Read all about it

0

Resident recalls decades her family ran The Pendleton Times

By Sue Hughes | For The Times-Post

PENDLETON — Betty Weaver Swinford has been a Pendleton resident all of her life.
She was born in a little house on High Street right behind where The Times-Post office is now. This is not the only connection Swinford, 82, has with the newspaper.
Swinford’s father, Harold Weaver, owned and was publisher of the paper — then called The Pendleton Times — from 1943 until his retirement in 1973. Even after he sold the paper, he still helped the new owner run it.
Weaver and his wife, Ruth, moved to Pendleton from Noblesville in 1940.
He and Ruth started their family in Pendleton, and he went to work as a pressman at another area newspaper. After working there for two years, George Rohm asked him to come to work for him at The Pendleton Times.
Two years later, Weaver bought the paper from Rohm. The office was located on Water Street across from Falls Park and remained there for many years.
“The whole family worked on the paper,” Swinford said.
Her brother Joe began working there as a pressman when he was discharged from the military in 1953. Swinford started helping out when she was 10 years old.
She used to walk around town selling subscriptions.
“I would go door to door asking if people wanted to buy the paper. It sold for $1.50 for one year or $2.50 for 2 years. I would make 50 cents for each subscription I sold.”
Her dad also let her run the addressograph, a big machine that put addresses on the papers.
“He had to slow it down for me,” she said with a laugh.
Once a month they printed books for McMahon & Leib Co., a food distributor in Anderson.
They also printed books for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, labels for Fall Creek Canning Co. and postcards of Pendleton.
Swinford’s mother worked in The Pendleton Times office, too. She performed a wide range of duties, Swinford said, including front-office tasks, operating a small press and helping on newspaper production night.
She did “a little bit of everything,” Swinford said.
Residents routinely brought in what they thought was newsworthy, and those items would always find their way into the paper, she said.
It was not unusual for the front page to have a story about a 5-year-old’s birthday party, including all the guests’ names, next to an obituary of a Pendleton resident, or news of someone coming home after military service and someone starting kindergarten.
The Water Street building housed all the functions of the newspaper operation. Swinford recalled her dad staying all night on Tuesdays to get the newspaper out on Wednesday.
In addition to running the newspaper, Weaver had a radio repair shop.
“My dad was mechanically a genius — he could repair or assemble anything,” Swinford said.
Her husband, Dick, added, “He would get printers in pieces and put them together without reading the directions.”
Weaver sold the business in 1973 to James Carter, one of his former employees.
“It was a family-run business,” Swinford said. “Everyone has their job to do.”

Dick and Betty Swinford hold up a copy of The Pendleton Times.

 

 

No posts to display