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Time Machine: Lamont Leader
‘Editor in overalls’ and his family published weekly newspaper for decades
The Buchanan County town of Lamont was celebrating its centennial in 1953. As part of the celebration, the local weekly newspaper, the Lamont Leader, ran a history series about Lamont. One of those stories focused on the weekly itself.
The Lamont Leader was founded in 1894, competing against with the year-old Lamont Press. In 1895, the two combined under the Leader masthead with Loren D. Lammon as editor.
J.F. Davidson became publisher of the Leader in 1900. He sent his son, Arthur, to attend school in Fayette.
In 1910, the Davidsons formed a partnership, J.F. Davidson & Son, with Arthur assuming half interest in the business. The elder Davidson left the newspaper under Arthur’s leadership, returning to Lamont in 1911 and resumed control of the paper. Arthur purchased the weekly Prairieburg News in February 1911.
But Arthur was back as the Leader’s editor in 1920, when he sold the paper to veteran newspaperman Alfred E. Brown of St. Paul, Minn. Brown was a printer. the one who’d established the Lamont Press weekly years before.
Brown took possession of the Leader in August 1920 at about the same time a new Morgenthaler Linotype Model L machine was to be installed.
In 1922, Brown sold the Leader to Mr. and Mrs. Royal Albert “Al” Tennis, who had owned the Aurora Observed before selling it to try farming.
But after four years on the farm, they moved back to Lamont and bought the Leader, publishing it for 16 years.
Their son, Edgar, helped his parents at the paper for a few years, then began driving the school bus. In 1930, he married and took a job delivering ice.
The Tennises sold the Leader to W.H. Cornell of Hopkinton in August 1939 and moved back to Aurora.
Tennises return
The Leader didn’t stay out of Tennis hands for long.
In 1940, Edgar Tennis and his wife, Ruth, took over publishing the paper.
Edgar acquired a used Linotype machine — a “hot”-metal typecasting machine — from Wisconsin. Later, he bought a Model 15 and in the 1960s bought an Intertype from The Gazette.
The Tennises published the paper together until Ruth died in 1969. Edgar’s daughter, Eleanor McGraw, stepped into her mother’s shoes.
Two Tennis brothers, Kenneth and Keith, helped out in the shop for a while. Kenneth became a Linotype operator for The Gazette, and Keith became a Baptist missionary in Thailand.
‘Editor in overalls’ and his daughter
A 1971 Gazette feature called Edgar, who was almost 70, an “editor in overalls.”
The Leader’s weekly Thursday press run was about 600, “but it goes to nearly every state in the union plus a couple of foreign countries,” to people who kept track of hometown events, The Gazette reported.
Edgar, his hands, coated in printer’s ink, said his daughter Eleanor did most of the writing for the newspaper. Edgar said he sold ads, ran the press and two job presses and made up pages, along with other duties.
When Edgar’s health declined, Eleanor became the owner and editor of the Leader in 1977. She had helped her father in the shop ever since her mother had suffered a bad fall that ended her time at the paper.
Edgar and Ruth Tennis had adopted Eleanor from the Annie Wittenmyer Home for orphans in Davenport in 1933. She married Philip Theodore “Ted” McGraw in 1949.
As editor of the Leader, Eleanor was usually low-key. But when another northeast Iowa paper called Lamont a “dying town” in 1982, she let loose.
She published a list of more than 50 of her community’s assets. “Now, I ask you, ” she wrote, “does this sound like a town or community that is dying? I think not!”
After her husband, Ted, died in 1993, Eleanor married Bill Riley. He died, and she married Roger Homewood in 2017. She outlived him, too, dying in July this year at age 92 at the Buchanan County Health Center in Independence.
Last years
Steve Sanders bought The Leader Jan. 1, 1998.
He reserved a corner of the building for Latha Henderson, the weekly’s editor, and turned over the rest to Common Grounds, a community coffee shop operated by the city’’s four churches.
Steven Sanders died in 2011.
After 123 years, the Lamont Leader printed its last issue Thursday, Dec. 19, 2020.
The Independence Bulletin Journal bought the Leader’s subscriber list, giving the subscribers two papers a week instead of the Leader’s single weekly issue.
Comments: D.fannonlangton@gmail.com
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