Mary Thurwachter aboard the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile when she was editor of the News Journal. Photo by Paul Milette
By Mary Thurwachter
I was the editor of the Delray Beach/Boynton Beach News Journal the day it perished on Nov. 20, 1986.
Overseeing paste-up of the paper in the West Palm Beach offices of The Palm Beach Post, I watched as an editor from The Post directed a woman with an X-Acto knife to remove the story across the top of the front page and replace it with another with this headline: “‘News Journal’ to cease publication after today’s edition.”
That was pretty much how I found out the little weekly newspaper I had come to love would no longer be part of my world.
Tears were shed. The NJ was dead. Stop the presses!
It’s so sad when a newspaper dies. It really is.
I had been part of the 64-year-old publication for only a short two years, but they were happy years.
My colleagues were like family, and we frequently walked from the newspaper office at Northeast Fourth Avenue (a lawyer’s office today) to the Green Owl for lunch.
Ronald Reagan was president, Doak Campbell was Delray’s mayor, and Charles Kilgore was the police chief.
Delray Beach had observed its diamond jubilee that year, and co-chairwomen of the 75th anniversary celebration were local jeweler Barbara Smith and Mary McCarty, before she became a county commissioner.
I never knew what sad or silly news would come my way. One slow news day, a 22-foot hot dog rolled up to the News-Journal. Ah, yes, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile was in town, and I got to drive it, if only for a few yards. My family, back in Wisconsin — home of the Wienermobile — got quite a kick out of the story and accompanying photograph.
The Sundy House, once home to Delray Beach’s first mayor, John Sundy, hadn’t been transformed into a restaurant and inn yet.
Atlantic Plaza rose up around an old banyan tree next to the Intracoastal Waterway in 1985, and low interest rates and a housing glut produced by overzealous builders had created a buyer’s market.
During my inaugural year (1984) at the paper, the Holiday Inn (now the Marriott) opened at A1A and Atlantic Avenue.
It was the place to go for happy hour and the spot where my friends and I got together to toast my promotion to editor.
That evening, I met my husband, although it took another 15 years before we tied the knot. You can’t rush these things, you know. Good news is worth the wait.
Mary Thurwachter is a freelance writer and the managing editor of the Boca Raton/Highland Beach edition of The Coastal Star.
Comments