Just as the news reported in the Villager has chronicled the changes in the neighborhoods it has served over the years, the Villager itself has changed--from its format to its methods of production to its distribution area. But in paging through the Villagers of the past 56 years, perhaps the most striking change is in what was deemed newsworthy. Newspaper content, to a large degree, reflects the priorities and personalities of the editors and publishers.
The Villager was founded by Arnold Hed and John Prichard in 1952 as an answer to the marketing needs of strictly Highland Village businesses: a freely distributed advertising medium that would provide 100 percent penetration in those businesses' primary market: the Highland Park and Macalester-Groveland neighborhoods of St. Paul and the adjacent Longfellow and Nokomis neighborhoods of Minneapolis. As such, the Villager was the first and only newspaper in the Twin Cities that by that date had ever straddled the Mississippi River.
As it turned out, the birth of the Villager foreshadowed a nationwide trend in the emergence and growth of urban and suburban community newspapers. That phenomenon accelerated in the Twin Cities with the arrival in the 1960s of an East Coast group that founded what is now Minnesota Sun Publications, a group of 44 suburban weekly newspapers owned by Dallas-based American Community Newspapers LLC. It had been Hed's and Prichard's dream to start a similar chain of newspapers in the Twin Cities before Uncle Sam intervened. Barely a month into their nascent publishing venture, both men were drafted for the Korean War.
Hed and Prichard sold their fledgling newspaper in early 1953 after publishing just three editions. The new owners were Elizabeth Haas and silent partner Bessie Jones, longtime colleagues at Commercial Press, a Minneapolis company that had printed the Villager. Haas was the office manager at Commercial Press, and Jones, who had been vice president, was still on the board of directors. A third Commercial Press colleague, Elmer Huset, was hired to manage the flagship--and ultimately only--enterprise of the newly incorporated Haas-Jones Enterprises.
Haas, Jones and Huset immediately set out to make changes in the publication, first by switching to a twice-a-month rather than a weekly publication cycle to increase the product's useful shelf life. The Villagers of the 1950s served primarily as neighborhood bulletin boards, chock-full of brief news items about people and events in the neighborhoods the newspaper served. Paging through the library of those yellowed editions reveals a growing array of schools, churches, service clubs and other organizations that availed themselves of the free publicity the newspaper provided. However, the newspaper offered scant coverage of the bigger local stories of that era.
If the early Villagers could be said to have an editorial "voice," it was lent to amplifying the promotional efforts of individual merchants and the Highland Business Association. News and views of the association, which was organized the same year that Haas-Jones bought the paper, almost always made the front page. In fact, for a time in the 1950s the newspaper did not even accept advertising from outside its coverage area, a decision no doubt made in the interest of local boosterism.
Huset died suddenly in 1958. Haas then hired a University of Minnesota journalism student, the late Ron Bacigalupo, to help out. Bacigalupo was hired primarily to sell advertising, but he also took photos and wrote stories. "The Villager wasn't much more than a shopper in the early days," Bacigalupo once said, "It was full of short news items that fit around the ads, with a front page that lionized the local merchants. But I wasn't going to journalism school to tell the world about the local Junior Achievement award-winners. I told the boss I wanted to write a column.
"Haas' response, delivered in her inimitable German accent, was, 'You're a lousy speller!' I recall wondering how we ever won World War II."
The Villager became a true chronicler of local people and events in the 1960s. The banner on the Villager's front page also evolved, from proclaiming the newspaper as the "Official Publication of Highland Village Merchants" to the publication for "Highland Park, South Minneapolis, Fort Snelling and Mendota Heights" to "The Good Life in Your Community." Circulation by that time had climbed from 12,000 to 26,100.
In 1969 Bacigalupo, who had tapped two financial backers to buy the Villager from Haas, set out to build what he hoped would be his own publishing empire. He and his investors also bought the Twin Citian, the region's first city magazine, predecessor of Mpls.-St. Paul. In retrospect, Bacigalupo admitted he had taken on a Herculean task in publishing both a monthly magazine and a twice-monthly newspaper. "I was ready to start a revolution," he said, "but there wasn't enough dry ammunition to sustain it."
In the spring of 1970, Maurice Mischke severed his ties with a small St. Paul publishing company called Imagination Inc. that he and three partners had formed as a moonlighting venture in 1959. Mischke had been employed as the business manager for Arnold Niemeyer and Associates, a St. Paul advertising agency, from 1954 until 1969 when he jumped into Imagination Inc. full time.
After leaving Imagination Inc., Mischke started his own public relations firm. Learning of Mischke's search for office space in Highland, Bacigalupo offered him free rent in the Villager's office in exchange for doing the Villager's books.
"Maury kept telling me I was losing money," Bacigalupo said. Selling the Villager to Mischke to cover the Twin Citian's printing debts gave Bacigalupo what he termed "the best and most honorable way out."