Our 125th Birthday

With 125 years of momentum behind us, you would think we could have taken the week off, and somehow The Bee would have come out anyway. There was no extra time off for anyone at The Bee this week, however, even though our publication date lands a century and a quarter to the day from the date of the very first edition of The Newtown Bee. In fact, we did a little extra work and produced for our readers eight additional pages devoted to The Bee –– its history, its people, and its place in our town.

In telling our own story, we have tried not to boast too much. But as we remember all the people who have worked on this paper before us and think about the shoe leather they wore out, the notebooks they filled up, and the fatigue they fought off with coffee and sandwiches at every ungodly hour, all for the sake of getting things right, it is hard not to be just a little bit proud.

We have had our share of unusual characters and rogues along the way. Newspaper work seems to attract them, drawn by the cover of the written word, which allows a person to be elsewhere when the audience shows up. We are not news “personalities” here at The Bee. We tend to fidget when the spotlight turns to us, which explains the shadow of apprehension you may see in the eyes of many of the smiling faces of Bee staffers who had to be photographed –– some under duress –– for our special anniversary section this week. We are proud enough of our newspaper to take a bow, but modest enough to do it reluctantly.

If we have gained any wisdom in our advancing age, it is this: a newspaper is only as good as the stories it tells. And Newtown gives this newspaper some wonderful stories to tell week after week. Those stories may touch on issues, events, and trends, but ultimately every story is about people, and here at The Bee, the people we write about are mostly Newtowners. We remind ourselves of the debt we owe to the people of Newtown every week by honoring them, one by one, in the upper right corner of our front page. (This week, we offer our first posthumous honor to John T. Pearce, the man who started The Bee on June 28, 1877.)

 We are, quite literally, a homegrown newspaper, nourished, encouraged, and supported by a community of people who have a pretty good outlook on life. One of our stories this week is about a community planning survey that reveals that an astonishing 99.3 percent of townspeople describe the quality of life in Newtown as good or very good. While the pressures of population, traffic, and taxes concern us, we are, on the whole, confident of our ability to face the challenges of the future together as a town. That confidence is rooted in Newtown’s abiding sense of itself as something greater than an assorted collection of individuals. Newtown knows it is a community.

Perhaps on the occasion of our 125th birthday, the people of Newtown will allow us one conceit: We believe that Newtown knows it is a community because it read it in The Bee.