It’s Here: The Tercentennial Coffee Table Book

By Shannon Hicks

Two dozen local photographers have contributed photos that capture the everyday life and special events that have been taking place in Newtown during the past year. While Newtown has been celebrating the 300th anniversary of its founding, amateur and professional photographers have been taking photos of everything and creating a collection to commemorate this major year in the town’s history.

The result is Newtown 2005: The Way We Are After 300 Years, a full-color 132-page collection that its editor, Justin Scott, hopes will become a treasure for those who purchase it. It will also become, he thinks, a reference source for future generations of residents and genealogists who are interested in the life of Newtown during an early year of the 21st Century.

The book is a full-color, coffee table-style presentation. Divided into 12 chapters, the book’s 267 images celebrate residents of all ages at work and play, growing, worshiping, building, serving (as police, fire, and ambulance personnel and also as town employees), learning, and celebrating a year’s worth of holidays and tercentennial events. It sells for $25.

The book will debut on Saturday, November 26, at 10 am, at Lexington Gardens, 32 Church Hill Road. Some of the photographers will be on hand to sign copies for purchasers, and to answer questions about their images.

The book will also be available for purchase on Saturday, December 3, at the Rotary Pancake Breakfast at Edmond Town Hall, which runs from 8 am until 1 pm; Saturday December 4, during the Holiday Festival, when tables will be set up at C.H. Booth Library and at The Victorian Tea at Edmond Town Hall, from 11 am until 5 pm.

Finally, a reception is planned for Sunday, December 11, at C.H. Booth Library. Photographers will be in the lower meeting room of the library and refreshments will be offered. The public will have an opportunity to meet Mr Scott, Town Historian Dan Cruson, and many of the contributing photographers.

In addition to these events, Newtown 2005 will be available for purchase at branches of Newtown Savings Bank, Lexington Gardens, C.H. Booth Library (25 Main Street), Village Barber Shop (6 Queen Street), and the Newtown branches of Savings Bank of Danbury (at 20 Church Hill Road) and Union Savings Bank (1 Commerce Road).

Like many tercentennial events, this project was well over a year in the making. Newtown resident and author Justin Scott put out a call for photographs by anyone, professional or amateur, that documented life in Newtown. Mr Scott credits the idea for the book to Mae Schmidle, who has asked Mr Scott to be the chairman for a publications committee for the Tercentennial Committee.

“I was a likely candidate, she explained, because I knew all about publishing,” Mr Scott wrote in the closing pages of Newtown 2005 in a section called How We Made The Book. “I explained that a professional writer knows as much about publishing as a cow knows about meat packing.” Mrs Schmidle insisted, however, and Mr Scott was volunteered into the project chairman.

The original plan was to produce a 9- by 12-inch collection of contemporary photographs. Along the way the measurements of the book were altered (somewhat enlarged actually), and the book now measures 11 by 11¼ inches.

The Introduction for Newtown 2005, which was penned by Mr Scott (as was each of the short articles that introduce each chapter, along with the book’s closing essay), celebrates the diversity of Newtown. We are a town of 26,000-plus residents, after all, with neighbors living in anything from a two-room shack owned by a weekend resident who loves being awakened each morning to the sound of horses neighing or an “antique” home of the 18th or 19th Century to raised ranches of the 1970s and the McMansions that began appearing shortly after the Millennium. Mr Scott observes that Newtown is a public town, “what we see along the edged of the main roads,” and a “quieter, off-the-road private town of friends and family and neighbors.”

For months, Mr Scott received photographic donations — nearly 3,000 of them. From that massive collection, Mr Scott selected about 390 photographs and then began working closely with Town Historian Dan Cruson and Don Brooks, a retired photojournalist and past president of Flagpole Photographers.

“Dan Cruson was particularly effective because he possesses a fine narrative sense combined with a great instinct for telling a story in pictures,” Mr Scott said.

The photographers responsible for the collection of images in Newtown 2005 are Lawrence Arthur, Brendan Baker, Bob Berthier, Don Brooks, Curtiss Clark, Susan Coney, Debra Connolly, Nancy Crevier, Anne Eigen, Dottie Evans, Andrew Gorosko, Kim Harmon, Shannon Hicks, John F. Klopfenstein, Emi Lydem, Justin Scott, Ray Shaw, R. Scudder Smith, Jim Talarino, John Paul Tucci, Kaaren Valenta, Cindy Vavrek, John Voket, Diane Warner, and Donna L. White.

