$10G to help digitize Suffolk newspaper

Babylon Town archivast Mary Cascone with a copy of the... — Babylon Town archivast Mary Cascone with a copy of the South Side signal; its first 10 years have become available on the Web. (Nov.14, 2011) Credit: Ed Betz

By DENISE M. BONILLAdenise.bonilla@newsday.comDecember 6, 2011

Some things never change.

A look at the Nov. 10, 1911, issue of the South Side Signal, Babylon's hometown newspaper from 1869 until 1920, reveals that even 100 years ago newspapers focused on familiar subjects. There were election results and articles on the town's budget, as well as an opinion piece calling for a change in the method of property assessments.

Then, reminders that a century has passed.

A story on how a local hospital -- run through annual "subscriptions" paid by residents -- is having its name changed, followed by a list of patients recently released. An article that mentions California's "experiment with women jurors."

A story that follows the progress of a businessman's cross-country attempt to deliver oysters by car. The article mentions the man's experiences in the Midwest, where "an oyster in the shell is a great curiosity."

Such treasured historical nuggets will now be more readily available to the public. The first 10 years of the South Side Signal were recently made available online as part of the Suffolk Cooperative Library System's Suffolk Historic Newspapers project.

The South Side Signal was published until 1920, and the... — The South Side Signal was published until 1920, and the Town of Babylon has received donated funds to help it add its last 41 years to the Internet. Part of 12 other newspapers are also now available to researchers online as part of a Suffolk library system project. (Nov. 3, 2011) Credit: Ed Betz

Expansive goal

Now town historians are hoping that a resident's $10,000 donation to the Babylon Public Library will help them digitize the Signal's remaining 41 years. When completed, the entire paper will be searchable by keyword and date, and readers can look at particular articles or the entire page of the paper, as it originally appeared.

The South Side Signal was published weekly for 5 cents each. When it first began publishing, the four-page paper stretched 22 inches by 28 inches and hardly resembled the look or content of today's papers. Headlines among the congested columns were strictly informational and demure by today's tabloid standards.

Little, if any, local news was present on the front page, which was instead dominated by poems, fictional stories and articles from national and international newspapers.

Tall tales

The Nov. 6, 1869, paper, for instance, has as one of its front-page stories a small article titled "A Strange Race of Men," which states that a man in India believes there is a community of "tailed" men and women living in Borneo.

The rest of the paper delves into local sections, including Lindenhurst, which was then called Breslau, as well as a multitude of ads for merchandise and services ranging from horseshoeing and livestock to medical cure-alls.

When the paper began publishing there was no Babylon Town. South Shore communities were then still part of the Town of Huntington. But it is believed that it was from within the pages of the South Side Signal that the idea of forming a separate town first gained momentum.

"Huntington is large enough in territory to make two good-sized towns," the paper noted in its Feb. 12, 1870, issue. "The village of Huntington cannot much longer make laws for Babylon."

The article "seemed to fuel the flames" of independence from Huntington, said Babylon Town archivist Mary Cascone. Babylon officially separated from Huntington two years later.

The town has frequently opened up original copies of the newspaper for inquiring minds. For a general regional sense of history, The New York Times has online archives going back to 1851. "But if you want to know what was really going on in your backyard, where are you going to go to?" Cascone asked.

Costly research

Those researching their family history have often turned to the South Side Signal for information such as birth or death records, or to search for advertisements for a family-run store. But because many of the issues are only available in hard copy, such searches are difficult and time-consuming unless people are exact in their background information.

"With only the first 10 years digitized, we've been limited," Cascone said.

Digitizing a newspaper can take several months and costs 50 cents per page if taken from microfilm, said David Concar, who helped launch Suffolk's Historic Newspapers project several years ago. Sometimes the microfilm is not available or is in poor quality, and the cost to digitize from print can be higher, he said.

So far, a portion of 12 Suffolk newspapers has been digitized. It costs libraries about $800 a year, he said, and with the economic crunch that money may start to dwindle. That makes donations such as the one from Theresa Santmann to the Babylon library all the more critical to bringing newspapers online.

"It seems to me that to be able to address our current situation, we need to know our history," Santmann said of the reason for her donation. "Maybe this will motivate somebody to improve things in our society."

Cascone noted that the South Side Signal has served to fill in the blanks for local historians on more than one occasion. Her office once came upon a poster from the 1920s announcing that one of the Roosevelts was to speak on the steps of Babylon Town Hall.

There was no indication as to which Roosevelt it was, or why he had come to Babylon, so Cascone looked up the date in the South Side Signal and found that it was former President Teddy Roosevelt's son Theodore, who was running for governor.

"The article referred to him as 'Theodore The Little,' " Cascone said. "It talked about how he wasn't well-received and mentioned that while he had the same name, he was certainly not his father."

Missing details

But being only a weekly paper, the South Side Signal does not paint a complete picture of the times. Many events are missing, Cascone said, and often, because it was expected that everyone living in the area knew locations, exact addresses were left out.

Still, Cascone said, a newspaper such as the South Side Signal can offer an important glimpse into life during a certain time period.

"It's a capsule of a community's life for that era and what was going on," she said. "There was no TV, no radio. The newspaper was your entertainment and your news. It was everything."