PEEKSKILL, NY Longtime city resident Jack Murphy will be honored tonight by the Field Library for his various contributions to the city.
Murphy helped found the annual Peekskill St. Patricks Day Parade and was involved with Lapolla Little League, The Paramount Center and The Peekskill-Cortlandt Chamber of Commerce, among others.
But he is probably best known for being the editor-in-chief of the Peekskill Evening Star newspaper until it changed hands and eventually names. Murphy began his journalism career as a part-time sportswriter for The Times Union in Albany while in college, graduating in 1966 from Siena College with a degree in English.
His first full-time job was at the New Haven Register writing sports. That was followed by a short run at the Schenectady Union-Star, and then four years on the city desk of Albany Knickerbocker News, where he would become the executive city editor.
In 1973, Murphy was recruited to be the editor of The Evening Star, the storied Peekskill newspaper founded in 1922 when it was purchased by Ogden. The newspaper he inherited was a far cry from the more modern automated operations of the time.
My first thought was that I had made a ghastly mistake, Murphy said. "It was the first time in my life that I had ever been in a composing (print) room that was entirely manually operated. We could have put a bubble over it and called it a museum of newspaper and would have been just as successful.
Murphy spent much of his first year on planning and executing new production processes.
The paper would survive for another 12 years with Murphy at the helm but its downfall was eventually a lack of advertising revenue due to its advertising deal with Gannett, Murphy said.
It looked like a prosperous paper, during the week it would be 36 to 40 pages with a lot of ads in it, Murphy recalled. But we had an arrangement with Gannett where they sold the national ads for the entire county, including us. We might sell you an ad for $1,000 but if you wanted it in all the [county] papers, Gannett would sell it to them for $4,000 and divvy it up 10 ways, so instead of the full thousand wed get $400. And then theyd take a representation fee off of that.
In November 1995, Gannett purchased the paper, along with several other weekly papers in the county, and relocated it to Yorktown. Murphy left the company after about a year and the paper eventually became part of the Journal News.
Murphy said more than 25 years later he still hears from residents who miss the Peekskill Evening Star. When asked why that was, he said readers loved the focus on local news usually found in weekly papers above all else, sometimes literally.
On the day that Nixons vice president resigned it was top of the page news in every paper but it ran across the bottom of our paper, Murphy said. And it wasnt lack of news judgement on my part - it was deliberately done.
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