By KEVIN NEVERS

Almost seven years ago now, in July 1997, the managing editor of the Chesterton Tribune, Dave Canright, interviewed me for the position I now hold.

We spoke of many things that hot afternoon in the artist’s studio above the newsroom: my beat apparent—Porter and Burns Harbor; the themes of the region—steel and NIPSCO and the Dunes; our mutual interest in military history—his especially for the American Civil War and mine for WWII; and my qualifications for the job—none, actually.

A day or two later, Canright interviewed me once more and this time was joined by his father, the publisher, Warren H.—Chief, as I have always called him—and I remember very clearly the latter’s utter lack of enthusiasm for the candidate sitting before him, and my surprise at his disinclination to hide it. Chief expressed grave doubts about my aptitude and wondered how in the world a failed academic who had puttered for four years on an unreadable dissertation could possibly adjust to the rigors of writing on deadline. In the end however—for reasons known only to him—he shrugged his shoulders and gave me the nod anyway.

On Monday, July 28, 1997, I joined the roll call of editors and reporters who through the years have rattled typewriters and cages alike to bring Duneland to life: the eccentric Louis Menke, the chain-smoking Margaret Mabin, the driven John Canright, the buoyant Margaret Willis, the industrious John Mabin, the fearless Paulene Poparad, the meticulous Vicki Urbanik, the beloved Kurt Ruoff, and the indefatigable Jim Hale.

Today, April 1, is the 120th anniversary of the founding of the Tribune, and as I sit here at my keyboard at 4:30 a.m., trying to find a suitable way to mark the occasion—Do something, Canright said, but keep it short—I’m reminded of the only two really valuable things he told me during my two interviews.

The Chesterton Tribune is the newspaper of record in Duneland.

And sooner or later everyone in Duneland gets his or her name in it.

So it is now, and so it has always been, since a man named Arthur Bowser—recruited by local businessmen to resurrect a newspaper which had failed two years earlier after a run of only 35 issues—came to Chesterton in 1884 and set himself the task of boot-strapping a rail junction into a community. In that first edition, Vol. 1, No. 1, Bowser immediately established high standards for comprehensiveness and name-dropping:

Joseph Morgan has an epithelial cancer on his lower lip which will necessitate an early removal.

Last winter Geo. Morgan had two hogs and a cow drownded in Morgan Lake, they falling in a hole where ice had been taken out. As the ice has broken up the bodies of the animals have come to the surface.

Pete Peterson had the misfortune on Monday to get his right forearm broken. It was dressed by Dr. G. H. Riley.

Miss Maria Brummitt and Miss Anna Erickson, teachers at Porter, were in town Monday, and gave this office a pleasant call.

Last Sabbath evening while at church, some one whittled the window casing of a front window of the Central House very badly.

No item was too small, none too homely. Of course the Tribune covered the landmark events: the incorporation of Chesterton in 1899, the Great Fire of 1902, the arrival in 1910 of the first streetcar of the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line Railroad. It also covered the trends: the housing booms and busts, the rise and fall of local industry, the emergence of a public infrastructure. But Bowser always found his best stuff elsewhere: in casual conversations with shopkeepers and housewives, in dispatches from farms and churches, in chance meetings down the street and around the corner, in the nooks and crannies where his readers lived and worked and played and worshipped. At times the old Tribune reads like a compendium of Seens and Heards: who’s just left for the big city and who’s just returned, who’s sick and who’s recovering, who held a picnic Saturday afternoon and who made the dance Saturday night.

Now Bowser was a bit of a bounder, a schemer and a dreamer who saw personal profit in economic development, and long before there was the Lake Erie Land Company there was his own Chesterton Realty Company, and if you live in Morgan Park today you can thank Bowser for your neighborhood. He had a taste too for the tabloid, an ugly penchant for racist editorializing, and a keen political sense which ultimately led to his election to the State Senate. And if Bowser were to rise from his grave and speak from the floor at the next meeting of the Town Council, he would likely claim credit for building Chesterton single-handedly. Bowser most certainly did not build this town, but he did give readers the tools to do it themselves: a pride and a drive and a communal identity.

In 1923 Bowser at last sold the Tribune to his editor, John Graessle, who continued to lard his pages with nuggets and names. So finally did the Canrights, when Chief’s father, Warren R., bought the newspaper from the widow Graessle in 1928. Week in and week out, then—beginning on April 3, 1961—weekday in and weekday out, the Tribune has made a point of sparing no detail: scores of column inches—read them all, I dare you to—devoted to last night’s meeting of the Duneland School Board or the Utility Service Board, to the latest something-or-other at Coffee Creek Center, to reassessment and COIT and TIF and annexations.

But scores of column inches as well devoted to you, and to your daughter and your cousin and your neighbor and your boss, and to their adventures in Duneland. Community editor Alexandra Newman and sports editor Jimmy Kissee Jr. keep tabs on all of you: the Bowler of the Week, the Duneland Exchange Club Student of the Month, this fundraiser by the Chesterton-Porter Rotary Club, that one by the Chesterton-Duneland Kiwanis Club, our newest Eagle Scout, the latest exploits of the CHS Speech and Debate teams, the results of State Park Little League, the up-and-comers in the Duneland Swim Club. You may not care a whit about the density of a subdivision or the variances in a PUD—though surely someone does—but you do want to know who won the Turtle Derby, who made the Honor Roll, and who received the Athena Award.

Reporters from other newspapers, bigger newspapers, don’t get it. As a stringer for a regional rag once put it to me, with unfortunate crudeness, Anytime someone breaks wind you think it’s news. Yet our competitors miss the point of the Tribune. This newspaper will probably never win a Pulitzer for its coverage of the drug problem or the steel shakeout, but then its mission—Bowser’s mission—has always been less grand and more important: to record the minutes of our lives in this community, and to report the agendas of the people whose passions and preoccupations make it a community. If you want to know about the world outside Duneland, do what I do: read the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.

In that first issue of the Tribune, published 120 years ago today, Bowser, always the self-promoter, added this blurb: The TRIBUNE has come this time to stay. You want a paper. You need one. With your help we can make the TRIBUNE one of the strongest papers in northern Indiana. I like to think that this newspaper and its readers, in partnership together, still make good on Bowser’s promise and will do so for years to come.

Posted 4/1/2004