BDN’s Joanne Jordan Van Namee dies at 82

Joanne Jordan Van Namee, 82, chairperson of the Bangor Publishing Co. board of directors, died peacefully Wednesday in Bangor at the home of her son, Richard J. Warren, publisher of the Bangor Daily News.

She was predeceased in 1984 by her husband, James F. Van Namee, a former safety engineer with the Westinghouse Corp. and the American Insurance Association and a commissioner of the Occupational Safety and Health Act Review Board.

For more than 35 years, Mrs. Van Namee was a key figure in the growth, development and stability of the BDN, a family-owned newspaper founded in 1895 by her grandfather, J. Norman Towle. Both of her parents, Fred D. Jordan and Lillis Towle Jordan, served as publisher of the newspaper as did her former husband, Richard K. Warren.

Like the other members of her family, Mrs. Van Namee’s personal roots are deep at the Bangor Daily News, and her involvement with the paper spanned more than half the life of the publication.

As a child, she spent hours exploring and having the run of the Bangor Daily News plant, which then was located on Exchange Street in Bangor. As she recounted in a 1999 interview, her flowing blond hair was a concern to the men operating the typesetting equipment. “They always had the big old pots (of molten lead) up on the very top floor, and I had long hair. Somebody was always chasing me away from the pots.”

As the daughter of the BDN’s publisher and later as the matriarch of the family newspaper, she met many of the notables of the past century – the people who performed in athletics and politics on the national stage. Perhaps the most exhilarating experience came in 1934, when the then Joanne Jordan, age 10, became the youngest passenger that day to fly over Bangor with Amelia Earhart.

Touching down on Godfrey Field, now Bangor International Airport, she described the flight with the renowned aviatrix as “fascinating” and told the newspaper she was “ready to go places by air in a big way.”

Although she later christened the first B-52 that flew into Bangor, throughout her adult life she remained firmly grounded in her newspaper and in her community.

Born in Boston Sept. 23, 1923, she graduated from Rogers Hall in Lowell, Mass., and from Westbrook Junior College in Westbrook. After her marriage to Richard K. Warren, the couple returned to Bangor where they raised their two children, Carolyn and Richard.

While her mother, Lillis Towle Jordan, and later her husband, Richard, served as publisher of the BDN, she took an active interest in the affairs of the newspaper as a member of the Maine Daily Newspaper Association, the New England Daily Newspaper Association, the New England Newspaper Advertising Bureau and the American Newspaper Publishers Association.

In 1971, then Joanne Jordan Warren was elected vice president and held the title of assistant to the president of the Bangor Publishing Co. She was elected president of the Bangor Publishing Company in 1974 and later succeeded her mother as chairman of the board.

She had many civic interests outside the newspaper – as sustaining member of the Junior League of Bangor, board member of what then was known as the Bangor TB and Health Association, and longtime member of the Frances Dighton Williams Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution. She was president of the Junior League when it established the Speech and Hearing Center with special attention to services for children, an entity that eventually evolved into the Warren Center for Communication and Learning.

Her energy in statewide interests was invested on behalf of studies, research and legislation promoting highway safety. She was a member of the Maine Highway Safety Committee, becoming its vice chairman in 1971, and served on its legislation committee. She was a member of the executive board of the Women’s Conference of the national Safety Council.

“We used to kid her about the fact that she was on the safety commission,” Wilma “Willie” Bradford of Bangor recalled Wednesday. She and other close friends teased Van Namee, asking her, “How long did it take you to get to Augusta today, Jo?”

Remembering her friend of almost 60 years, Bradford recalled Joanne the expert horsewoman, the little girl born into a powerful newspaper family, the only child of its publisher, Fred Jordan, who “adored her.” According to Bradford, her friend “was never allowed to cook. In fact, she wasn’t allowed in the kitchen.”

Somehow, Bradford chuckled, “She overcame all that with no siblings to cut her down to size.” She became an excellent cook, said Bradford, “and her house was always open.”

“She was an unusual person,” Bradford said. Van Namee had moved away as a young woman, as so many people in the region did then and do today, “but she came back and became part of the community,” Bradford said. When the then Joanne Warren with her young family was looking for a home, a house in Bradford’s West Broadway neighborhood went up for sale. “I called her and said, ‘Jo, get over here and buy that house.'” She did. It is now owned by her son, Richard.

Joanne Van Namee is survived by her daughter, Carolyn W. Mowers and Rick Emery of Cape Elizabeth; her son Richard and Elizabeth Warren of Bangor; and by grandchildren Courtney and her husband Tom Adragna of Norwalk, Conn.; Scott and Jill Farley of Cadillac, Mich.; Jennifer Mowers of Cape Elizabeth; George Warren of Bangor; Anne Warren and fiance Scott Golding of Boston; and great-grandchildren Brett, Benjamin and Bryan Farley of Cadillac, Mich.; and Holden and Grace Adragna of Norwalk, Conn.

Funeral arrangements will be announced in an obituary to be published at a later date.