Co-workers remember journalist Durnbaugh

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BLUE HILL – Friends and co-workers remembered Jerry Durnbaugh on Wednesday as a dedicated journalist, a committed community member, a deliberate curmudgeon with a heart of gold, and as a good friend.

Durnbaugh died Wednesday in a Boston hospital.

When he and his wife, Gayle, traveled from Indiana to Blue Hill to start The Weekly Packet in 1960, he already was a veteran newspaperman. He brought with him a journalistic ethic he adhered to throughout his career.

“As a journalist, Jerry was one of the best I’ve ever known,” said Hugh Bowden, executive editor of The Ellsworth American, who worked with Durnbaugh in the early years of the Packet. “He was uncompromising when it came to principles and doing things right.”

Durnbaugh had a passion for accuracy and attribution, Bowden said Thursday, and objected to the modern practice of using anonymous sources.

“He felt we had a real responsibility to the readers. If you present something as fact, you better be able to attribute it,” Bowden said.

Earlier this month, Durnbaugh was inducted into the Maine Press Association Hall of Fame, an honor he considered the highlight of his career, according to Nat Barrows, publisher of Penobscot Bay Press who purchased the Packet from the Durnbaughs in 1981.

“I was very proud of what Jerry had accomplished,” Barrows said Thursday. “When you work with the founder of a paper, I think you have an obligation to try to take that paper where he took it, and where he wanted it to go.”

In his speech inducting Durnbaugh into the hall of fame, Barrows noted his many journalistic and community accomplishments.

“With his record of achievements, his commitment to the profession, his consistency of purpose and his concern for the community,” Barrows said, “I can think of no one more deserving of being inducted into the Maine Press Association Hall of Fame than Jerry Durnbaugh.”

Durnbaugh’s Clipboard column was a staple in The Weekly Packet during the years he owned the paper and for the 22 years since he sold it. The column regularly rankled readers in high and low places, sometimes made them smile, and often made them so angry they could spit.

“Jerry loved to create a controversy,” said Ellen Booream, former managing editor at the Packet.

Booream recalled one instance when his column angered so many people that the paper had to run two pages of letters to the editor two weeks in a row just to handle their comments.

“Jerry came in beaming,” she said. “He bragged: ‘I was hung in effigy before I left Indiana.”‘

The curmudgeon was an acquired persona, though, one that he relished, but one that was put aside in private.

“He was one of the kindest people I know,” Booream said.

Bowden agreed.

“He was wonderful to work for and to work with. I couldn’t have asked for a better boss or a better friend.”

Starting a paper in a small community was no small feat, and it made a big impact on the community.

“It gave local businesses a place to advertise,” said Gordon Emerson. “That was a big economic impact for the community.”

It helped to create a real community in Blue Hill, linking people who lived in different areas of town, according to longtime friend Denny Robertson.

“That newspaper put Blue Hill on the map for Blue Hill people,” Robertson said. “It helped them to see what was going on clear across town. He gave us that.”

Robertson said that aside from the newspaper, Durnbaugh was an asset to the community.

“He just did and did for this community,” he said.

He helped give the town the Peninsula Ambulance Corps in the late ’60s. Bob Bannister recalled that it was Durnbaugh who used the paper to promote the corps, and when the fledgling organization needed funds for an ambulance, he was there to help.

“He put it in the paper and within a week we had the $1,500 for the ambulance,” he said. “That ambulance corps is a real memorial to him. Think of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people since 1968 who have benefited from that.”

Durnbaugh was involved in emergency medical services locally, regionally and statewide, according to Robertson.

“Jerry had an impact throughout the state as much as he did here,” he said.

Durnbaugh loved his community and contributed to it in many ways through participation in the Congregational Church, through his support of scouting and as the moderator of the annual town meeting for 25 years or more. “His name became synonymous with the term moderator,” said Selectman Jim Schatz.

Although the role required that he keep his opinions to himself, Durnbaugh seemed to enjoy keeping down-home democracy working. “He always prepared for whatever might happen,” Emerson said. “He kept control of the meeting. He was a good moderator.”