The Journal-News was first established in 1879, it is the oldest continuously operated business in Spencerville, Ohio. The Beebe family has owned and operated The Journal-News since 1959, making them the owners with the longest tenure.

     The start-up of the newspaper was a very tenuous situation back in its early years. Early editors established, bought and sold it, sometimes within months. The Beebes came to Spencerville from South Dakota in 1959 on a handshake with then-owner Phil Bennett. No contract, no money deposited with him, just a gentleman's agreement between partners Tony Beebe and Jim Berreth and Phil Bennett. No one went back on his word, and we made the 1,000 mile journey to Ohio on that premise.

     The procession began with Tony driving a 1937 stake bed truck with no heater that held the few belongings (including a grand piano) that we could crowd into it. Grandma Kate followed him in her car with her bird in its cage sitting beside her on the front seat. I followed in our family car the three kids, Rich, Bob and Jill, variously taking turns riding in one or the other vehicles. We followed the flapping tarp that covered the truck, trying to keep together as much as possible. When we arrived in Spencerville in late February, it was bitterly cold, as Ohio winters are wont to be. We expected to have a house waiting for us, as promised by Bennett. But that was not to be. Three-year-old Jill and Grandma Kate came down with winter colds from being dragged from place to place, looking for a house to rent. Meanwhile, we parked our cars and truck in a motel driveway in Delphos and called that motel home, eating in family restaurants here and in Delphos. Finally a house on Main Street was uncovered and we moved in. We could afford very little in the way of employees at that time, which meant we worked very long hours. Tony and Jim prepared the paper for our press late in the night, while Kathy Berreth, pregnant at the time, and I sat in a car out front, talking and cat-napping until dawn broke, when we would help mail the paper. Grandma Kate was home with the children.

     The old printing press sat in the back end of our building, a marvel of steel and wood. A marvel that had seen its best days many years before we owned it. Harold 'Gildersleeve' Boyer was our pressman; sitting on a perch high up on the press and feeding individual sheets of newspaper into it, to be inked with the latest news. The press printed four pages at a time, compared to a folder that made a clackety-clack sound was located directly behind the press. Someone, usually Tony or Jim, took the printed papers and hand fed them into the folder. All this was a very laborious and time consuming process.

     But, we owned our own business! Tony's dream. He had two special thoughts about The Journal-News, both of which at one time or another were printed on the masthead. One was 'The only newspaper in the world that gives a damn about Spencerville, Ohio'. The other, 'Like a letter from home'. Those two thoughts expressed his feelings completely. After two years, the Berreths and their daughter returned to the west, purchasing a newspaper in Minnesota. That left the Beebes, the bank, and a few trusting relatives as the sole owners of the business. Eventually, we were able to repay them all, with the bottle of champagne we had stashed for that momentous day somehow forgotten in the hustle and bustle of everyday work. Tony had started his newspaper career at the age of 15, when he worked at our home town newspaper as a Linotype operator to help pay his way through high school. He had a natural talent for writing, a talent that was encouraged and nurtured by some very good English teachers and his mother. Words seemed to flow from his typewriter and the Linotype. (He never did completely trust computers.) He loved writing and he loved the newspaper business. Working at The Journal-News made him the happiest; so happy he hated to leave town, even for a short time. Longer vacations were out of the question! When pressed to think about a time of retirement, he said he might retire when he was 70. He never made it; but he wouldn't have wanted to quit working at 70 anyway. Many things have changed since those early years. The Linotypes are long gone; the printing press and folder are no more. The newspaper is prepared by computer typesetters and printed on a high-speed offset press in Celina. Technology has taken over, yes, but the philosophy of newspapering remains the same. With son Rich at the helm, we plan and hope to continue the business with the same integrity that is the history of The Journal-News in Spencerville, Ohio.