These people contributed images ranging from prints on film and color slides to digital media files.

In addition to images from photographers, Mr Scott relied on the archives of The Bee Publishing Company, Inc. Many an afternoon was spent in The Bee’s office, working though back issues of the newspaper and digital files created by the newspaper’s editors and reporters.

“The one thing one thing that kept me from hopping a freight train out of town was knowing that I could go into the Bee archives to fill in the gaps in the magnificent record left by the volunteer photographers,” Mr Scott said this week.

In addition to the photographers, there are other people who were key components of the book’s completion.

Brad Stanton has been receiving plenty of praise from Mr Scott and Mr Brooks.

“We had a few pictures that were a little on the dark side, and Brad lightened those up a bit,” Mr Brooks said. “He also made color corrections on a number of photos. He worked on every one of the photos, in fact, turning them into CMYK [the process of adapting an image so that it can be printed using four-color process printing] for the printer.”

Mr Brooks was already impressed with the talent Mr Stanton, who grew up in Newtown and graduated from Newtown High School, brought into the project. What sealed the deal was the dedication Mr Stanton showed as deadlines approached.

“We were on deadline, on a Monday, and [Mr Stanton’s] father died that day. He finished that book for us by the next day. He worked through that situation and completed this for us,” Mr Brooks said.

Mr Scott also praised Mr Stanton, calling him “a … magician capable of ‘resing up’ postage stamps into posters.”

Instrumental also was Newtown resident Jill Baimel, who offered images collected for a Newtown poster released earlier this year to be used for the book’s end papers.

Mr Scott, who lost many hours of sleep and probably spent more time staring at a computer than was good for his eyes, also said much of the book’s work could not have been done without Don Brooks.

“There is a point where good intentions must couple with reality and I must state here and now that neither our [tercentennial] calendar [released last November, nor Dan Cruson’s recent release A Mosaic of Newtown History] nor this photograph collection would have ever seen the light of day without Don Brooks shepherding them through the arcana of printing,” Mr Scott wrote.

Mr Brooks reportedly offered Mr Scott “a crash course in photojournalism, and then a crash course in cropping.” Mr Scott in turn began asking the contributing photographers to look through their viewfinders a little differently.

Each image that made it into Newtown 2005 is accompanied by a photo credit and a brief caption. Readers will notice that the captions are general: there are few specific names of people or locations. The reasons for this were three-fold, and agreed upon only after a lot of debate.

“I didn’t want to clutter the book up with a whole pile of information that was not necessarily helpful to the pictures,” Mr Scott said this week.

“I wanted this to be a pictorial story, a pictorial time capsule. In some places the type of people you’re looking at is more important than a name,” Mr Scott explained. “A mechanic in a repair shop, for instance, represents all the mechanics in all the town’s car shops. The three librarians in one photograph, also, represent all of the librarians and services available at the town’s library.

“Number two, the mechanics of attaching names to pictures taken by amateur photographers who are not, we must remember, reporters was important. Reporters get the names of people because they are writing a story. Most of these photographers are not reporters. They don’t have the training or the time to get all the names. Their focus was the image.

“The third problem,” continued Mr Scott, “is getting releases from everyone and then getting into the issue of people saying ‘I don’t want my picture taken.’”

While the importance of getting a photograph as it happened in front of the photographers was stressed, Mr Scott also admits that the lack of detail within the book’s captions will eventually be a deterrent to future genealogists or historians.

“The historical value of the book is lessened because a historian will crack open the book 100 years from now and there won’t be any names attached to the pictures,” he said. “That may or may not be a problem: A historian looking for a general view into the way we lived will be fine, but someone looking for names could have trouble.”

That problem, however, has already been addressed.

Dan Cruson, the town historian, is going to prepare an archival version of the book containing as many names as possible.

“He will have a copy [of Newtown 2005] where he will add the names of all the people whom we can identify.

“So there will be that, and Dan is also now the archivist of all of the pictures that were submitted. I have emptied my computer into one gigantic DVD with all those pictures, and he will have that as a source,” Mr Scott explained. “When Dan is done with that work it will leave to the historical society that collection so that when a person picks up the book a century from now, they can also look through a detailed supplement.”

Within the pages of Newtown 2005: The Way We Are After 300 Years readers will recognize friends, neighbors, and locations. There are faces we recognize, and many we don’t. But with the turn of every page we see our hometown and everything that makes life worth living here.