Whiting’s Newspaper History
From the Congregationalist to the WRite Stuff

John Hmurovic
June 2026

There are easier places than Whiting to make money in the newspaper business. Many have tried, many made a living out of it, and many have failed. Despite the struggles, Whiting has a rich, and interesting, newspaper history.

It started with a minister. In 1890, less than a year after Standard Oil built its Whiting Refinery, Rev. David Hohman of the Plymouth Congregational Church felt he needed a way to let his congregation know what was going on, not only with their church but also with the rapidly growing community of Whiting. He bought a few fonts of type and an old printing press and published a paper he called The Congregationalist.

Whiting’s first newspaper was a success. Readership expanded beyond Rev. Hohman’s congregation, and in January 1891 he changed the name to the Whiting News.

But Rev. Hohman was a man of God first, a journalist second, and when his church wanted him to move to another city, he needed to sell the paper. The buyer was real estate dealer James G. Davidson. Davidson was a businessman, and he saw the newspaper as a way to promote his real estate business. What he didn’t know, however, was how to run a newspaper.

Davidson wanted to make a big splash, so he started by printing ten thousand copies of the Whiting News. But Whiting’s population at the time was just three thousand. He quickly ran into money problems, so by June 1891 he sold the newspaper to his brother, Henry S. Davidson.

Henry got the business in shape, and if there was a Whiting Newspaper Hall-of-Fame he would deserve a plaque on the wall for the way he handled a problem in 1894. That year, nationally, there was a major labor dispute. Workers struck against the Pullman Company’s railcar factory in Chicago and for more than two months they shut down freight and passenger trains in many parts of the country, in an era when railroads were the major means of moving people and products.

The number of items that didn’t get delivered because of the strike was huge, but the one which mattered the most to Davidson and the Whiting News was newsprint, the paper he needed to print the publication. Without newsprint there would be no newspaper. Davidson, however, came up with a solution. He had access to some wallpaper. The July 6, 1894, issue of the Whiting News was a limited edition, because it was printed on the back of wallpaper.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, newspapers were highly politically partisan. The Whiting News was a Republican newspaper. In 1894, a competitor emerged, called the Whiting Democrat. It wasn’t the first competitor to the News. In 1892, the Whiting Standard appeared, published by Edwin S. Gilbert and edited by Edward A. Gowe. Within a short time, they closed their shop and sold their printing equipment to Davidson at the Whiting News.

Davidson wasn’t so lucky with the Whiting Democrat, because it was run by the very competent Ulysses Grant Swartz. Swartz entered the newspaper business on a mission. Whiting was under political attack from Hammond. At that time, Whiting was just an unincorporated part of Lake County. It had no town or city government, but it did have a huge oil refinery that paid taxes. Hammond city officials wanted that tax money for their treasury. They made an aggressive move to make Whiting a part of Hammond. Swartz felt that the Whiting News welcomed Hammond’s takeover, while he felt the people of Whiting needed to put up a fight.

The two newspapers battled it out on their pages. Thanks in part to the push that Swartz provided through the Whiting Democrat, Whiting incorporated as a town, defending itself from a Hammond takeover. Hammond did not walk away from its expansion campaign empty handed. Besides Whiting, it wanted to take over another unincorporated area that provided access to Lake Michigan. It gobbled up Robertsdale.

In 1895, Henry Davidson wanted out of his role with the Whiting News. He sold the newspaper back to his brother, James Davidson.   

James was a busy man and was not fully committed to the newspaper business. If he had other things to do, the News just didn’t get published that week. Over at the Democrat, Editor U.G. Swartz was also running into time problems. Even before he started the newspaper, he had a job at the refinery. By 1896, Standard Oil had offered him new opportunities that appealed to him. At around the same time he was appointed to the job of postmaster in Whiting. Something had to give. Swartz sold the Whiting Democrat. William Ingham was the new owner.

Ingham was the publisher and editor of the East Chicago Gazette. When he bought the Whiting Democrat, he merged the two operations and moved everything to Whiting. He also changed the name of the Democrat to the Whiting Sun. The first issue of the newly christened newspaper was on January 1, 1897.

The change of ownership and the change of name did not change the bad blood between what was now the Whiting Sun, and the Whiting News. Most likely as a cost-cutting tool, the Whiting News arranged to have its papers printed at the offices of the Hammond Tribune. The editor of the Whiting Sun pounced. He called the News a “Hammond newspaper,” and harkening back to Hammond’s attempted takeover he said the Whiting News had always “worked against Whiting’s interests.”

William Ingham and the Sun were making inroads against the News. Seeing that Whiting was growing and spreading to the west down 119th Street, the Sun moved its offices across the railroad tracks that once crossed 119th Street near today’s Oil City Stadium. Up until that time, the business center of Whiting was Front Street. With that move, the Sun showed it was forward-thinking and agreeing with those who saw 119th Street as the future retail hub of the city.

Then, in 1898, William Ingham died. Ownership of the Sun went to Cecil Ingham, his son, who was just seventeen years old. Cecil had been working as a manager at the paper, but now he was suddenly the editor and the owner. What he really wanted was to continue his education and go west. He didn’t want a career as a newspaperman.

William’s family encouraged him to pursue his dreams and to sell the newspaper. He tried in 1900, but a sale fell through and he had no choice but to stay on. He moved the office, again, this time to Schrage Avenue, just two doors south of Fischrupp Avenue, and he expanded delivery of the Whiting Sun to the west to Robertsdale; and to two neighborhoods to the east, Oklahoma and Berry Lake, both of which would soon be gobbled up by the rapidly growing refinery.

