The Belleville News-Democrat can point to two U.S. presidents as having at least an indirect hand in its origin.
That historic foundation is one reason the News-Democrat today celebrates a remarkable milestone -- 150 uninterrupted years of supplying information and service to the metro-east, making it the oldest surviving paper in St. Clair County and one of the oldest in the state.
In the metro-east of the 1800s, newspapers came and went like one-hit wonders on the pop music charts. Starting with Dr. James Green's Western News in 1827, literally dozens of papers -- Republican papers, Whig papers, Democrat papers, German-language papers, labor papers -- sprang up, only to merge or fold, often within months or even weeks.
In Belleville, all but the News-Democrat have wound up at the bottom of history's birdcage. And for that, credit starts with the paper's founder, the Rev. Dr. Williamson Franklin Boyakin, a Baptist preacher who came to Belleville in the 1840s after making his fortune years earlier in the Northwest.
While Boyakin was growing up, his father fought alongside Andrew Jackson against the Creek Indians in Alabama and wound up rescuing the nation's future seventh president during a battle. In return, Jackson insisted on paying for Williamson's education at Spring College in Pulaski, Tenn. Upon graduation, Boyakin began practicing law in the offices of Bramblett, Brown & Polk -- i.e., James Polk, who would become the nation's 11th president in 1845.
Boyakin's religious scruples soon ended his lawyering days. He earned his medical degree and also became a Baptist minister, eventually building his own church on Main Street in Belleville and becoming president of the Belleville Temperance Society. There was clearly more than heaven on the preacher's mind: In 1844, he headed a committee that tried to bring the proposed Vincennes, Ind.-St. Louis Road through Belleville.
In December 1857, he offered a prospectus for the Belleville Weekly Democrat, which initially was run out of an office on North High Street, between what is now East Main and A. No copy of that first issue on Jan. 16, 1858, survives, but the leading opposition paper, the Belleville Advocate, described it as "a weekly paper advocating democracy as expressed in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (which allowed new states joining the union to decide themselves whether to be slave or free)."
In its early days, the four-page broadsheet had no pictures, no headlines and "news" was generally months old. Much of the front page of the second issue on Jan. 23 was devoted to poetry, a continuing biography of Thomas Jefferson and a 3-month-old update of a road being built in the Southwest. In the "Wit & Wisdom" column, male readers were reminded to "never marry a woman merely because she has a handsome face."
Since a paper's politics drove sales more than its news in those days, local news was buried on Page 3. There, readers were lured with stories about a successful deer hunt, the opening of a new market house in downtown, and a "most terrible case of human depravity" in which a married man and woman had left their spouses and four children to run off three months previously.
Boyakin used his publication to lobby for community improvements and engage in the kind of public service activities that the paper continues today. In March, he announced the formation of a committee that would help qualified students attend Normal University in Bloomington to bolster the city's ranks of trained teachers.
At the same time, he said he could not understand how a city the size of Belleville (about 13,000 at the time) could have lost its telegraph office years before. By the end of 1858, the telegraph had returned, leading Boyakin to contemplate for the first time a Daily Morning News-Democrat "at about 10 cents a week."
It was a dream Boyakin would never realize. By the end of 1858, Boyakin was lamenting his inability to pay back an initial $800 investment by "good Democrats." He apologized for having to raise subscriptions to $2 a year, payable in advance. Less than a month later, Boyakin left, and, after another short stint as editor in the early 1860s, he was gone for good. Eventually known as the "fighting parson" for his valor in the Civil War, the man who knew personally every president from Jefferson to Grant and in whose house Henry Clay's 1850 compromise bill was reportedly drafted, settled in Kansas, where he died in 1908 at the age of 102.
The paper scrapped on for the next 30 years under a revolving door of publishers, editors and colorful writing.
"The City is infected with robbers and thieves," the paper reported in 1859 after the house of former state Gov. John Reynolds had been burglarized. "Judge Lynch is the only relief. Hang a few, and the rest will run off."
