By Garrett Ray
Grassroots Editor
Winter 1986

Blair Macy died Feb. 28, 1995, at the age of 77.

An upright piano sits in a cottage on the Lorado Taft Field Campus of Northern Illinois University. Old-timers in the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, remembering summer conferences on the bluff above the Rock River, think of it as Blair Macy’s piano.

They remember Macy at the keyboard late on a sultry night, a tumbler of good whiskey within reach, improvising as he rolls out the blues and big band classics from the ’40s.

Keyboards have marked the changes in Macy’s life. He wrote many of his first editorials on the keyboard of the Linotype at the Windsor (Colo.) Beacon. Now he uses a personal computer and a modem to send his controversial weekly columns to the Greeley (Colo.) Tribune.

Macy’s first person editorials won him recognition 10 years ago as the first recipient of ISWNE’s Eugene Cervi Award. The award, honoring the late founder of Cervi’s Rocky Mountain Journal, goes to a weekly editor who consistently produces outstanding, courageous community journalism.

Macy “has never avoided speaking his mind on any issue, even when his readers have disagreed strongly,” the Cervi Award citation noted on June 13, 1976. “This forthright honesty led him to oppose the war in Vietnam long before most editors spoke out. It led him to campaign against efforts to railroad the county sheriff out of a job. And it produced the most important conflict of his 28 year newspaper career when he fought against heavy opposition for orderly, planned growth for his community after a large manufacturer built a new plant nearby.”

Macy, former editor and co publisher of two Colorado weeklies — the Windsor Beacon and the Keene Valley Sun — did not set out to become a prize-winning editorial writer and columnist.

“Even though my Dad was an editorial writer, I didn’t intend to get in the newspaper business,” Macy recalls. “I had no plans. When I went to Grinnell College I played in a dance orchestra; I thought that would be a great career.”

His plans for a major in music foundered because he had never had music lessons. “You can’t major on just having a good ear,” he says. He decided to try journalism.

Out of college in 1940, Macy wrote for a weekly in Clear Lake, Iowa, but saw no future in journalism. He worked as a contractor in Panama, then joined the Navy shortly before World War II broke out. After traveling the Pacific, he returned home in 1946 to get married and work in his uncle’s lumber yard.

Macy’s father, Roscoe, had written editorials for the Des Moines Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. But his heart was set on owning a weekly. When the senior Macys bought the paper in Windsor and moved to Colorado in 1948, Blair and his wife Genevieve decided they would come too.

“Of course, we were letterpress in those days,” Macy says. “I mostly put together type and pages. Dad was writing the editorials and news.”

Blair had begun writing a Page 1 column — “anything I could think of,” called “The Pied Typer.” When the regular Linotype operator was injured in a car accident, Macy became the typesetter. To save time, he began composing his writing at the Linotype. He continued to do so until the paper switched to photocomposition in 1970.

By 1958, when Roscoe Macy died, the younger Macys had taken over operation of the paper. Genevieve, with no previous newspaper experience, now worked at the paper too. In fact, she became a better Linotype operator than her husband.

Macy, a stocky, balding man with a white Van Dyke beard, seems terminally shy. He speaks slowly, almost haltingly, in a rumbling voice that sometimes sounds as if it has not been used for awhile. Only his laugh, a huge, frequent belly laugh, is assertive. Gen, lively, talkative and quick with her opinions, seems more likely to be the member of the team who would create controversy.

But it was Blair’s writing that quickly involved the couple in one hometown controversy after another.

“You get these ideas, and you’re young and full of vinegar, and you just do it,” Macy says. “I thought editors were supposed to be outspoken. If you’re outspoken and young, you’ll usually make someone mad. Your thoughts aren’t that good yet, but your opinion of ’em is real good.”

The ISWNE citation on the wall of Macy’s den notes: “Eugene Cervi, for all his caustic writing, was a compassionate man with a profound awareness of the earth’s downtrodden. Like him, Blair Macy shows in word and deed a sympathetic understanding of plain people and their joys and sorrows.”

Macy, writing to his neighbors in a conservative rural town, spoke up for people without a voice. People mistreated by heavy handed authorities could count on his support. He sympathized with Colorado’s largest minority, the Mexicans and American born Hispanics who thinned the sugar beets and picked the lettuce.

The editor, usually a political liberal, tackled the local American Legion in one memorable fight; he cannot remember now what the disagreement was about. At the same time, he alienated local farmers by questioning the need for agricultural price supports.

Unlike most previous owners of the paper, Blair and Gen covered meetings in person. They reported suicides and listed the prices of local real estate transactions. “Blair reported what happened,” Genevieve notes.

Gene Cervi always seemed to thrive emotionally on controversy. The Macys did not. “I never enjoyed the flak very much. But it didn’t bother me much,” Macy says. “I’d write it anyway. Usually people wouldn't say anything to me directly. They'd talk to Gen, or call up or something."

“Very seldom that I can remember that anyone came in and tried to change Blair’s position on a story,” Gen adds. “I don’t remember any time when he deliberately held out a story.”

Macy learned the hard way that it is difficult for an editor to be active in local politics. “I was on the town board once,” he remembers. “The next election, I came out on the bottom.” He now thinks it was a bad idea to serve in the first place.

The couple also found it hard to have close friends in the local community. “Our real close friends are other editors,” Macy says.

He found people who understood the problems of small town editors at the ISWNE summer conferences.

"Blair’s dad, Roscoe, and I rode the train to some of the first ISWNE meetings,” says Houstoun Waring, editor emeritus of the Littleton (Colo.) Sentinel Independent. Waring, co founder of ISWNE, was constantly watching for vigorous weekly editors to enlist in the organization.

