The Oyster Bay Pilot was created by brothers Robert and Edward Townsend 1885. The latter was already the publisher of the Seymour Journal of Seymour, CT, when Robert decided to use their newspaper to bring the LIRR to Oyster Bay. Townsend was successful in that pursuit and in 1898, was on to other interests.
He sold the newspaper to John C. Kennehan, owner of the L.I. Farmer, another newspaperman.
He hired Albert Loren Cheney to be the editor, and 17-year-old Joseph Carl to be the “printer’s devil.” That job was an important one in the printing industry since all the letters of the alphabet were stored by upper and lower cases and by point size in large trays. After the letters were arranged one by one in long lines to be printed, the cases of letters were broken down and the small pieces of type were thrown into boxes for the printer’s devil to separate into their different font styles and sizes ready to be assembled for the next edition.
Joseph Carl was the grandson of David Carll who served in the Civil War and is buried in Pine Hollow Cemetery, and is Vanessa Williams’ great-grandfather. [You may have seen her at this year’s Miss America Contest when she received an apology from the foundation for causing her resignation after artistic photographs of her with another woman were seen as scandalous. Her mother was the one most upset, she said, by the initial reaction and the most pleased with the apology.]
It was a great time for the newspaper and for the town, which prospered with the rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Albert Loren Cheney was a great friend of Roosevelt and Cheney’s daughter, Amy, worked for the president at Sagamore Hill after he requested she serve as a stenographer for him.
In a telephone interview, Oyster Bay town historian John Hammond said Amy worked in what is called the Gun Room, TR’s work room on the third floor of the house.
When TR became the governor, publisher Kennehan took an interest in being located in Oyster Bay and had a run of stiff competition against the Oyster Bay Guardian, which had been started by Nelson Disbrow in 1899. Before that, Disbrow had tried to buy into the newspaper but was declined, a fate that happened to Joseph Carl when the paper was again to be sold. Both times the newspaper went to men with heavy journalistic experience.
Life With TR
In his Personal Memoirs of the Home Life of the Late Theodore Roosevelt, Cheney recalled the day Roosevelt was coming home from Cuba, via Montauk Point, and he rode around the town on a bicycle, stirring up people to go greet their famous fellow townsman at 5 a.m., but he received a telegram saying the train was stalled at Jamaica and would arrive in Oyster Bay at 7 p.m.
“Everyone went home to supper,” he said, “and told everybody else, and at 7 p.m. it seems as though the entire population of the village had come out to the railroad station.” He wrote, “A huge bonfire was lighted, and when the train arrived there was a howling cheering mob of people to greet the Colonel who was dressed in his khaki uniform. So great was the crush that a horse near the railroad station platform was lifted from its feet and thrown bodily over on its back; the clothes were literally torn from a little girl; and hats were scattered everywhere.”
Cheney had a welcome sign placed over the road and as Roosevelt passed under it, he rose in his carriage, took off his hat and exclaimed: “This is indeed, a surprise!”
Cheney wanted to get his story out to the world, but the telegraph operator was going home and only allowed him 25 words. So he boarded the train to New York and wrote a story en route for the New York Herald. From there he took the el to the office of the New York Sun and then telephoned a story to the Standard News Association, a branch of the Associated Press. Sunday morning all the newspapers carried the story and Monday morning a dozen reporters and special writers arrived in Oyster Bay. Roosevelt’s success in Cuba and the public’s reaction to it was the beginning of TR’s national celebrity that eventually took him to the White House.
When Kennehan died on Aug. 13, 1919, the paper was bought by Thomas H. O’Keefe who had been the editor since February 1918, but O’Keefe died 18 months later and, although Joseph Carl expected to buy the newspaper, it was sold to Colonel Lloyd C. Griscom of East Norwich, who moved it to Valley Stream where he owned another paper. In Oyster Bay Remembered, John Hammond told another truism of the newspaper business. There is a certain amount of business in town and when there are two papers they share that revenue. When the Pilot left the scene, the Guardian prospered by getting all the legals. Fate had a hand again and Nelson Disbrow died Thanksgiving eve of 1928.
The East Norwich Enterprise published its last edition on June 3, 1926 and joined the Pilot to become the Oyster Bay Enterprise Pilot from then to 1953 when under Griscom, it became The Glen Cove Record and The Pilot. Owned and published weekly by Griscom Publications, Inc., a New York corporation, Bronson W. Griscom was the chairman of the board; Grey Mason was the president and treasurer and Walter Schmid was the vice president and secretary.
The Record and Pilot was a combination of the East Norwich Enterprise founded in 1889; the Sea Cliff News, founded in 1883; the Oyster Bay Pilot founded in 1885; the Glen Cove Record founded in 1917; the Glen Cove Advance, founded in 1935, and The Spotlight and Hempstead Harbor Herald, founded in 1950.
On Sept. 2, 1976, Griscom brought back the Oyster Bay Enterprise Pilot as a separate paper. Oyster Bay readers recalled being upset to share the paper with the neighboring city. The Enterprise Pilot opened an office on South Street, above the Sweet Shop as they announced to the public, “We’re Back!.”
The next year Griscom created the Weekender, a free four-page newspaper mailed to all residents of Oyster Bay and East Norwich starting in 1977, that lasted about two years.
Edward Higgins was the next publisher of the Oyster Bay Enterprise Pilot as he bought Community Newspapers from Lloyd Griscom. It was by then a two-part paper with news from the entire Gold Coast areas covering the social and cultural scene from Great Neck, Manhasset, Port Washington, Roslyn, Glen Cove and Oyster Bay. At this time it is fitting to mention Lestor Grolnik, a superb editor-in-chief of the chain.
Higgins sold the newspapers to Karl V. Anton when Reaganomics made it auspicious for him, the international distributor of the Dutch company Van Son Holland Inc., to follow his youthful dream of being a newspaperman once again.
Anton and his family had early roots in the newspaper business, his father having published the Freeport Recorder in the 1920s. As a young man following in his father’s footsteps, he founded Merrick Life in 1938 and developed it into a viable newspaper. Though he sold Merrick Life in 1952, his love of the newspaper business remained.
In 1984, satisfying his lifelong desire to return to the newspaper business, Anton purchased Community Newspapers Inc., then a group of eight paid subscription weekly newspapers based in Glen Cove, all of which have historical significance. Anton moved the newspaper headquarters to a building he owned in Mineola. A few years later the Enterprise Pilot closed its office, then located in Townsend Square and moved to Mineola, where it still remains today.