Most of what appeared in those early years has been lost forever, including all issues between 1873 and the turn of century. Only the Advocate is left to record the next crucial chapter in the paper's history: the sale of the Belleville Democrat to Judge William J. Underwood's News Publishing Co., leading to the first issue of the combined Belleville News-Democrat on Oct. 2, 1883. (By some accounts, the News started in 1855, but no copies of such a paper have been found.)
Still, the answer to whether even the combined paper could continue to survive the ongoing merry-go-round of owners and office locations would have to wait until the 1891 arrival of a most unlikely savior -- Frederick John Kern.
1891-1972: Kern family ownership
Fred J. Kern seems a most improbable founder of a Belleville family publishing dynasty.
Born Sept. 2, 1864, to German immigrants in Millstadt, he quit school to work on the family farm. As a teen, he bounced around from the mines to grocery stores to shoveling dirt into sink holes in St. Louis. When times became too tough here, he hopped trains to join two brothers in Arkansas, walking for miles when he and fellow "tramps" (as he called himself later) were thrown off the freight cars.
Then came the tragic moment perhaps most responsible for changing newspapering history in the metro-east: Happy with his new sawmill job in Gurdon, Ark., Kern was rabbit hunting when a plug of wet snow jammed his rifle barrel. The next time he fired at his prey, the gun exploded, nearly ripping his left hand from his body.
"The hand was just hanging there," Kern's namesake grandson, Fred J. Kern, said as he recently related the family story he first heard as a youngster. "Now, this is all hearsay, because he died two years before I was born. But I was always told he had to walk a couple of miles to have his hand amputated."
Going back to school, he eventually earned a teaching degree, but the low wages of an educator left him yearning for more. So, with no journalism experience, he took a chance and joined his friend Fred Kraft as editor of the East St. Louis Gazette.
Soon after, came the boldest stroke of all: Just 27 years old and with no money to speak of, Kern came to Belleville just before Christmas 1891 and, with Kraft, bought the Belleville News-Democrat and the German-language Belleviller Zeitung from the Southern Illinois Publishing Co.
"The story is that he bought it on credit with 25 cents in his pocket," said Kern, chuckling at his grandfather's gutsiness. "He didn't have much money, but he was a hard worker, and he made it go."
Four years later, Kern bought out his partner, and, for the next 77 years, he and his family spent their lives turning a drab, four-page broadsheet into the city's only surviving daily. Along with it came a series of ever-bigger presses and, even in the early 1900s, a parade of modern features from color comics to literary magazines. But the key, his grandson said, was his love of politics and desire for public service.
Already in 1892, city officials were asking him to look into the sewer systems of other cities. Kern had become friends with Gov. Peter Altgeld and was chosen to clerk the Illinois Senate. There was never any doubt of Kern's unabashed Democratic leanings. Even while struggling to find work as a teenager, he left one job rather than be forced to march in a rally to support a Republican candidate.
Kern met with setbacks early on. In 1898, he lost his first bid for a U.S. congressional seat. A month later, on Christmas Eve, news came that his paper, then located on the northwest quadrant of Public Square, was ablaze. It was a total loss, destroying most copies of the paper printed to that time.
But Kern's own fire was inextinguishable. He quickly moved the paper into his home -- the paper's current location at 120 S. Illinois St. -- while moving his wife, Alma, and young son next door. Two years later, he won his seat in Washington, D.C., and, in 1903, began the first of five consecutive terms as Belleville's mayor.
"He was a very spirited man, and he raised a lot of Cain toward any corrupt politician and took people to task in a pretty rough way," Kern said. "In those days, the editorials got pretty rough. He let them have it, you know?"
As mayor, Kern led the fight to bring sidewalks, sewers and a paid fire department to the city. During a smallpox outbreak, he ordered all residents to be either vaccinated or isolated and rented ground for a temporary hospital. In the 1920s, his fiery editorials often railed against what he considered a pox on individual freedom: Prohibition.
