Born: c. 1915
Died:
Married:
Children:
Dan MacMasters was a journalist.
Adirondack Daily Enterprise, April 7, 1958
FROM ACROSS THE CONTINENT
Praise For Enterprise From Dan MacMasters
Editor's note: The Enterprise justifiably comes in for criticism from time to time. We are glad our readers care enough about the paper to tell us when they think we are wrong, or when they think we are right. Today we print a letter which naturally makes us feel good, especially since it comes from an old pro, Dan McMasters of the Los Angeles Examiner).
Gentlemen:
I can't say I'm a constant reader of the Enterprise. I have relatives in the Saranac Lake and Malone area who occasionally send me a copy of it. I'm always impressed by the changes that you have made in its spirit and makeup. So I decided it was my duty to tell you so, and why.
My recollection of the Enterprise goes back 25 years. (My first memories of Saranac Lake go back nearly 40.) In 1933 and 1934 I worked in the summer as a chore boy at the McAlpine camp on the slough between Upper St. Regis and Spitfire lakes. Ives Turner was the caretaker. After the summer season ended and the camp was closed, I stayed on with him to help in his trapping. He then had a trap line some 200 miles in length. I'd have worked for nothing but he actually paid me— a dollar a day for my room and board, and a dollar for every mink we got.
The first winter I read Spinoza and Boswell's Johnson. The second I learned French from an old grammar the summer people left behind. And in the long evenings I also read The Enterprise, though it didn't take long. It was a sorry thing, a scant sampling of world events and a dreary succession of personal notes. It neither pleaded nor prodded, accused or amused. Maybe I'm too harsh. Maybe it was better than I remember. But I honestly can't recall a single story from those years, and they were stirring times. The depression had finally hit Saranac, a couple of years after it paralyzed the rest of America, and caused a vast unease.
The next four years I spent in college and worked summer times at Saranac Inn, on the newsstand. There I developed a taste for Havana cigars (that I never since could indulge) and could read omnivorously in the newspapers of the day. We got the best of them, including such now-defunct oracles as the Boston Post, New York Sun and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. We also handled a few Post-Standards and Watertown Times. But we never sold the Enterprise.
Then I came back to Saranac in the fall of 1939. I'd spent three weeks in the city room of the Watertown Times, convinced somebody that I could spell, and was sent forth to sink or swim. After some floundering, I swam.
I spent a year there, a great one. It wasn't a bed of roses. My day ended when the night train pulled out, and no day was ever completely my own. In addition, since the Times then had a circulation in Saranac and Placid of some 300, I was a poor third when people came to think of reporters, if they ever thought of me at all But it probably was just as well. It encouraged resourcefulness, possibly even originality. However, the competition was slight.
Bill Biesel, who had graduated with me from Syracuse University that spring, was city editor of The Enterprise. At least, that's what he called himself. I always have admired Bill for his loyalty under torturous odds.
Story of Bob Mill
I discovered that in Saranac every fourth person had at one time worked for The Enterprise. Among them was Bob Mill, then public relations man for the Conservation Department and a free lance fiction writer. He'd been a crime reporter in the "Roaring Twenties", the kind who'd get himself sentenced to Auburn prison so he could do an inside story. He worked for papers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles. He was fanatic, it seemed to me, in his economy of language and his meticulous choice of it. Fortunately I got to know him and he offered to criticize my work.
Once weekly I brought him all my tearsheets and he gravely reviewed them, there in his apartment in the Hotel Berkeley. I learned more from him than from any other man in this business. Nearly 20 years later I caught myself at times expecting his rebuke when I violated one of his canons. He was a man impatient with many things, but never with me. I mourned him sincerely when he died in a few choking seconds, as he had known he would, a couple of years later.
Saranac Lake then was at the nadir of its civic existence. The economic carpet was being pulled out from under it. Oh, citizens still seethed when they recalled Dr. Brown's admission that climate had little to do with a cure. And The Enterprise still published figures purporting to show that Saranac Lake had some sun every day in winter, just the same as Phoenix. But that was whistling past the graveyard.
Dark Days
Whole streets of cure cottages were empty. A man could buy a house for a thousand dollars. Ten years before you paid $25 weekly for a room under the eaves, with maid service but no nurse. Now you could rent a furnished bachelor apartment (as I did) for $16 a month. Relief and make-work projects looked like permanent features of the new economy. At that time the Watertown Times was surveying North Country economy, and finding a buoyant mood and tangible advances. In due course I made my survey, too. But instead of writing the story of what I learned, I sent a long memo to Harold Johnson. He thanked me and let it go at that. There wasn't a ray of hope in town.
And what was The Enterprise doing? Nothing. Of course, that's what everybody else was doing. But if it couldn't lead the way, it might have been diverting. I remember Biesel's first campaign when he got to town, fresh from coltege: It was to extend the library hours.
Since the fall of 1940 I've visited Saranac Lake at intervals and kept in contact through relatives there. Meanwhile I've seen the shift from a dynamic to a static economy in journalism. I've seen its philosophy go natural shoulders and gray flannel, leaving its gaudy, glamorous ways behind. And sadly I've seen its people take second place behind the TV commentator and analyst.
The New Enterprise
So you see your work with The Enterprise pleases me on two counts. It is serving the community well, and it reminds the rest of us journalists that we can do more than just drift with the tide. In a day when the zinc pots are cooling all over America, it does us good to see new life breathed into a paper.
And let me be a little more specific. You have made The Enterprise livelier than it's ever been in all the years I knew it. You've also caught the local, incongruous blend of the cosmopolite and the "native." And I feel you've faced up courageously to the economic vacuum. The North Country is fortunate to have two papers like it and the Watertown Times. Well, I usually come to the point much sooner than this. I hope you'll forgive me. It's been good to set down these recollections and winnow from them a few conclusions.
As for me, I left the Watertown Times in 1948 to go with the Los Angeles Times. Then came a couple of years in New York with House Beautiful Magazine, a year with the moribund Boston Post, and finally back to Los Angeles with the Examiner's new Sunday roto magazine.
Once again my congratulations for the splendid work you're doing for Saranac Lake and for the good example you set for us working journalists. The best of luck in the days ahead.
Don MacMasters 1540 Waldran Avenue, Los Angeles 41, Calif.
