The Enterprise's twentieth century: directories, a daily month, a borrowed masthead, the Enos era

1920–2019 · the weekly endures

The trade directories, read across forty years, give the Enterprise's modern course in snapshots. In 1920 Ayer lists a Friday Republican weekly, six columns, $1.50 a year, circulation 1,150, E. A. Jernegan editor and publisher, in a town the directory counts at 14,579. In 1952 the paper is a Thursday Independent, eight columns, $2.00, circulation 5,798, with Bert Enos as editor and Bert and Edith Enos as publishers. In 1962 it is Thursday and Independent still, five columns, $2.00, circulation 5,147, and the masthead has narrowed to one name: "Mrs. Edith Boys Enos, Editor and Publisher." Between the snapshots, two episodes stand in the library's film. In June 1926 the weekly tried daily publication: the film carries a run cataloged "Mishawaka Daily, June 4, 1926 – June 30, 1926," inside the Enterprise's file — four weeks of a Mishawaka daily under the weekly's roof, after which the file resumes its weekly course. In 1937 the Enterprise's reels run for that year under another masthead, the Fair Dealer — issues of January 7 to December 30, 1937 — and by the first reel of 1938 the Enterprise name is back. Whether the Fair Dealer was a year's renaming, a merger absorbed, or a rival paper whose file was folded into the Enterprise's, the record reached does not say; it is printed here as the film presents it, an unexplained masthead inside the run.

What is not snapshot but continuity is the run itself. The library's microfilm holds the Enterprise in an unbroken weekly sequence from the 1870s through "Jan 3, 2019 – Dec 26, 2019" — the last reel in the library's list — a Thursday paper still publishing when the filming stopped. The proprietors between Edith Enos's 1962 masthead and that last reel are not named in any record; they stand week by week in the film's own mastheads, and the gap is registered below with that settling source.

Sources

1. N. W. Ayer & Son's American Newspaper Annual and Directory (1920) and Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (1952, 1962), the Mishawaka entries, read first-hand, the 1962 page read from its printed image.
2. Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, St. Joseph County, Indiana Newspapers holdings list, the Enterprise run including the Mishawaka Daily of June 1926 and the Fair Dealer of 1937, read first-hand.