“Blair inherited a good tradition from his father and became active in ISWNE himself,” Waring says. “Blair has always been a reader, interested in a variety of viewpoints. He’s always willing to read and learn.”

Macy’s open mindedness led to his biggest and last crusade in Windsor. Kodak announced in 1968 that it would build a new plant just outside Windsor. Macy knew that his town was unprepared for the changes that sudden growth would bring. He campaigned for a long range growth plan and encouraged the town board as it developed the plan.

The editor’s support for planning led even to his opposing a proposed auto dealership; the new firm’s location did not fit the town growth plan. The Macys recall, laughing, one letter to the editor: “Why don't you take your home made editorials and walk to the lake and keep walking?”

“As long as we were in Windsor, the board stuck with the plan,” Gen says.

The growth caused by Kodak was ultimately responsible for the Macys’ leaving Windsor in 1972. An out of state publishing firm, observing the area’s growth potential, offered to buy controlling interest in the Beacon. Macy would be kept on as editor, with a five year contract and “the most money I ever made in my life.”

Even Genevieve would get a salary, for the first time since she married into the newspaper business. They sold, using part of the proceeds to buy a new house on the edge of town.

Shortly after the Macys sold the paper, the picture changed. Dissidents in the community complained to the new owners about the radical editor. The corporation sent in a man to ask business leaders what they thought of the Macys. Disturbed by the deterioration in the relationship, Blair and Gen offered to buy back the paper or to sell their remaining interest. They sold their share of the Beacon and left for vacation, “our first real vacation in 27 years,” Gen says.

Blair dissents. “I got to go to some of the ISWNE conferences in Illinois. That’s sort of like a vacation.”

The “real vacation” was short. Two weeks later the Macys bought the Keene Valley Sun, which was printing four pages a week in the village of Keenesburg, on the windy plains northeast of Denver.

They moved from their new Windsor house into a tiny apartment behind the bedraggled Keenesburg newspaper office. “I almost cried when I saw it for the first time,” Gen says, remembering the broken front window.

The Macys moved to Keenesburg expecting to semi retire. “We fixed up the little apartment and we thought, ‘Here we go now. We can get the paper out in two days,’ Gen says. “But you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, because there we were, doing the real estate exchanges again, doing the subscription calendar, starting to cover the meetings.”

“We had three incorporated towns,” Blair says. “We had to cover three town board meetings, three chambers of commerce…oh, gosh!”

Blair continued to write controversial editorials. “The only issue I stayed away from was abortion. There were so many Catholics in our area, and it wasn’t a big issue then. There was no reason to bring it up at that time.

“I’d learned to write better, so I didn’t sound quite so obnoxious,” he says. Blair recalls studying colonial journalist John Peter Zenger. “He didn't write well at all. He wrote crudely about the local powers-that be and made fun of ’em. They just couldn’t stand it and couldn’t ignore it. So they had to put him in jail.

“At the same time Ben Franklin was in the paper business too. Well, he was a polished guy. It’s like comparing someone with Ed DeCourcy in New Hampshire. After you write awhile, you learn to say the same thing but to do it a little better.”

Although the paper grew during the next decade, it still provided only a spartan living. Tired and wanting more time to travel, the Macys sold the Sun in 1983. They moved to a rural subdivision near Windsor a year later.

Now he gardens, travels, carves wood and plays the piano, besides writing a weekly column for the nearby daily newspaper in Greeley.

“Blair’s column enjoys good readership and a good following,” says Ron Stewart, editor of the Greeley Tribune. “It’s a liberal voice in a conservative area, and a youthful voice from an older guy with a lot of experience and background. He’s a real refreshing columnist, and he’s controversial."

A single Macy column may include topics ranging from an informed discussion of the Strategic Defense Initiative to his problems with new dentures. He is consistently tough on the Reagan administration, partly as a result of a visit to the Soviet Union three years ago.

“Since my visit I have been unable to consider the Soviets as dangerous ogres seeking to do us in,” he wrote in a recent letter. “So my strongest drive has been to try to prepare ourselves to accept peaceful coexistence. The Russian people must do likewise, but I think they are already way ahead of us in their desire for peace.”

He considers his column a wonderful outlet. “I’ll write it as long as they’ll keep running it,” he says. “If I didn’t have this I’d probably resort to writing frequent letters to the editor.”

Besides his column, Macy’s great therapy is the piano keyboard. Every month or so, Blair and three other newspapermen gather to play jazz. They call it the Keenesburg Music Society, according to Percy Conarroe, editor and publisher of the Louisville (Colo.) Times and the group’s saxophone player.

Percy and Blair enjoy a complex relationship that goes beyond a love for jazz. “He’s pretty far to the left and I’m pretty far to the right. We have that understanding and we get along fine,” Conarroe says with a laugh.

“Blair and I often would not know what the other was thinking about, but we’d go ahead and write our editorials. When we opened the papers, there we were on the same subject, but with completely different viewpoints.”

Conarroe says that though they are good friends who respect each other greatly, “I won’t flatter him at all. He really dislikes flattery and kind of shies away from the spotlight.”

Indeed, Macy refuses to enter newspaper contests, and he is modest about his citations from national and state journalistic groups.

Still, he remembers one compliment. It does not appear on any of the plaques in his den.

“Did you know Weimar Jones?” he asks. Jones, late editor of the Franklin (N.C.) Press, was an early and greatly loved member of ISWNE.

“He said something I’ll always remember; I think it was one of the nicest compliments I ever got. He said that I was honest. I always felt that if I felt something, I should say it, you know, the best I could. As honestly as I could.”