WILLOW CREEK — Clara Winslow marks 20 years as publisher of the Willow Creek Gazette this week, and she has written a front-page editorial that reads less like a celebration and more like a love letter to a town she never planned to call home.
“When my father died in 1984, I was working as a reporter for the Bangor Daily News,” Winslow writes. “I had a career. I had an apartment I liked. I had plans. None of those plans included returning to Willow Creek to run a weekly newspaper with a declining circulation and a building that needed a new roof.”
Winslow returned reluctantly, intending to stay for one year to stabilize the paper and find a buyer. Twenty years later, she is still here.
“I stopped looking for a buyer around year three,” she writes. “I realized that I did not want to leave. I wanted to be the person who decided what went on page one. I wanted to be the person who covered the Ice-Out every spring. I wanted to be the person who wrote the editorial when something mattered.”
Reflecting on two decades of change, Winslow notes that the town has transformed in ways she did not anticipate. The mill reopened. The trail was built. The Ice-Out became a regional event. The Gazette survived the death of print advertising as the internet arrived.
“I do not know what the next twenty years will bring,” she writes. “I suspect they will bring challenges I cannot imagine from my desk in 2005. But I know one thing: I will still be here, writing about them for a town that deserves to have its story told.”