For much of its life, the newspaper you are holding in your hands — or perusing on your computer or smartphone — was nowhere near the best one in Washington. It wasn’t The Washington Post that was thick with ads, peppered with datelines from around the world, full of insider gossip, piercing editorial cartoons and the proclamations of officialdom. It was the Washington Evening Star.
The life of every star is finite, and Washington’s Star was no different. On Aug. 7, 1981, the words “FINAL EDITION” blared from above the paper’s nameplate. It really was.
The life of the paper is recounted in “The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washington Newspaper,” a new book by Faye Haskins, a former archivist and photo librarian in the D.C. Public Library’s Washingtoniana division.
Haskins came to the District in 1971. She admits that over the next decade, she had little interaction with the Star.
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“I was always a Post subscriber,” she said.
That made Haskins a blank piece of paper when it came to the Star.
“Having never known about it, it was surprising to me to learn it was such an important paper and had such significance in the city’s history,” she said. “Its history got buried because it did have a slow decline. Its heyday was in a much earlier time.”
The Star was founded in 1852 by a printer named Joseph Borrows Tate. It passed through several owners before being sold in 1867 to a group that included Crosby Noyes and Samuel Kauffmann. Kauffmann handled the business side of the paper while Noyes, the Star’s star reporter, oversaw the newsroom.
Noyes was one of those driven, self-made figures that the 19th century seemed to conjure up regularly. He was an illegitimate son from Maine who gladly left the cold winters of that state in 1848 when a publisher there told him if he moved to Washington, he’d pay him $1 for every story he sent back.
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By 1855, Noyes was working at the Star. He covered the 1859 hanging of abolitionist John Brown, ending his dispatch with the words “[The] body swung perpendicular, turning slowly round and round … with the fluttering of the coat shirts in the breeze, giving it singularly the appearance of a cornfield scarecrow.”
For the next century, members of the Noyes and Kauffmann families ran the Star and were active in the commercial, political and philanthropic life of the District.
“As Katharine Graham said, they were on every board of every bank and business in the city,” said Haskins, who now lives outside Austin. “The Star was known for being a good local paper. It really covered local news, from politics to culture.”
By the time of the paper’s 1952 centenary, “They really were on the top of the world,” Haskins said. Two years later, The Post bought the Washington Times-Herald, in an instant leapfrogging the Evening Star, an afternoon paper.
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“They were not aggressive enough,” Haskins said of the Star’s managers. “They became really stale, not so much in the newspaper, but in the business decisions.”
Even in decline, the Star earned the loyalty of its employees, people like columnist Mary McGrory.
“She absolutely loved the paper,” Haskins said. “She came there as a book reviewer. Then Newby Noyes, the national editor, asked her to go to the Joe McCarthy hearings. She became famous because she did these really astute observations of the man, naming him as a bully.”
The Star, Haskins said, “was a conservative paper editorially, but they didn’t mess with their reporters.”
Among those journalists were some who went on to work at The Post and elsewhere, including McGrory, David Broder, Diana McLellan and Howard Kurtz.
In 1974, Joseph Allbritton bought the Star. He sold it four years later, concerned FCC rules wouldn’t allow him to own the paper and his TV station, what is now WJLA. New owner Time Inc. seemed not to know what to do with a daily newspaper. When the Star folded, readers mourned.
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“People were worried that the [U.S.] capital was a one-paper town,” Haskins said. “That’s what a lot of people complained about. Even if they weren’t strong [Star] supporters, they thought there was a need for another voice, a viewpoint that was different. The more voices you have, the better.”
Of course, today many communities would love to have even a single newspaper.
Haskins will be speaking about her book at 1 p.m. Nov. 9 in the Peabody Room at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library and at 6 p.m. Nov. 14 at the Historical Society of Washington in the Carnegie Library.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
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