By Judy Woodward

As the Bugle turned 50 years old in July, the newspaper has had a long run of varied and multi-talented editors whose subsequent careers have taken some interesting turns.

In the beginning, the Bugle (then known as the St. Anthony Park Bugle, as if to emphasize its hyper-local roots) was a hometown newspaper, started and, for the most part, run by neighborhood residents.

In 1992, that tradition was broken when Winton Pitcoff was hired as editor. Originally from New York, Pitcoff was a brand-new Macalester graduate when he started at the Bugle.

“It was my first salaried job,” he said, “making $9,000 a year. I thought it was great.” Pitcoff recalled that his co-workers, in particular layout artist Kathy Malchow, “were far more patient than I deserved. That’s why the paper survived.”

Pitcoff’s tenure at the Bugle was brief. He went on to a career in nonprofit communications in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, where he currently is deputy commissioner with the state Department of Agricultural Resources.

Pitcoff has at least one vivid memory of the Bugle, however. When the rent for the Bugle offices in the old Healy building became too steep, the newspaper decided to cut costs by subletting part of their space to an unusual tenant: The late Peter Ostroushko, musician with the quintessential Minnesota radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, needed a place to practice undisturbed.

“I remember coming to the office late in the afternoon, and there would be Peter, playing the mandolin,” Pitcoff recalled.

A wake-up call

Another previous Bugle editor, David Anger, took the helm in the late 1990s, armed with prior journalistic experience. What he wasn’t prepared for was the monthly meeting of the board of directors. At 7 a.m. Never a morning person, Anger reflects, “Everybody was so enthusiastic at 7 a.m.!”

For Anger, who was not a resident of the readership area, there were other things to figure out as well. Three organizations, for example, were held in such high esteem in the neighborhood that coverage was obligatory.

“The Community Council, the Music in the Park and the Block Nurse Program. They were pillars of the community. I quickly learned, don’t mess with any of them,” he laughed.

Anger came from what he calls “a visual background” and the main changes he made to the Bugle were in terms of layout and formatting, emphasizing the center section of the paper and putting in place “a more conversational style.”

In that he had great help from production manager Regula Russelle. “Regula was a joy,” he said. “She has such great technical skill and community knowledge.”

After leaving the Bugle (for the second time) in 2000, Anger moved to Iowa where he served as senior decorating editor at Better Homes and Gardens.

Eventually, Anger realized his strength lay more in the decorating end of the business than the editing. He and his husband returned to the Twin Cities, where he started his own styling business, overseeing set design and photography primarily for advertising clients.

“It’s been 18 years now,” he said, since he began David Anger Design, but he still uses techniques he learned at the Bugle. “Meeting deadlines, interfacing with people, (cold) calling … the Bugle made me skilled that way.”

Now living in Edina, Anger sums up the Bugle community as “Smart, informed, lively people doing lovely things in a very lovely place.”

Black and white and red all over

Laura Pritchett was a 26-year-old graduate student “working on my big dream of becoming a writer” when she became the editor of the Bugle in 1998. She claims she learned the mechanics of turning out a community newspaper on the job.

“In the mornings, I worked on my first book, and I worked in the afternoon at the Bugle.”

Asked for memories of her time at the Bugle, Pritchett recalled working up the courage to ask for her first interview. The target was a man who had restored an old fire truck and drove it around her Como Park neighborhood.

“I was scared and nervous,” she said, and in those pre-Internet, pre-social media days, there was only one way to reach out to her subject. “I knocked on his door, and I woke him up. It was my first step as a curious journalist.”

Pritchett got the firetruck story and developed the confidence to proceed where her curiosity led her. Since her Bugle days, she’s published several award-winning novels as well as hundreds of shorter pieces.

One highlight? Pritchett wrote a nature article that featured her encounter with a hibernating bear. While accompanying a scientific research team, “I got to climb into a bear den and hug a bear and her cubs for 20 minutes…. I had (simply) called and asked if I could go on (the team’s) next expedition.”

Now director of the Nature Writing MFA program at Western Colorado University in her native state, Pritchett said, “I got to do that (bear story) because of the Bugle. It launched the best possible life for me.”

