The Observer celebrates 25 years of news

Gerhard Munster leans back in a chair on his home’s patio deck, gazing at a portly white trawler boat pointed toward the St. John’s River in Sanford. Long into retirement, he seems ever at ease on a chilly Friday afternoon, pondering his future a few weeks away at sea aboard the Raz-Ma-Taz. He’s not quite sure where he’s going yet.

The ever-smiling Austrian expat picks up a yellowed old newspaper from the table in front of him. On the front page of the Winter Park Observer, his smile, 25-years-younger, stares right back at him.

Next to the photo, written in his own words: “This is the culmination of a boyhood dream.” Twenty-five years ago, Munster was sleeping under a desk with no heater in the middle of winter. But he had his own newspaper — his dream come true.

His history with the printed page began three decades and 5,000 miles earlier. A paper boy and Vienna Boys Choir member in his home in Austria’s capital, he would grow up and ship out for a post with the Sunday Times in South Africa, work aboard the doomed sailing ship HMS Bounty and sell ads at papers throughout Florida. But his dream came true behind a Winn-Dixie supermarket in a converted duplex with a shower rigged up in the carport and a rickety abandoned layout table in the living room.

It took three weeks to introduce the Winter Park / Maitland Observer for the first time. The design was painstakingly laid by hand on pasteboards. Munster sold the ads, assembled an army of writers and an editorial board, and pasted up the newspaper himself on a layout board he’d designed and built from a door he’d pulled off its hinges.

The submissions came in written by hand. He had to retype them all. He couldn’t afford to have photos printed at $9.50 each, so he designed his own rendering process using microscopic dots to get around the price. When his celebrity columnist — acclaimed novelist Sloan Wilson — asked to be paid $250 a week, Munster offered him a silver dollar. He accepted.

In big bold white letters, the National Bank of Commerce’s ad on the front page of the inaugural issue, Thursday, Jan. 26, 1989, read “Great Expectations.”

“I had no idea what I was doing,” Munster said with a laugh.

And just like that, the Observer had its eye on the city. Back then the eagle atop the page — hand-drawn by Munster — soared only above the words “Winter Park.” It only took a couple years before the Observer’s nameplate said Maitland too.

In those early years it wasn’t hard to find the Observer. Munster’s green Army Jeep rolling down the street during parades or parked next to festivals filled with newspapers took care of that. Trying to grab non-traditional readers, he started personally delivering a subscriber’s first issue on his Harley.

The growth came quickly, as Munster’s knack for marketing combined with the talents of a mishmash of staff from all walks of life. Back then the paper had a movie reviewer, Samuel Schnur. His first review raved about “The Accidental Tourist.”

By the end of the first year Carole Arthurs was advertising director, a post she would hold for two decades. Along the way she would pick up writing and photography, becoming one of the paper’s key reporters.

In the summer of 1989, columnist Chris Jepson came on board. A few months later, world famous opera singer Louis Roney’s “Play On!” column debuted. Counterbalancing each other’s politics, they’ve been with the Observer ever since.

And through it all, beyond the story of the helicopter that crashed into a Winter Park backyard, the destruction of the Winter Park Mall and rise of the Village, the end of a violent era in Hannibal Square and the transformation of a new walkable doppelganger for Park Avenue, the Observer served as a conduit for it all.

In the spring of 2007, Kyle Taylor came knocking at Munster’s door just as Munster was considering retirement. Within a few months, a new era for the Observer dawned, though it was in the same old duplex with the brown shag carpets and an old pool table in the storage room.

“I loved the connection [the Observer] had to the community,” said Taylor, who became the paper’s publisher that summer.

Alex Babcock would helm the paper as editor for much of those first two years after Munster retired, spearheading ambitious stories on the changing face of Winter Park and Maitland and the personal struggles of friends and families in the community.

“Getting to help people, that's why I got into journalism,” he wrote of his time as editor. “I believe in the ideal of the citizen reporter, the person who's asking questions that need answers, answers that will get things changed for the better. The Observer gave us the chance to do that.

“I'll never forget the pride in the series we did on gentrification of the west side of Winter Park, of the history of that area and the efforts of the west side's community leaders to maintain a proud heritage, while they pushed out bad elements and did their best to accommodate the changes they in some ways don't have any choice but to accommodate. The research that went into that series, it was a real eye-opener about a community wrestling with change, and in some significant ways triumphing.”

But it was a tough time for the newspaper business. By the end of 2008 the world had fallen into what would become the worst recession since the Great Depression.

“It was a tough business environment, especially for newspapers,” Taylor said. “It was challenging for all of us.”

The paper would go digital, making the jump to the Internet in the most economically trying era in the history of newspapers.

“I got to modernize the most reliable source of news for the area,” Babcock said. “That was the job I was handed — take something good and make it fresh and new, put it on the level of the Sentinel, and get readers talking about it. We had a very solid foundation, including an archive like a treasure trove of Winter Park and Maitland history. We knew what the Observer was; the question for us was, ‘What will it be?’”

As the newspaper found ways to adapt and survive, it also won accolades statewide. To date the Observer has won 10 Florida Press Association Awards in the FPA’s annual Better Weekly Newspaper competition under the helm of Babcock, Jenny Andreasson, who served as editor from January of 2009 to November of 2012, and the former editor’s twin brother Isaac Babcock, who has been the Observer’s editor since November of 2012.

For Andreasson, who earned the role of associate editor only a year after joining the paper out of college, it was a transformative experience.

“I had wonderful support from all the connections I’d made in the community,” she said. “It showed me how a community can come together and support each other. The cities could never be covered by the [Orlando Sentinel] like they can with this newspaper.”

Every week when the paper would arrive at the Observer’s office, it felt like Christmas morning, she said.

The community that Winter Park, Maitland, Baldwin Park, College Park and Goldenrod will become is happening every day, waiting for its stories to be told. That’s something publisher Tracy Craft, who took over in March of 2012, said will always be available in the palm of your hand with the Observer.

“There’s something special about being able to read about your friends and family in a community paper that you can hold and touch,” she said. “While we continue to grow in the digital age, I think our roots will always be in the print version. The paper will always be the backbone.”

That's a tradition that's been with the Observer's parent company, owned by the Crain family, since the very first newspaper was started in Kentucky in 1916.

Back at his home, with Raz-Ma-Taz waiting at the dock, Munster heads outside and checks the mailbox. His Observer isn’t there yet. Twenty-five years later, he still reads it every week.

“The beginning was rough, but I got a great kick out of it,” he said.

With another cold January sending his thoughts to warmer waters in a few weeks, he’s feeling adventurous again. He just needs to decide where his future will take him.

He’ll take a look at the Observer online when he finds a port past some southern horizon. He knows a new paper will be waiting at home when he gets back.

But this Thursday will be a little different. He’ll pick up the Observer just like he does every week, and it’ll be that moment in 1989. He’ll turn the page and find himself saying hello again, from back when a dream was just coming true.

“We want to be your voice in the community,” Munster wrote in Volume 1, Number 1. “…We are your newspaper, and we will never forget that.”