Humor in print I: Betty Stein's "By the Way," 1982–2018

The News-Sentinel — first column 12 November 1982 — last 31 July 2018

The column: Fort Wayne's durable newspaper humor was a reminiscence column with a light hand. Betty E. Stein (born December 10, 1916), a retired teacher, was working as an assistant to the principal of Memorial Park Middle School when, in the summer of 1982, she gave the News-Sentinel's Stewart Spencer a tour of the school; Spencer suggested she write a guest column, and her first "By the Way" appeared on November 12, 1982. She then wrote it every other Tuesday for thirty-six years — more than two thousand columns in all — until July 31, 2018, closing with a farewell column on September 28, 2018, as the paper itself was ending its print run. In October 2018 a selection was collected in book form as By the Way, the Columns of Betty E. Stein, prepared with Blake Sebring. The columns were built from readers' responses and her own long memory of the city — schoolrooms, neighborhoods, vanished shops — and they made her, by the paper's own valedictory account, one of the best-known bylines in Fort Wayne. Comedy in print in Fort Wayne is mostly this: not a humorist's column in the syndicated sense, but a thirty-six-year conversation, carried in the News-Sentinel from 1982 to 2018, which this section records as the local print record's center of weight. Her books and the rest of her civic record are carried in the Authors & Books record; the column as a humor institution belongs here.

Sources:

1. ACGSI, Allen INGenWeb, "Betty Stein" — born December 10, 1916; the News-Sentinel career from the items collected there: the 1982 start, the more than 2,000 "By the Way" columns, the farewell column of September 28, 2018, and the 2018 book.
2. By the Way, the Columns of Betty E. Stein (October 30, 2018), publication record — the Memorial Park Middle School tour and Stewart Spencer's suggestion, the first column of November 12, 1982, the every-other-Tuesday run to July 31, 2018, and the collection with Blake Sebring.
3. Authors & Books section of this history — Stein's book and the Fort Wayne authors' record, cross-referenced here by agreement; the newspapers themselves are the Newspapers & Media record's.