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< Campane, Number 72 | Campane, Number 74 >
Current and Topical
by Harold Segal
The active members of the National Amateur Press Association have three issues at hand. One will raise the annual dues to $7.50. The second amendment would increase the cost of life memberships. A third, which was not endorsed by the amendments committee, would offer a family membership plan.
Some may question the penchant of amending the constitution. Why can’t we let it alone and go about the business of amateur journalism? Yes, it is a bore and the technicalities of framing precise language can make committee meetings drag and convention sessions dreary, but we live in times of change. We could not operate as an association on the schematics of 1876 – or 1900 – or even 1930. The hobby undergoes change, whether we like it or not. It may not be exactly as it was the year you joined – and for this reason may have lost some of its attraction – but, then again, to see the other side of the coin, it may be better. However, a strong organization must flex with the wind and adjust accordingly.
Seven dollars and fifty cents used to be a lot of money. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. This is the amount we will pay in annual dues should Amendment 1 be approved. This is a 50% jump and the biggest dollar increase in the association’s history.
It is evident that the association wants to maintain a quality official organ, a bit more than officers’ reports and the current membership list. It is also apparent that free bundle mailings are now taken for granted as part of the membership “package.” It is no secret about rising costs. Even the publisher of a “flimsy” knows that paper prices have skyrocketed. The inflation spiral has carried with it every item relating to printing. Now we have been “promised” the 10-cent first class letter rate, while other rates – including the one under which our bundles are mailed – have been increasing periodically (please excuse Tom Swiftie).
A “quality” National Amateur cannot be published at this time under a $5 dues structure. According to J. Ed Newman, an ex-president and official editor, association services average over $7 per member. In the past few years, our expenditures have out-distanced our income. While there is no immediate cause for alarm, it indicates that under the current rate something would have to be trimmed, either the official organ or the monthly bundle. Neither option is palatable.
A look at the financial report on expenditures for The National Amateur might just scare you out of your britches. With a $2000 yearly sum budgeted for printing, it doesn’t take a mathematician to deduce that this would consume the income from 400 dues-payers. We don’t have 400 dues-payers. We also have twelve monthly mailings (envelopes and postage) to make in this same period.
Granted, the Trusty Rusty fund helps considerably, but we have gone into the red for two consecutive years. We must not overlook the physical contribution that printer Russell Paxton makes on our behalf. He also disregards added charges we’d have to pay for elsewhere. Recent editors have helped, too, by getting members to contribute costly covers.
The amount of dues is a barometer of the times. In 1932, in the midst of a national depression, dues were reduced to $1 from $1.50. During the war years (1944) it was increased to $2. The rate for new members stood at $2 until 1962, but in 1950 renewals were upped to $3 (the $2 introductory offer was a lure).
A five-year battle to raise the dues to $5 was finally successful in 1962. Having fought long and hard for the “fiver,” it was amazing to see almost unilateral support for the $7.50 proposal. One enthusiast at St. Petersburg said it should be $10! Bless you, Kelly Janes!
Forty years ago, the patron saint of the Amateur Printers Club, Vincent Haggerty, used to tell the boys that a life membership in the NAPA was the very best insurance policy anyone could buy. Life members seemed to be carried on the rolls ad infinitum. (Life memberships then could have been purchased for $10!) Amendment 2 would increase the cost of life memberships from $50 to $100; and from $20 to $50 for official editors. This you cannot refuse. Actually, the NAPA cannot afford them.
Back in the misty past it was felt that if a member served a term as president he was entitled to a free life membership. In the light of 1973 it seems the reasons are diluted, but in days past it served a useful purpose. Before mid-century the association was always in the red. We had to raise funds each year to pay for National Amateur printing costs. Ex-presidents were generous givers and fund raisers and because of them we have a healthy reserve cushion today. It may not always be so, but presently our finances are more stabilized and for this reason perhaps the entire life membership situation is in need of serious reappraisal.
Amendment 3 is the constant perennial July bloom: family memberships. It has been defeated twice in the past ten years. It was not recommended by the committee on amendments at St. Petersburg, but the convention decided it should be put on the ballot. The 1973 version permits the spouse and/or child under 18 living in the same household to join at half the dues rate ($3.75 if Amendment 1 passes, $2.50 if not). Only one bundle and one copy of The National Amateur will go to this household, but activity requirements will still determine qualification for voting.
Supporters of this “togetherness” movement believe it will encourage others in the member’s household to become interested and active in the NAPA. Others, and we are in this group, believe that if anyone under the same roof is sufficiently interested they would join without any cut-rate inducements. If they are partially interested, we still have a selling job to do. Their names on the membership list are meaningless and wasteful – what we are seeking are active publishers and writers, not amused spectators.
