Morrisville paper is yet another third-generation Vermont media dynasty

Shay Totten’s Jan. 12 Seven Days story on three-generation Vermont media dynasties, “All In The Media Family,” was a personal trip down memory lane, having a personal connection with three of the four news operations profiled. I covered St. Johnsbury Village for the Caledonian-Record in 1981 and a few years later spent two years as County Editor for Emerson Lynn at the St. Albans Messenger. “Cal-Rec” Publisher Gordon Smith was a terrific guy who didn’t mind getting printer’s ink on his hands. Every Monday afternoon, he and everyone else at the paper dropped everything to stuff at least one supermarket circular into every copy of the paper, by hand. Mr. Lynn embodied the principle that the best newspaper publishers care equally, passionately, and daily about improving both the news coverage and the advertising/circulation revenue.

I never worked for WCAX, but from President Peter Martin I learned that I should have studied harder in my college medieval history class. During a job interview 30 years ago, he saw “European history major” on my resume and promptly asked for details about the Investiture Crisis. My deer-in-the-headlights response assured me of a future in the newspaper business.

But this column isn’t about me, thank heavens, it’s about yet another three-generation Vermont newspaper family: the Limoge clan of Morrisville, publishers of the weekly News & Citizen since 1922. Arthur Limoge left the Free Press and went to work at the News & Citizen in 1921, buying it a year later after the death of the owner. His son Clyde “came up in the business,” and except for several years serving as a combat infantryman in the storied 10^th Mountain Division in Italy in World War II, spent most of his long life running the Morrisville print shop and newspaper.  As late as the mid-1980’s, Clyde would awe print shop visitors by operating the “hot lead” Morganthaler linotype machine, an amazing 19^th century-era, moveable-type contraption. When he wasn’t in the shop, you might find Clyde fishing nearby with his buddy Chuck Yeager, the famed test pilot, who had a family connection and loved to fly north and fish in Vermont. Clyde co-owned the paper with his sister Frankie, who capably ran the “front desk” and/or kept the books for decades.

Clyde’s son Brad joined the News & Citizen shortly after completing his active duty military service in the 1970’s. (He remained active as a helicopter crewman in the Guard for many years afterward, and today is an active Civil War re-enactor and in-character marcher in July 4 parades.) He threw himself into all aspects of the business, becoming a highly capable printer and pressman.  He has an astute business sense and an encyclopedic amount of practical knowledge of all things concerning community newspapers. Born and raised in Morrisville, he knows everyone in his stable, multi-generational town, and has inherited or hired a loyal, local, family-like staff. The News & Citizen may be the only Vermont newspaper where, on a November Monday morning, both editor and publisher ask visitors, “so, did you get your buck?”, and they really want to know the answer, and every detail.

The News & Citizen is a paid weekly, its gigantic broadsheet pages crammed full of local news. Local correspondents from each Lamoille County town inform the reader who ate Sunday dinner at their home, and whose house had a tree fall on their roof in the big storm last week. The front page too is local, local, local. Like similar independent, locally owned and operated community newspapers – the Journal Opinion in Bradford, the Hardwick Gazette, and Grand Isle County’s The Islander, to name just a few – the News & Citizen may be unknown outside of its readership area, but is an institution inside it. Also, the News & Citizen is believed to be the only weekly community newspaper printed on its own, in-house printing presses.

Under Brad Limoge’s leadership the business started a sister paper, The Transcript, a free, total-market-coverage weekly circulated to virtually every mailbox in Lamoille County. If you’ve ever seen the World in Washington County, The Message of the Week in the Connecticut River Valley, or the Vermont News Guide in Bennington and Rutland counties, then you know what the Transcript is all about: strengthening local businesses by giving them unparalleled advertising access to thousands of homes.

One other thing about Mr. Limoge: like Gordon Smith and many others before and since, he’s an untiring stuffer of supermarket flyers. Every Friday afternoon, he and most of the staff (often including myself, in both of my two stints there) would stuff, jog and bind. He is a hands-on publisher who wears suspenders on the job. Not Wall Street “power suspenders”, but department store suspenders that he wears because he’s too darned busy finishing a print job to waste time pulling up his pants.

He may be the last Limoge in the venerable Brooklyn Street shop. His only child lives out of state. Whatever happens and whenever it happens, Mr. Limoge will be able to look back on his career with pride. Over the coffee pot in the News & Citizen print shop hangs a poster of the First Amendment with a reminder to all readers that it is the ink-stained printer/publisher who is the last line of defense for America’s first freedom.

-          Guy Page

Below: Brad Limoge, third generation publisher of the News & Citizen in Morrisville (www.newsandcitizen.com)