Not So Wild a Dream

Most newspapermen like to dream about buying a little weekly some day and settling down in the country, but not many ever do anything about it. Montreal's John William Sancton, 29, is one who did. Until six months ago, Sancton was a news editor of the daily Montreal Gazette (circ. 54,383). Now he is editor, publisher and owner of the 104-year-old weekly Stanstead (Quebec) Journal (circ. 1,350) -- and enjoying life very much.

Sancton is no newcomer to either Stanstead County or the Journal. He first came to the leisurely little town of Rock Island (pop. 1,395)--in the rolling, Green Mountain country along the Quebec-Vermont border--to attend Stanstead College in the '30s. As a student, he covered college activities for the Journal. When the college's main building burned down, Sancton flashed the news to Montreal's Gazette. He got a byline and his first full-time reporter's job.

Back to the Hills. It did not take Sancton long to get fed up with "the rush, the noise and the grime" of city life. After a wartime hitch in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Sancton went back to the Gazette's staff in 1945 long enough to start a campaign to "bring over the war brides quicker." Soon after his own English war bride, Mary, joined him, Sancton heard that Octogenarian John C. Holland, owner and editor of the Stanstead Journal, was ailing and willing to sell his paper. Sancton quit his job and bought it for a few thousand dollars.

It was like going back into another century when John and Mary explored the faded old white house where the handset, rundown Journal had been published for decades. Blocking their way was a weird jumble of cardboard boxes, auto parts, dried nuts, empty jars, tin cans and old metal. In a stack of unopened letters, the

Sanctons found several hundred dollars in checks, money orders and cash. Mary, who moved in as circulation manager, found only 145 paid-up subscriptions; others were in arrears as far back as 1896. (Wrote one delinquent: "I'd been pleading with old John for half a century to stop sending me his paper.")

Into the Black. Sancton set about speeding up the Journal's four pages, which for years, unrelieved by photos or even headlines, had been padded with boiler plate and fillers. In Vermont, he bought a second-hand linotype machine to set a cleaner column in a fraction of the four hours it had taken the Journal's printer to hand set one. He brightened Page One with newsy photographs and headlines (one big March story: JOHN C. HOLLAND LAID TO REST). In his English car, Editor Sancton made the rounds of his borderline beat, hunting for stories to bolster the time-honored diet of "personals." Soon, paid circulation hit the 1,000 mark. Advertisers sought space in the livelier Journal. This week, for the first time, the Journal will publish a ten-page issue.

Filling all his jobs as the Journal's janitor, newsboy, ad salesman, reporter and make-up man keeps Owner-Editor Sancton hopping. He has also learned to make concessions to the sleepier standards of country journalism. When Royal Canadian Mounties nabbed Quebec's biggest cigarette smuggler in Stanstead County, Sancton filed a story to his old paper in Montreal. Correspondent Sancton scooped Editor Sancton by two days. But Journal readers were more interested in news of abiding matters--the farms, the factories, the water supply and the schools. Says happy Editor Sancton: "You visit a small town and you say, 'This is quaint, this is the Middle Ages.' But after a while, you realize that this is the way most people live. This is the normal."

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