"Many of his editorials were nationally recognized and published," Kern said of his grandfather, who would become friends with such luminaries as Clarence Darrow and Teddy Roosevelt.
Through it all, Kern was gearing up for a second generation to take over what had turned into a family operation. After World War I, his eldest son, Alfred, worked as city editor before dying of a brain tumor at age 30. Middle son Robert had a knack for keeping the paper's many machines running.
"(Bob) never graduated from high school because his dad said, 'You're wasting your time there,'" Kern said. "Even though he had gone to college and graduated from Illinois Normal, (Fred) always thought college was a place where brickbats were polished and diamonds were dulled. That was one of his sayings."
Youngest son Richard "Pete," however, ignored the advice and went to the University of Illinois, where he continued to develop his fascination with cameras. It was just months after his graduation in 1931 that his father died in his sleep of a stroke at age 67. Bob Kern, who would become editor and publisher, was 27 years old at the time -- the same age his dad had been when he bought the paper.
The cane-twirling man known for his morning walks around Belleville with his beloved collie, Queen, was gone, but the paper hardly skipped a beat as it continued its fierce rivalry with the Belleville Daily Advocate, the town's Republican paper, for news, circulation and advertising.
"Listen, there was hot competition," Kern said. "In high school, I took a lot of pictures for the News-Democrat, too. I can remember one campaign when we supported H.V. Calhoun for mayor, even though he was a Republican. When he won, I was taking pictures in the old City Hall, and they tore the camera out of my hands. So, it got rough, and I was just a kid then."
Although he had no formal degree, Fred's dad worked hard at keeping up with advances in the field and surrounded himself with employees who became local institutions, people such as Joe Adam, Roland Sax, Bill DeMestri and Wally Merz. And, although they never ran for office, both Bob and Pete continued their father's commitment to public service and the Democratic party. At the 1932 Democratic National Convention (one of three he attended), Bob was chosen to lead the group of delegates committed to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Later, he would be invited to luncheons at the White House with John F. Kennedy and earn numerous journalism awards, including election to the Southern Illinois University Hall of Fame as a Master Editor.
They nearly started a second Belleville radio station to compete with the then-fledgling WIBV, Kern said. He said they had acquired a stronger frequency, purchased the farmland for the tower and even picked out the call letters -- WBND. The studio would have been in a house near High and Lincoln, on the site where Kern and his wife, Barbara, live today.
"Then, television came in and my mom and dad decided not to do it," Kern said.
In February 1946, the Kern family purchased about a third of the outstanding shares of Advocate stock from the wife of the rival paper's late business manager. On Nov. 1, 1958, Advocate employees and readers were stunned to learn that Cy Arnold, the paper's president, had sold the remaining shares to the Kerns. Two days later, Belleville became a one-paper city.
With the added resources, many figured the paper would remain in the Kern family indefinitely. Even as a youngster, Fred Kern, now 75, remembers spending his days in the print shop, setting type by hand and publishing his own little paper. He acquired his driver's license at 13 and began delivering bundles of papers to the paper's young carriers. He also showed the same flair for mechanics that his dad had.
But a lengthy and sometimes ugly pressmen's strike in the late '60s did much to change his mind. With his dad and uncle up in years and his own children too young to help, Kern found it quickly becoming a one-man operation. He was working long days doing everything from seeing that the huge rolls of paper were delivered through the picket lines to running the press. Finally, he asked a lawyer he had met during the strike to search for a suitable buyer.
In the summer of 1972, Capital Cities Broadcasting Corp., of New York, took over the management of the News-Democrat. Bob, Bob's wife, Elsie, the paper's business manager, Pete and Fred, left the paper for the final time. It was difficult for all involved, Kern said. Not only was the family losing the prestige and influence of running a sizable daily newspaper, but its political voice was changing from Democrat to Republican. Even now, Kern, whose son Mark is St. Clair County Board chairman, has difficulty putting his family's legacy into words.