It is easy to understand the positive side: a co-operative spouse and family makes for compatibility on the hobby side, but while we may be fascinated by some bit of the crocheting (as an extreme example) on the distaff level doesn’t necessarily mean family involvement. Of course, it is nice if the family participates, but the interest of amateur journalism should originate of its own accord and take root from there. Induced feeding won’t give us the active members we need.
As stated at the recent convention, the project of this private press will be to print a centennial souvenir book (hopefully, in a hard cover) to be distributed to members attending the Philadelphia convention in 1976.
Preliminary thoughts led us to a list of officers through 1951 and later, thinking of this, it occurred to us that some famous names are missing. Members who made major contributions to the NAPA, but for one reason or another were never elected to major offices. Credit should be accorded them, too. We had in mind Sheldon Wesson. Also, Burton J. Smith.
Then Burton Crane, who was called to war service while serving as official editor. He injected vitality into the association in a period when it needed a lift from dullness. Farther back there was Sam Steinberg, who published the famous Dilettante. He is credited with only one issue of The National Amateur, yet previously he and three others, during a low period, took over the costs and printing of an entire volume.
Report on Ashtabula
by John Gillick
Shortly after the convention in St. Petersburg, I received a letter from Kelly Janes, who suggested that the Ohio members of the NAPA pool their funds and send a delegate to San Diego to beat the drum for an Ohio convention in 1975. Kelly said the bus ride from Massachusetts to Florida and back was a bit much for a man born in 1898.
I passed the word along to Bill Boys, and either or both of us thought of Ashtabula. Why Ashtabula? It is a name that has popped up regularly over the years in the voting for a convention site. “One vote for Ashtabula” has been heard year after year as the voting teller announced the election results to the convention. There is, of course, a story behind this quaint phenomenon.
Back in the first half of the century, several conventions had been held in Cleveland. Tony Moitoret had been a newspaperman in Cleveland, and during one of the conventions he and a friend escaped from an afternoon session to go for a ride in a car Tony had borrowed from an acquaintance. They rode east along the shore of Lake Erie, laughing and jesting as old friends will. About sixty miles east of Cleveland they came to the city of Ashtabula, and it struck a note that capped the hilarity of the day. As years went by, Tony took to voting for Ashtabula as a convention site.
Since we had a successful convention in the small city of Marietta, I decided to take a look at Ashtabula. My son, Jerry, and I drove east on Interstate Highway 90 on a fine October morning and we reached our destination at noon. The county seat of Ashtabula County, the city itself is larger than Marietta. It is a lake port that receives heavy tonnage of iron ore and limestone for Ohio and Pennsylvania steel mills, and crude rubber from Africa. A great deal of coal is exported to Canada through the port. There is considerable industry in the city, but none of the polluting smog that hangs over larger industrial centers.
We talked to Chuck McClure, city editor of the Star-Beacon, and to Charles Phipps of the Chamber of Commerce. They were friendly and helpful, and made Ashtabula seem a pleasant place to be. There are two fine parks at the lakefront, with excellent picnic facilities. The city is clean and well-kept, and it is initiating an urban renewal program. It would seem to be a fine convention site, except that it lacks the one thing we need most: hotel space.
The Hotel Ashtabula has eighty rooms, and it is clean and comfortable. However, many of the rooms lack the modern plumbing facilities we have become accustomed to in the 20th century. The urban renewal program includes plans for a modern motel, but since we choose our convention site a year in advance, we could not risk selecting a site without presently-operated facilities. It appears, therefore, that while we are ready for Ashtabula, Ashtabula is not ready for us.
So much for the city of Ashtabula. There are two or three possibilities in the county itself: Conneaut has a Ramada Inn with 105 rooms, and Austinburg, ten minutes west of Ashtabula, has a Holiday Inn with 108 rooms. The Ohio Amateur Press Guild is meeting shortly and I will report to them. If there is enough interest, we will send out a scouting party to Ashtabula County. After all, I think we owe it to Tony Moitoret.
Do They Know What They Want?
by Victor A. Moitoret
Maybe – just maybe – we can help some NAPA members decide what they want!
Away back in 1969 at the Columbus, Ohio, convention, one of the ten proposed amendments to our constitution which cleared the hurdle of the constitution committee and then was endorsed by a majority of those in attendance and voting had to do with our laureate contest in the art category.
