Beginnings
The Sun Chronicle was founded in 1971 by Guy S. DeVany, who merged The Attleboro Sun (1889–1971), of which he was publisher, with The Evening Chronicle of North Attleborough (1871–1971). An advertisement on the back cover of the 12-page final edition of The Attleboro Sun declared: "The new Sun Chronicle will be an adventure in print . . . stimulating . . . provocative . . . at times disturbing . . . always interesting." The 20-page first issue of The Sun Chronicle was published on March 1, 1971.
The North Attleborough Evening Chronicle began February 3, 1871 as The Attleborough Chronicle, a 4-page weekly founded by Walter Phillips, a Providence newspaperman whose wife was Attleboro native Francena Capron. Phillips moved the newspaper's headquarters to North Attleboro in January 1873. Its name was changed to the North Attleborough Evening Chronicle in 1887, when the town of North Attleborough split from Attleboro.
The Attleboro Sun published its first issue September 3, 1889. For decades the two papers were friendly rivals.
The Chronicle was a small newspaper with big connections; for most of its history, its publisher was the prominent Republican Congressman Joseph W. Martin, Jr., who served in the House from 1925 to 1967 and was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1949 and again from 1953 to 1955. Martin ran the Chronicle for six decades, and gave North Attleboro a reputation for conservatism.
The Attleboro Sun, for its part, was sold by a group of local businessmen in 1906 to John S. Vallette, an advertising salesman for The Providence Journal. He appointed a 19-year-old reporter, Charles C. Cain, Jr., as the paper's editor.
Vallette expanded the newspaper's reach, and pushed for Attleboro to adopt a city form of government, which it did in 1914. Then in 1929, Cain became the newspaper's publisher, and in 1933 he appointed Clarence D. Roberts as editor. Roberts remained with the paper for about half a century, in later years contributing columns from Florida.
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Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)