Between you and me and the fence post…

For Dave Healy, who held the job for a decade from 2000 to 2010, becoming editor of the Bugle was in one respect the fulfillment of a long-held ambition. At that time, the paper was housed in the since-demolished Healy Building on Como Avenue.

From the time he first moved to St. Anthony Park, Healy had told his family, “Someday I’m going to work” in the space that bore his name.

It was a short-lived satisfaction.

During his editor’s term, Healy (who had no family connection to the building) brought the Bugle fully into the digital age, and that meant a decreased need for office space.

After an interim move to smaller quarters, Healy said, “The paper had gone completely online and we didn’t really need an office.”

Asked for his most memorable article as editor, Healy recalled a feature article he did on fences.

“I drove around looking for interesting fences, then I knocked on doors and asked people about how they came to be. Luckily, people had thought about this question.” He ended up with an exploration of the “social and personal implications of fences.”

Since retiring as a freelance editor in 2016, Healy has become a dependable volunteer and a tireless community leader. After stints at the St. Anthony Park Home and the Branch Library Association, he currently chairs the board of directors at the St. Anthony Park Area Seniors organization. There he also teaches classes in poetry appreciation, including a class this spring on The Poetry of War.

When asked to sum up the community for which he has labored tirelessly in so many roles over the years, Healy turns back to his story on fences.

“(Homeowner) Michael Russelle put up a fence, but not so high that people couldn’t look over it. Then he added a cross-bar on top, wide enough so that people could set a cup of coffee down and talk over the fence. To me, that’s Saint Anthony Park in a nutshell.”

One of the less convivial parts of the editor’s job at the Bugle is fielding the occasional complaint. Healy said that the most memorable bit of negative feedback he ever received came, not from an article he published, but from an ad placed by the old Muffuletta restaurant, the longtime occupant of the spot where Nico’s Tacos now does business.

“Muffuletta were loyal advertisers with a ‘creative’ ad person,” Healy remembered. “In order to hype their Italian cuisine,” in that less sensitive era, the ad copy inserted the loaded word “mafia.”

That was enough to inflame the ethnic pride of one Italian-American reader, who called Healy to inform him in no uncertain terms of the offense caused by negative stereotypes.

Healy told the outraged caller to write a letter to the editor, “and he did.” Muffuletta never responded directly to the letter, but the point had been made. Healy recalled, “That was the most vociferous complaint that I received in 10 years (as editor).”

Kristal Leebrick, who became editor in 2010, when Healy retired, also received a few complaints. But hers usually came from readers who took exception when minor neighborhood disputes occasionally spilled over into the pages of the newspaper. “The folks in Bugleland are smart and involved.”

Going social

Leebrick, who had served on the Bugle board of directors before she became editor, brought the paper further into the digital age.

“I got the social media accounts going while I was still on the board, and … I instigated getting the Bugle mailed rather than delivered to households.”

 An award-winning poet, Leebrick said she was most proud, of founding the annual April Bugle poetry contest.

“I liked interacting with the community that way … and I’m glad to see (the contest) is still going,” she said.

Since leaving the Bugle in 2018, Leebrick, who lives in St. Anthony Park, continues to be able to walk to work. She has worked for the University of Minnesota in various roles, currently the communications coordinator for a department in the College of Forestry, Agricultural and Natural Resources.

Leebrick is happy the Bugle still is still a strong local voice, but she regards the paper as something of an exception in the bleak landscape of modern journalism.

 “I worry a lot about the lack of news coverage on the local level,” she says. “We need journalists to cover our city councils, our school boards and our neighborhood community councils so that we know what’s going on, what decisions are being made that affect our lives.

“We need to hold elected officials accountable, but we also need to tell the good stories, like what’s happening in our schools, what the kids are doing these days. It boggles my mind that so many people I know don’t subscribe to a newspaper anymore.” 

Judy Woodward lives in St. Anthony Park and is a retired Ramsey County Library reference librarian who wrote the “Ask the Librarian” column for the Bugle.