| March 1998 |
| Family Tradition . . . The following excerpts are from remarks made by Deborah Cornely upon her acceptance of the MDDC Board of Directors presidency at the annual Winter Convention. My parents founded The Dundalk Eagle nearly 30 years ago. They started it from scratch. My father began his newspaper career in his teens as a sports reporter for the Community Press and Baltimore Countian, a Stromberg Publication. He worked for Stromberg and later for The Times, which took over the chain. In 1969, my father, who was in his 50s and my mother, who was in the process of trying to tame and socialize her brood of 11 rowdy children, scraped together enough money to start their own newspaper. They risked everything. They worked hard. Dad had a great network of friends and business acquaintances that extended back 40 years. Yet he was rarely home before midnight in those early years. Mother used to lay out the paper on the kitchen table. Subscriptions sold for $1 the first year. I helped by selling advertising, running the addressograph machine. I went on to organize the classified advertising. I also reported on local issues and events, took photographs, and edited copy. I learned to compose type on a Compugraphic machine, shoot halftones and make veloxes on a NuArc camera, did layout and pasteup. For a while I made the weekly run to deliver the bagged and tagged papers to the Post Office, usually arriving just prior to the midnight deadline. Anyone in the family who was old enough helped wingmail on Wednesday nights. I was a puller. I was never coordinated enough to work the hand-held wingmail machines. That honor went to my sister, Barbara -- the hottest wingmailer on the East Coast -- and to my mother, who eventually developed a right forearm that a weight-lifter would envy. The Dundalk Eagle has prospered over the years. They have built a loyal following of advertisers -- one in particular has purchased the back page every week since the paper's second edition. Weekly circulation hits close to 23,000, and subscription prices have risen a bit. We have a great team of reporters who are dedicated to enhancing our local news coverage. I think my parents have come close to fulfilling their original dream to produce a newspaper that is the voice of the community.
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Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association 4201 Northview Drive, Suite 219 Bowie, MD 20716-2604 voice: 301.352.0600 fax: 301.352.0606 email: mddcpress@aol.com Contents copyrighted 1998. |