In the last few years some of my family and friends have started referring to me as an “amateur historian.”
A lifelong interest in history — my first career goal as a child was to be an archaeologist — has apparently developed into a full blown preoccupation with the subject.
I didn’t grow up to excavate pharaohs tombs or Neolithic villages, but I did enter a field that has some commonalities with archaeology. Journalism, it turns out, is also about digging things up.
Lately, that digging has been focused on Snohomish County and North King County history. Some of that has to do with the realization that many local landmarks from my childhood are quickly disappearing.
But that’s a column for another time.
Recently I was organizing some of my history files and rediscovered notes I’d compiled some time ago about The Enterprise’s “genealogy.” What good timing that was.
It turns out that 2008 marks a momentous occasion: The Enterprise will celebrate its 50th year of publication.
When the first edition of The Enterprise appeared in 1958, the paper’s initial focus was the newly incorporated cities of Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace. The paper quickly expanded its scope to include news from communities at Martha Lake, Alderwood Manor, Richmond Beach, Edmonds, Woodway, Brier and others, as it still does today. As it also still does, the paper was delivered free to local residents.
The Enterprise went on to purchase the Edmonds Tribune-Review in 1967. The Tribune-Review’s history goes even further back, to 1910, when the Edmonds Tribune merged with the Edmonds Review. The Review was the older of the two, itself founded in 1904.
The Tribune-Review continued to be published under that name until the early 1980s, when it finally became the Edmonds Enterprise. Not long after came the Mill Creek Enterprise. In the mid-1990s, after The Enterprise was purchased by The Herald daily newspaper in Everett, Shoreline Week was launched. The Shoreline edition eventually took on The Enterprise moniker as well.
The Enterprise will be acknowledging this 50th anniversary in a number of ways over the next year. A large part of that celebration is about you, the reader, because it’s your support that has brought The Enterprise to where it is today. We are looking for story ideas from the community for anniversary related articles we plan to run during 2008.
Have you been a resident or a business here for 50 years or more? Are you a couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in 2008? Did you work for The Enterprise in some capacity? Do you have historical photos or stories about the area you’d like to share?
We want to hear from you. Please send me your ideas at entfeatures@heraldnet.com.
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