Page 339

                      JOURNALISM
NEENAH, despite limitations imposed by geographical location, has in
the last three quarters of a century been served by newspapers which
kept pace with developments in the publishing industry. From the
days of hand-set type and hand-fed presses to the current era of
highly mechanized production, men who devoted their talents to local
journalism possessed, their accomplishments show, vision of the
future.
  Outstanding among Neenah's editors and publishers in the period
from the early i88o's to the present were L. H. Kimball, J. N. Stone
and J. R. Bloom, all deceased.
  The Island City Times, successor to the Conservator, first newspaper
published in this city, was founded as a weekly by Stone in October,
1863. The paper continued as a weekly until 1882, when it was
changed to a daily.
  Bloom entered the local publishing field in i90o, when he and others
purchased the Neenah Daily News from the late L. H. Kimball, who
served as Postmaster of Neenah for a number of years prior to his
death in 1913. Kimball, incidentally, was proprietor of the first news
depot operated in Neenah in early days.
   Politically, the rival papers were opposed, Stone in his editorial
writings clinging to Democratic principles, and Kimball, followed by
Bloom, as ardently expounding the Republican cause.
   Stone was a native of Rochester, New York, born there March 4,
 1835. He passed his boyhood there, and when not attending school,
 spent much of his time in newspaper offices. At the age of 14, he went
 to Buffalo where he served a three-year apprenticeship in the printer's
 trade, at the close of which he went to Detroit, Michigan, where he
 worked as a compositor.
   In the fall of 1856 he went to Romeo, Michigan, where he founded
 the Argus, a weekly, which he published for one year. He then moved
 to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where he became one of the editors and
 publishers of the Weekly Tribune. In the following year he went to
                               339