The constitution then (and it still does now) stated that the entry for the art laureate is a paper and that the laureate title is given to a paper, but that the “award” is made to the artist, who must be a member. Although I am no artist, and voted against the inclusion of this category in the laureate contests when it was originally proposed as an addition, it seemed an anomaly to me that all other individual creative efforts (poem, prose, fiction, history) are entered as individual creations. Only in the editing and printing categories is it the amateur paper itself as a whole that is to be judged in competition. A piece of artwork should be in the former, not the latter, grouping.
Thus I proposed this amendment, which I felt offered some improvement and clarification. A majority of the members present at Columbus either agreed with my proposal or at least agreed that the membership should be given the opportunity to ballot on the question officially at the following convention.
The amendment was attacked in print by the editor of Campane, by the editor of Ding Dong, and by the usually astute Liz Butt, one of the few who normally take the trouble to read our constitution carefully.
The membership was apparently swayed by the arguments put forward by Harold, Tony and Liz, for at Denver the following July, the scorecard turned up 27 absentee votes in favor of the amendment, but 42 against it, so the convention vote could not affect the issue and 13 convention votes against the amendment were tallied. Seven who voted by mail left the question blank.
So the membership had spoken out load and clear. By 55 votes to 27, they indicated, they wanted the art laureate to remain as it was – to go to the paper and not to the artwork.
Comes now 1973 and the convention at St. Pete. If the laureate honors are accurately recorded in the minutes in the September National Amateur, then we learn that in the art category the laureate award went to Bill Boys (the artist) as it should, but that it went to him for “Our Lady of Guadalupe Church” whereas the entry should have been a paper, and the winning entry should have apparently been OAPG Annual, 1972. The same flaunting of the constitution appears for the honorable mention.
Tony Moitoret wasn’t at St. Pete, so he couldn’t speak up again in favor of what he was promoting before, but strangely enough there is no mention in the official organ that Harold Segal or Liz butt, who were the other two leaders in defeating the 1969 amendment, spoke up to castigate the convention for accepting a report that flies in the face of what they advocated and for which they whipped up the support of two-thirds of those voting in 1969.
Come on now, Harold and Liz! Just what do you want?
Elizabeth Butt:
Just what do I want – re the art laureates? Nothing.
This may seem a bit drastic, but it is the simple truth. When the laureate results were read in St. Petersburg, I was pleased to note that the winners were persons who do excel at writing, printing, etc.; and I shall long cherish the memory of the expression on Elaine Peck’s face when her name was read as the winner in the poetry contest.
While it is generally pleasing if the constitution is followed exactly, each president tends to follow his own ideas. Vic is, of course, correct in his comments about the proper award. But Bill Boys evidently preferred the award to be as he read it. I was not listening that closely!
Originally I was not enthusiastic about adding an art category to the laureate contest as there usually are too few artists for such a category to mean very much. I dare say that some years the necessary three entires may all be by the same artist, so it becomes a question of which item is the best, not which artist. However, it was hoped that having this category would encourage the use of art in amateur papers. Perhaps it does.
While I agree with Vic that art seems to fit better among the categories in Section 1 (rather than in Section 2), I was opposed to the proposed amendment #4 (1969) because if there is a change, I think there should be included a requirement that the artist and printer must be one and the same. There are two kinds of art, in the sense that some is developed by the artist, and the other is brought out by the printer (particularly where more than one color is used) and who is to say that a result is due to the ability of the artist or of the printer. My own inclination is to prefer a requirement about the art laureate that the artist and printer be identical, or if not that the entry be joint. I believe some thoughts along this line may have been behind the original placement of the art category in the same section as that of printing.
So I might be for an amendment to alter the placement of the art category – but only if the proposed amendment seemed to be an improvement.
No, I did not speak up when the awards were read, since it is immaterial to me whether the art award is given to the artist or to the paper… so long as the artist/printer are one. What do I want? Nothing. But if the proper amendment were proposed, I would vote for it.
Harold Segal:
I’ll take refuge under the legal cop-out: I stand mute.
Campane is published in the interest of organized amateur journalism and the National Amateur Press Association by co-editors Hazel and Harold Segal, Margo Gardens, Bristol, Pa. 19007. Hand set in Baskerville types and 425 copies printed on 60-lb. offset stock on an 1890 7×11 Pearl treadle press.
Articles discussing associational problems, critiques or recollections and research in the history of the hobby are constantly sought and welcomed by the editors.
Rebuttals to articles in Campane will be given prompt attention. We do not necessarily endorse remarks made in these pages by others than the editors, but we are not averse to airing both sides of controversial issues.