By Mary Carter
Eagle Times Correspondent
Claremont, NH — In the summer of 1909, Anson Wood Belding relocated from Rensselaer, NY, to Claremont with two goals in mind. One was to teach. The second was to edit a newspaper.
After serving three years as principal of Stevens High School, Belding took out a loan and purchased The National Eagle.
Calling it “old in years and large in page,” Belding had a vision for creating a daily newspaper. He believed readers would “appreciate a means of learning promptly every afternoon what went on in the world.”
In 1912, big-city newspapers did not arrive in Claremont until the next day.
Belding started down the path of his dreams in Claremont’s Union Block with a working staff of six and some hand-fed two-cylinder presses. Belding purchased a Linotype to help speed up the process. Now, all he needed was a sharp writer.
Enter Kenneth Duane Whipple.
Belding knew Whipple from his time as a principal at Stevens High. Belding hailed Whipple as an “A-1 student” who would be able to “recognize a good story and write it up in proper fashion.”
Whipple became Belding’s right-hand man, securing leads, reporting stories, copying news off the wire and proofreading.
“There was scarcely a phase of the editorial work that K.D.W. did not tackle and learn to do extremely well,” Belding surmised in a 1964 tribute.
Six days a week, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., Belding and Whipple would man the telephone newswires, transcribing what they heard on typewriters. If they missed a word or two, they could get a repeat. Additionally, boilerplate news was shipped to the Eagle office daily from Boston.
Residing on Grove Street in Claremont, Whipple was a devoted fixture at the Daily Eagle for more than fifty years.
He enjoyed play-acting and novel writing. In the summer of 1928, Whipple had a role in historian George B. Upham’s outdoor dramatization of the Tory trials, which occurred in Claremont during the Revolutionary War. The script has been preserved at Claremont’s Historical Society on Mulberry Street.
Whipple also wrote fast-paced mystery novels, some of which are still held in special collections at the Fiske Free Library.
Whipple will be portrayed by current Eagle Times general manager Kevin Brown during the Off Broad Street Players’ upcoming “Spirits of Claremont” production. The Iowa-born Brown is enjoying his debut role with the long-established Off Broad Street Players. Like Whipple, Brown is making positive strides in the new direction of our present Eagle Times.
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