Maine editor did it `The Hard Way’ > Book details adventure, and humor of newspaper business

Alexander B. “Sandy” Brook says his remembrance of his two frenetic decades as owner and editor of a weekly newspaper along the Maine coast is “a story of rags to moderate income.”

Disenchanted with life as a Wall Street executive, Brook borrowed $30,000 to buy the Kennebunk Star, an undistinguished four-page broadsheet consisting of press releases, local chit-chat and boilerplate filler.

In 1978, he gave up the ventur and sold for $1.65 million what had become the York County coast Star, a muckraking journal that won national recognition for excellence while exposing venality and corruption in small-town Maine.

Brook’s book, “The Hard Way: The Odyssey of a Weekly Newspaper Editor,” (Bridge Works Publishing, $19.95), chronicles his fight against local politicians and his efforts to keep ahead of creditors while pursuing the territorial growth and plant modernization needed to assure the newspaper’s success.

No aspect of the business escaped his touch: he covered the news, wrote stories and editorials, sold ads, fixed the antiquated presses and delivered the papers to the stores.

With the prospect of failure a constant fear, Brook and a handful of dedicated employees put in herculean work schedules that left little time for family life.

In a telephone interview at a rehabilitation hospital on Long Island, N.Y., where he was recuperating from a mile stoke, Brook, 70, said his book’s descriptions of the difficulties he experienced were no exaggeration.

“It was that bad, or a lot worse. I can assure you, it was not an easy thing. But the main thing is that it doesn’t have to be like that. You can start with enough money, or enough training, or be willing to settle for something less than I felt I could settle for,” he said.

Although he hadn’t intended to sell the newspaper, Brook eventually found himself beaten down by the business and decided to seek a buyer when his two partners wanted to sell their shares.

Since then, the newspaper changed hands three times: to tycoon Joe J. Allbritton of the new defunct Washington Star to Worrell Newspapers of Charlottesville, Va., and then to the New York Times.

Brook said the paper has done well under the Times’ stewardship, which has brought it the financial security he could never provide. But he said it lacks the intense community interest and involvement that local ownership engenders.

Ater a brief transition period in which he helped Allbritton’s people run the paper, Brook left for North Haven, N.Y., an island near Sag Harbor, where he wrote tow unpublished novels and worked on his memoirs.

The first novel, he said, is about a lobster war in Maine costal community not unlike Cape Porpoise in Kennebunkport. the second is aout “a man at war with society… It’s kind of a love story, in a sense.”

Brook is starting to write a third novel this summer, but won’t say what it’s about. He has remarried following his second divorce from his first wife and is planning to move back to Maine – to a center chimney Federal-style home on 25 acres in Sheepscot, well up the coast from his old stomping grounds in the Kennebunk area and York County, where growth has been a mixed blessing.

“It’s gotten very crowded, particularly in the summertime when you should be able to enjoy it. It’s become more commercial and more like everywhere else than it is like Maine.

“I don’t think Sheepscot is going to get ruined, at least not in my lifetime.”

Brook spent well over a decade, by fits and starts, writing “The Hard Way,” which was 2 1/2 times its size before being trimmed.

He said he hopes the book conveys some of the adventure, excitement and humor he found in the newspaper business.

“I hope my friends read it. That’s the main thing for me,” he said. “It’s done for people I like and if they enjoy it, that would be great.”

An unabashed fan of weekly newspapers, Brook believes that the best of them can achieve an intimacy with the reader that a daily can’t hope to match.

But he laments the continuing trend toward consolidation under chain ownership of all but the smallest mom-and-pop weeklies.

“The chains all do their newspapers the same way and they do them according to a formula, in ways that aren’t as strenuous,” he said.

“You work hard at something and it becomes more of a work of art and a work of craft. It you do it the easy way, then it has no particular character.”