"The only thing I can say is we tried our best," said Kern, who is most proud of his family's unwavering support for increased school funding and historic preservation. "Everyone has to form their own opinion about how well we did. We worked with the community and we tried to promote Belleville. That was our primary interest."
But a new era of corporate ownership had begun.
1972-2007 -- Moving ahead
When Bill DeMestri learned that a New York corporation was buying the Belleville News-Democrat in 1972, one word dominated his thoughts.
"We were leery of it," he said. "We were very leery."
Who could blame him? Since 1941, he had been taking photos for family-run papers whose owners lived in the community -- first at the Belleville Daily Advocate and then for Bob and Pete Kern when they completed their purchase of the Advocate in 1958. He rubbed elbows with the owners every day and knew they had the paper's best interest at heart and cared about the Belleville area as well.
"When I worked for the Kerns, they treated me like a million bucks," said DeMestri, who recalled the time Bob Kern gave him a massive piece of exercise equipment to strengthen his problematic back. "Whenever I showed extra effort, Bob would say, 'You're getting a little more money this week.' And, that was often."
Now, a faceless company he had never even heard of -- Capital Cities Broadcasting Corp. -- would run the show. What did they know about the metro-east? How would they treat employees a thousand miles away? Besides, they were better known for radio and TV, not print. Both employees and readers had every right to be apprehensive, said Gary Berkley, who joined the News-Democrat in 1978 and became its president and publisher a decade leader.
"I can see where they would," said Berkley, who retired in 2004 after 17 years at the paper's helm. "There's a lot of perfectly fine newspapers in the last 25 years that have been diminished by group ownership."
Not the News-Democrat. Soon after flamboyant Publisher John Shuff Jr. took over, readers saw the genesis of a new-look paper that would double its circulation of 30,000, grow from a few dozen employees to nearly 300 today, publish every day of the year, and produce hard-hitting, in-depth investigative stories that regularly win both regional and national acclaim.
First Shuff, followed by Darwin Wile and Berkley, began taking the paper in several new directions. Starting in the 1970s, the paper expanded its boundaries to include I-270 and the rapidly expanding Madison County on the north, Breese on the east and the Randolph County line on the south. Bureaus were opened in Collinsville and Edwardsville. By 1976, the paper was publishing as many as three different editions each day.
The editorial page, which had supported Democratic Party principles throughout its history, turned conservative. Berkley, for example, remembers disappointing Knight-Ridder Inc., which bought the paper in 1997, when the paper endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2000.
"Gary Berkley used to say we're conservative on the editorial page and that that was a reflection of what the people in this area at their heart believed in," said Jay Tebbe, the paper's current president and publisher. "So, I think you find your path and you follow it."
The paper's front page content also got a makeover. Throughout most of its history, the News-Democrat front page was a typical mix of local, national and international stories that a reader would find in most major daily publications across the country. No longer. Short of war or a Sept. 11 catastrophe, the News-Democrat front page has been exclusively local since the mid-1990s.
Readers also found their news packaged differently. With the purchase of a 64-page capacity offset press in 1982, the News-Democrat began its now-familiar four-section configuration. With it came an ever increasing number of new features including local weekly entertainment listings and daily stock pages. On Sept. 12, 1976, came the first-ever Sunday edition.
On Jan. 1, 1984, the paper announced it would resume the Saturday publication it had dropped in 1971, and switch from an afternoon to a morning publication. It dropped its 750 junior carriers in favor of 150 adult distributors who would deliver the papers during the wee hours of the morning 365 days a year.
"Everything changed that day," said Tebbe, a 49-year-old Belleville native who began driving delivery trucks for the News-Democrat in 1976. "How we billed people, when we delivered, how we delivered. For me, it became this sort of a mission to get it all to work right."
