Volunteers have made their mark on the Chronicle since the beginning. One of those marks is something you see every day when you open the Chronicle’s daily email or visit the website or pick up a copy of the latest print edition.
Our logo.
It was designed by local graphic designer and comic book artist Marc Alan Fishman. He was kind enough to tweak it for our 10th anniverary, too. I added the fedora on the web version of the anniversary logo, but the design is Marc’s.
Thank you, sir, for generously sharing your talent to help out your local newspaper.
I want to give a shout out, too, to Liz Thomas, who helped pull together a fundraiser we held in the fall of 2015 so we would be able to afford to pay the printer for our first edition that January.
There’s also a group of volunteers who pitched in during the first year of the Chronicle’s print edition that deserve special recognition: The Deliverators. (We stole the name from Neal Stephenson’s novel, “Snow Crash,” although our deliverators didn’t deliver pizzas or carry Japanese swords.)
The Deliverators helped distribute copies of each new edition of the Chronicle before we moved to mailing them to everyone in both villages. I suppose the group has a special place in my heart because my first job in the newspaper business was as a paper carrier for the Des Moines Register.
Good times.
Our delivery crew included Jennifer Molski and Tony Manos, Sarah Austin, Jodi Libretti, Steve Buchtel, Lilly Slaney Weberg, Annie Lawrence, Kate Duff, Greg Weiss, Kim O’Lone and Jim Joyce, Marybeth Briske, Quincy Crump, Tom and Patty Houlihan, Don and Marilyn Thomas, Jadey Ryndak and the late Jim Wright.
I checked in with the group a few weeks ago and got this reply from Jennifer:
“Having grown up in Heather Hill, one of my early memories was helping my older brothers with their paper routes for the Homewood Flossmoor Star. There was lots of ground to cover so we’d be on foot, bikes, skateboards, roller skates and on rainy days in the back of my parents stationwagon throwing papers out the back. When asked to help in the early days of the Chronicle I jumped at the chance. I slung a sack over my shoulders, stuffed it with papers and off I went around our Flossmoor Park neighborhood like a real “newspaper gal.” It was a neat way to reminisce about the old days. I was honored to be a teeny tiny part of building something so needed and important for our community.”
A few of us — Kate, Sarah, Kim, Jim — got together on a Zoom call to reminisce. I thanked them for their help. All the work that goes into producing a print newspaper would be for naught if we couldn’t get it into the hands of readers, and that first year we didn’t have enough money to use the mail, so the Deliverators played an important role.
Kim and Jim got papers to places that were important to them. Kim delivered to Flossmoor Community Church. Jim, a musician, took copies to the former Grape & Grain on Dixie Highway, where his band often played.
Kim remembers being met by some skepticism when she first notified church staff that she would be bringing newspapers by. They weren’t sure what they were going to be getting, she said, but they embraced the paper after they saw it.
“It was such a complete turnaround that it made me proud,” Kim said. “They were worried and then they loved it.”
Jim said he had to keep up with demand at Grape & Grain.
“I just remember once or twice that I’d go up to Grape and Grain for a beer and the bartender would say, ‘Hey, you gotta get me some more of those Chronicles because everybody wants one. So I’d have to go borrow them from the church,” he said.
Sarah helped launch the paper by serving as the primary source for our first story, a feature about the Little Free Library she built out of a tall ash tree stump in her front yard. She also volunteered to get the print edition to residents of local nursing homes.
“The Chronicle is the most amazing thing to happen in Homewood in years,” she said.
Kate was the Homewood Farmers Market manager at the time and delivered mostly to downtown businesses.
“I remember taking it on the train when I was commuting,” she said, so when the chance to help came along, she jumped in.
“I wanted to see the Chronicles succeed. I was just ready to pitch in,” she said. “It was exciting to be there near the beginning like that. You kind of felt like you’re in something cool.”
After 10 years of keeping the community informed, the Chronicle is no longer new and might not be cool, but we think it’s still important, and we’re energized by the support we continue to receive from the community.
Thank you, Deliverators, for helping us get things started.
