back to The Bee's regular weekly coverage of the horse community, supplemented by the occasional special section, called Equestrian Life.

The quarterly Health Monitor was started in July 1993 and continues to report on general health topics.

By 1993, it became apparent that The Bee's Goss Community presses in the basement were being overtaxed by the unabated growth in both the size and circulation of Antiques and The Arts Weekly along with the demands of the new specialty sections.

Having scrapped plans to construct an all-new office and printing facility on land the company owned at the intersection of Routes 25 and 302 for economic reasons, The Bee was looking for other ways to find much needed space in its Church Hill Road offices while increasing its press capacity.

It was decided that year to construct a new printing facility on Commerce Road. The plant was completed in 1994, and the five press units in The Bee's basement were moved to the new facility, where they were joined to three new units and a new folder. The press expansion allowed The Bee to print tab-sized sections of up to 64 pages, at a speed of 18,000 copies an hour - double the prior output.

The move also freed up much-needed space in the basement of the Church Hill Road offices. Circulation, bookkeeping, and advertising offices were moved downstairs, and offices were redecorated and reconfigured on the main floor.

Following its long tradition of blending its traditions with technology, The Bee launched a website in March 1995, becoming the first newspaper in the state to present constantly updated of news and information to its readers. The first web pages for The Bee were produced on a laptop.

In the 2« years since then, The Bee Publishing Company's website has become more sophisticated and has expanded to include news, information, and services for the readers of both The Newtown Bee and Antiques and The Arts Weekly. Included on The Bee's site (http://www.thebee.com) is a complete reference library of information about Newtown, which includes all the listings of government officials, clubs, organizations, schools, and churches that is published each year in the newspaper's Annual Guide To Newtown. There is also a extensive section devoted to kids. And townspeople have gone on-line to talk back to their newspaper through letters to the editor and a moderated discussion of town issues on the website called "Town Talk."

In the longstanding tradition of The Bee that all employees should be prepared to be jacks of many trades, six staff members have added web page design to the their list of duties at the newspapers. All the work on The Bee's website is done in-house, bring this new service of The Bee and immediacy and responsiveness to local events that have been Hallmarks of the newspaper since its beginning.

From the very first journalistic jottings of John T. Pearce printed on the old Washington hand press to the latest news posted on the World Wide Web, The Bee's beat has always been Newtown.

The town has watched itself grow up in our pages. It has come to appreciate its people, its landscape, its landmarks and institutions - and so have we. No matter what changes the future holds for The Newtown Bee, the beat will go on in our pages, on our computer screens, and especially in our hearts.