That mission has continued through a succession of owners from Capital Cities in 1972 to the Walt Disney Co. in 1995, to Knight-Ridder Inc. in 1997 and, finally, to the McClatchy Co. in 2006. It also has seen the paper's use of evolving technologies from decades-old Underwood and Royal typewriters to a series of computer systems that have grown ever-more sophisticated.
But two things never changed, Tebbe and current Editor Jeffry Couch stressed: The quality of the newspaper's work and its continuing commitment to the community.
For the past 30 years, the paper has won some of the most prestigious awards in journalism on both a regional and national level, including examinations of political corruption in the St. Clair County court system, bond-for-deed home sales in East St. Louis and racial profiling in arrests of black motorists in Belleville. In 2007, George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer won a string of honors -- including grand prize in the National Headliners Awards and the Robert F. Kennedy Award -- for their Lethal Lapses series, which revealed how children died after mistakes were committed by state child welfare workers. In 2003, Editor & Publisher named the paper one of the "10 that do it right."
In addition, the paper contributes tens of thousands of dollars each year to aid and promote community events and organizations. Over the years, that list has included everything from junior golf tournaments and Christmas concerts to scholarships for minority business students at McKendree University, the foundation of the Masterworks Chorale's Children's Chorus and Art on the Square.
2008 and beyond On a rainy Friday in late November 1963, Joe Ostermeier waited impatiently for that afternoon's News-Democrat to be placed on his doorstep. President John F. Kennedy had been shot hours earlier, and the 10-year-old boy was eager to read the most comprehensive information he could get his hands on.
Now just 44 years later, Ostermeier knows that scene is as old-fashioned as a 19th century Currier and Ives print. Given the same circumstances today, he either would be flipping among the 24-hour-a-day TV news channels or be glued to his computer, frantically clicking to see which Internet site would report the next critical fact.
All of which prompts the question: With an explosion of media providing up-to-the-second headlines on everything from computers to cell phones, will the newspaper remain a viable information source in the minds of the public? Will the Belleville News-Democrat celebrate a 160th birthday, let alone a 300th?
You can put money on it, says Ostermeier, who now heads a part of the News-Democrat he couldn't have imagined in 1963 -- the paper's bnd.com Internet site.
No other source can provide what the News-Democrat does, he says -- the area's largest trained staff concentrating on reporting metro-east news. The public wanted that information when the paper started in 1858, and it will continue to demand it in 2058. But to ensure its survival, the paper also must continue to take advantage of new technology.
"We're not trying to replace the print edition of the News-Democrat. That's still our lifeblood," Ostermeier said. "But what we must do now is serve our readers between the times that their little blue wrapper lands on the driveway."
Now, able to post stories, photos and video to its Internet site almost instantaneously when a murderer is caught or a tornado hits, the paper can go head-to-head with radio and TV on breaking news and updates -- with one distinct advantage.
"When you think about the number of news gatherers we have per capita, I'll put that against any radio or TV station," said Tebbe, the publisher. "We have the resources. That's our business. We do it better."
The paper's coverage is now enhanced online by videos, interactive blogs by reporters, background stories, extra photos and original materials such as police reports and public documents. Even this report on the paper's history has online extras such as historic front pages and video.
Editor Couch foresees a News-Democrat that will continue to serve its mission -- local coverage by reporters who care about their communities.
"Think about it: No matter what happens, 10 years from now no matter who lives here, those people are going to want to know what's going on in their community. They're going to want a watchdog of public institutions, of public officials and their tax dollars. That's us today, and it's going to be us tomorrow."
The Web site has drawn more readers each of the past four years, sometimes dramatically. Combine Internet traffic with those who read the printed paper, and the News-Democrat's audience rose 12.5 percent last year.
"We're reaching 9,000 more people a day," said Tebbe, who sees the growth continuing. "That doesn't sound like weakness to me. ... We're strong. We're viable."
