The Boston Globe today has a wonderful tribute to a pioneering community journalist — Rhoda Shaw Clark, who published the Claremont Daily Eagle in New Hampshire from 1950, when her husband died in a canoe accident, until 1963, when she sold the paper. Mrs. Clark died earlier this month at 99.
I particularly like this anecdote in the obituary, written by Gloria Negri:
As a top editor, she was known to be demanding, Charles Caruso of New York City well remembers. “I had gone there for a job, but before I went for the interview went to a road house where people were dancing. I saw this very pretty woman and asked her for a dance. As we danced, I told her I was nervous about an interview the next day with the publisher of the Daily Eagle. “‘I hear the woman publisher is a harridan, a real curmudgeon,’” he said. His dance partner turned out to be Mrs. Clark. He got the job.
The Eagle Times, as the paper was renamed following a merger, went out of business in 2009, but was revived later that year with the help of a $250,000 loan, 75 percent of which was guaranteed by the state — “an unusual deal because it involves a daily newspaper and the government it covers,” as the Nashua Telegraph put it.
I could not access the paper’s website, and according to this Wikipedia article, it’s been down since 2009. Too bad. I would have liked to see what the Eagle Times had to say about Mrs. Clark.