S. P. M’CALMONT.
The Independent Press-Association bought the Press in 1879. This influential body comprised twelve stockholders, Hon. William R. Crawford, Hon. C. W. Gilfillan, Hon. John M. Dickey, Hon. Charles Miller, Hon. Joseph C. Sibley, Hon. S. P. McCalmont, Hon. Charles W. Mackey, James W. Osborne, W. D. Rider, E. W. Echols, B. W. Bredin and Isaac Reineman, whom a facetious neighbor happily termed “the twelve apostles, limited.” They enlarged the sheet to a nine-column folio, discarded the bourgeois[bourgeois] skirt with long-primer trimmings for a tempting dress of minion and nonpareil and engaged J. J. McLaurin as editor. H. May Irwin, the second editor under the new administration, filled the bill capably until the Press and the Citizen buried the hatchet and blended into one. Mr. Irwin is not excelled as an architect of graceful, felicitous paragraphs on all sorts of subjects, “from grave to gay, from lively to severe.” He possesses in eminent degree the enviable faculty of saying the right thing in the right way, tersely, pointedly and attractively. The Press was a model of neatness, newsiness and thorough editing, with a taste for puns and plays on words that added zest to its columns.
H. BEECHER KANTNER.
JAMES B. BORLAND.
JAMES B. MUSE.
James B. Borland’s Evening News appeared in February, 1878, as an amateur-daily about six by nine inches. The small seed quickly grew to a lusty plant. James B. Muse became a partner, enlargements were necessary, and to-day the News is a seven-column folio, covering the home-field and deservedly popular. Muse retired in 1880, H. May Irwin buying his share and editing the wide-awake paper in capital style. Every Evening, a creditable venture by Frank Truesdell, E. E. Barrackman and A. G. McElhenny, bloomed every evening from July, 1878, to the following March. H. B. Kantner, a versatile specimen, hatched out the Morning Star, Franklin’s only morning daily, in 1880. It shone several months and then set forever and ever. Kantner drifted to Colorado. The Herald, the Penny Press and Pencil and Shears wriggled a brief space and “fell by the wayside.” Samuel P. Brigham, an aspiring young lawyer, edited the one-cent Press and stirred up a hornet’s nest by fiercely assailing the water-works system and raising Hail Columbia generally. He is at the head of a newspaper in the Silver State.
The third weekly Venango boasted in 1859 was the Allegheny-Valley Echo, published at Emlenton by Peter O. Conver, a most erratic, picturesque genius. Learning the printing-trade in Franklin, the anti-slavery agitation attracted him to Kansas in 1852. He established a paper at Topeka, which intensified the excitement a man of Conver’s temperament was not calculated to allay, and it soon climbed the golden stair. Other experiments shared the same fate, going to the dogs in short metre. Conver roamed around the wild, woolly west several years, returned to Venango county and perpetrated the Echo in the fall of 1858. At intervals a week passed without any issue, which the next number would attribute to the sudden departure of the “jour,” the non-arrival of white paper, or the absence of the irrepressible Peter on a convivial lark. Sparkling witticisms and “gems of purest ray” frequently adorned the pages of the sheet, although sometimes transgressing the rules of propriety. It was the editor’s habit to set up his articles without a manuscript. He would go to the case and put his thoughts into type just as they emanated from his fertile brain. Poetry, humor, satire, invective, comedy, pathos, sentiment and philosophy bunched their hits in a medley of clean-cut originality not even “John Phœnix” could emulate. The printer-editor had a fund of anecdotes and adventures picked up during his wanderings and an off-hand magnetism that insured his popularity. His generosity was limited only by his pocket-book. Altogether he was a bundle of strange contradictions, “whose like we shall not look upon again,” big-hearted, impatient of denial, heedless of consequences, indifferent to praise or blame, sincere in his friendships and with not an atom of sham or hypocrisy in his manly fiber. He enlisted in the Fourth Pennsylvania Cavalry when the war broke out, serving gallantly to the close of the struggle at Appomattox.