In April 1980 the three-person editorial staff of the Oak Park News walked out the door of our office in the now-demolished Mar Lac House on Marion Street. Never to return. We were going to start our own newspaper, dadgumit.
We had our reasons. In the first place, the paper’s publisher had just queered the deal we had arranged, at his request, to find buyers to get him off the hook of the money-hemorrhaging paper. And secondly, after he canceled the agreement on the brink of the closing date, he told me that everything would be fine financially once I fired my two colleagues.
The advantage of being paid almost nothing is that nothing isn’t much less. So we walked, Anne Duggan, Sharon Britton and I, into unemployment. We stepped off the cliff with the inspired notion of starting a new Oak Park newspaper because we were kids, and because each of us had a spouse who was, more or less, employed, and totally supportive.
Earlier this month one of those spouses died, early and unexpectedly. Ken Cmiel, Anne’s husband, was in his early 50s, a long-time, and judging from the obits, a much-loved history professor at the University of Iowa. The last time I saw Ken he was about 25, finishing an advanced degree at the University of Chicago and discovering how much he loved teaching undergrads at the U. of C.
In a better world I’d tell you that the six of us stayed fast friends, visited regularly and named our kids after each other. In fact, when I saw Ken’s picture on the obituary page of the Trib last week I was stunned. I hadn’t seen Ken since Anne left the one-year-old Wednesday Journal under trying circumstances. For the life of me, I can’t recall what was so trying about the situation. It was that sort of thing. Everyone was upset. The stress of running your own money-losing newspaper was worse than running someone else’s. But what exactly set off the flare, I don’t remember.
I’m grateful though that a year ago this time, as the paper was planning its 25th anniversary party that, through the reach of the web, I found Ken and Anne in Iowa City. I invited them to our big to-do at the Cheney Mansion, and while they couldn’t make it, it did re-open a closed door and led to several warm and happy catching up e-mails.
The thing is that Anne doesn’t remember what we were all upset about either. She just remembered, as I did, the happy times we all had up and down Harrison Street. During the months we spent planning the paper, the three of us worked all day at the dining room table in my little brown house just off Harrison. And many was the time after those long days that we’d adjourn with our husbands and wives to Ken and Anne’s apartment on Harrison. Ken cooked. We laughed and told stories, plotted and complained. It was one of the best times of my life.
Later, once the paper was launched in July of 1980, we moved the corporate headquarters from my house to the basement of an apartment building on Harrison. We were the only newspaper with a sauna in the back room and a hot tub in the back yard.
What I know with certainty is that while Anne and Sharon were both gone from the paper within two years of the launch, Wednesday Journal wouldn’t have succeeded without each of them. And the three of us wouldn’t have succeeded without Mary Haley, John Patrick and Ken Cmiel.
