The Enterprise marks fifty years

There’s sure to be no shortage of news for The Enterprise Newspapers in the coming year. With new voices on city councils, courtesy of the November elections, and at least one major economic development project in virtually every city covered by Enterprise writers, it looks like busy times ahead in 2008.

But 2008 will provide an opportunity to look back, too, for it is the 50th anniversary year for The Enterprise Newspapers.

The first Enterprise newspapers went out Sept. 12, 1958, with editions for Lynnwood and Edmonds. While Edmonds became a city since 1884, The Enterprise actually predates Lynnwood. In fact, the first editions carried a headline about the vote on the question of incorporation, scheduled for Nov. 4, 1958. As it turns out, that first vote failed, but proponents formed a new committee and brought the issue back. In April, 1959, the city became official on a 482-208 vote.

The Enterprise founders were a couple of newspapermen, Barry O’Connor and Orville Danforth, who left their jobs in Marysville working for legendary publisher Sim R. Wilson III. O’Connor and Danforth felt the area was ripe for its own community newspaper and O’Connor set out the new company’s humble goals with a statement in the first editions:

” … this will be the kind of newspaper that will please readers and advertisers alike. To imply that we have achieved this in our first issue would be the height of egotism. Rather, let us say that we are grateful for this opportunity … to try to better serve our community with a continually improving newspaper.”

Over the years, The Enterprise has seen a number of iterations. While the first editions were aimed at Edmonds and Lynnwood, a Mountlake Terrace edition came later that first fall. The 1970s saw short-lived editions serving Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Richmond Beach and well into Seattle, including the Greenwood and Ballard areas. Some of those papers were called the Journal, but all traced their lineage to The Enterprise. In the 1980s, the Mill Creek Enterprise was born to serve that new city.

Ownership changed, too. O’Connor and Danforth sold the papers in the 1960s to the husband-wife team of Richard and J.R. Lafromboise, who also owned the The Chronicle in Centralia. In 1996, the papers were sold again, this time to the current owner, The Herald newspaper, in Everett. The Herald had just started a paper to serve the newly incorporated area of Shoreline, and the Shoreline Week and The Enterprise papers were melded to form the current arrangement.

Shoreline Week kept alive that early established Enterprise tradition of being just a bit ahead of the city it was serving. The first edition went to press the night of the first city council election in 1995, and was handed out by street hawkers the next day. It took another two weeks to get everything in order to begin regular weekly publishing and later that summer, the paper covered the city’s actual incorporation.

In the coming year, the present Enterprise staff is looking forward to bringing you the news of the day as well as yesterday. We’ll include snippets of news from years gone by in a new feature called “Looking Back” that will appear on the Your Town page. We’ll delve into the people and decisions of the past 50 years that helped shape the communities we know today, and perhaps, what they will become tomorrow. Through it all, we’ll try to take the words of Enterprise founder Barry O’Connor to heart and bring you, ” … a continually improving newspaper.”