Meanwhile, there was change in the competition. In 1901, after a decade at the helm of the Whiting News, the Davidson family decided to move on. James Davidson sold the News to Edwin S. Gilbert, the former editor of the short-lived Whiting Standard, who was also the owner of the East Chicago Globe.

A year later, 1902, young Cecil Ingham was finally able to sell the Whiting Sun, the paper he inherited. The buyer was Brook Bowman. Meanwhile, Gilbert was struggling to keep the News in business. In 1904, he leased the paper to Edwin H. Farr.

The two had political differences and in 1906, Farr decided to start his own newspaper. The competition was too much for Gilbert, who was also committed to his new job as postmaster in East Chicago. He shut down the Whiting News. The city’s first newspaper was gone.

But Whiting was still a two-newspaper town. In 1902, soon after Bowman purchased the Whiting Sun, he made a slight change to the name of the paper. It was now called the Whiting Saturday Sun to emphasize the day it came out, and to emphasize that it was a new newspaper with a different owner. The competition for the Saturday Sun was Edwin Farr’s paper, the Whiting Call.

If a Whiting Newspaper Hall-of-Fame existed, Edwin Farr would be one of its first inductees. “Under the ownership of Edwin H. Farr,” someone later wrote, “the Call was a bright, newsy sheet and the most successful of all papers.”

Farr was an excellent writer with a good sense of humor. He was, “Probably one of the best writers that ever entered the newspaper field in Lake County, if not the state,” it was said of him. He was a local journalist who thoroughly covered the news, and even when he used humor he’d tie it to a local person, place, or event, such as he did with this limerick:

 There once was a doctor in Whiting
Who tried to stop two dogs from fighting:
But one mangy pup,
Turned him t’other side up,
And the tear in his pants was afrightening.

The Call had a weekly column, called “The Listener.” It appeared to be written by an anonymous writer, by “the fellow who hears things,” as it proclaimed at the top of each week’s column. Although everyone knew it was Farr who wrote it, the column let him slip into a different character, wandering Whiting while carrying his jug.

He wrote The Listener in a folksy style, and the stories he told were usually about the people that The Listener encountered in Whiting, the places he went, or the events he witnessed. “He had a style all of his own, and in his column,” another writer said, “He has written some classic humor.” Here is an example from 1920, where he tells about a news event, but in character as The Listener:

The Listener was scart out of ten years growth the other night when a flash of lightning decided that the high school chimney was in the way and proceeded to trim a ton or so of bricks out of it. The bricks flew in every direction, just as if they were glad to get down after being way up there so long, and the Listener was three or four times glad that he was far enough away that they didn’t any of them hit him.

Farr and the Call did well, but the Whiting Saturday Sun was struggling. In 1908, Farr purchased the Saturday Sun and merged it with the Call. Starting on January 29, 1909, the paper was called the Whiting Call-Sun. That only lasted until August. “The hyphenated name was never pleasant,” Farr wrote in explaining why he went back to calling the paper the Whiting Call, “and it was only used to show what had become of the Sun.”

Throughout the 1910s, the Whiting Call was the city’s only newspaper. It was a weekly paper, and its main competition was a daily founded in 1906, the Lake County Times, later to be called the Hammond Times, and even later The Times. There were also numerous Chicago newspapers read in Whiting, but only the Lake County Times made some effort to cover Whiting news.

Even though he had little local competition, Farr found that making a living as a newspaper publisher was difficult in Whiting and he sometimes complained about it in print. “The paper has not had the support it deserved,” he wrote in 1921, under the headline: “Whiting Call to Cease Publication Next Week.”  The lack of support he was referring to was directed at the local business community for not using his paper for advertising.

Despite the threat to shut down, the paper kept going. Increasingly, Farr looked at other ways to make money. In 1917, he teamed up with another man who deserves a place in the Whiting Newspaper Hall-of-Fame: James J. Griffith, known as Pat. He operated a printing company called Griffith Printing. In 1917, he consolidated that printing company with the Call. Stationery, leaflets, cards, anything that needed to be printed was offered by what was called the Ben Franklin Press. Farr was still frustrated by the economics of the business, and in 1923 he threw in the towel. The Whiting Call ended its run of about seventeen years.

Other newspaper publishers appeared to fill the gap. Borrowing a name from the past, a new Whiting News appeared in 1924. One of its editors over its four years of operation was Dorothy Zimmerman, possibly the first woman to hold that position in Whiting’s newspaper history. The Whiting Herald also appeared in 1928, but it closed soon after.

There was something about running a newspaper that kept pulling at Edwin Farr. In 1925, he was back. He started a new paper, the Whiting Star. “Our slogan” he wrote, “is Whiting for Whiting.” Still looking for ways to convince local businesses to advertise, he said he would only accept ads from Whiting businesses and institutions.” According to Farr, other papers, by accepting ads from Hammond or East Chicago businesses, were encouraging readers “to go out of town for their purchases.” Farr said that “money earned by Whiting residents should go to upbuild Whiting first and last.”

The 1920s were prosperous for Whiting. Even when the Depression hit in 1929 and many struggled financially through the 1930s, the economy wasn’t quite as bad in Whiting. The Standard Oil refinery was still growing, and so was Whiting’s population. “There are perhaps three hundred businesses and institutions susceptible of advertising in Whiting,” Farr wrote in 1925 from his office on Fischrupp Avenue. He worked hard at convincing local businesses of the value of advertising. Within a year of returning, Farr gave up. He stepped away from the newspaper business, this time for good.

He sold the Whiting Star. Its new owners tried to expand its reach and maybe lure advertisers by circulating the paper to a bigger audience of potential customers. They changed the name to the Whiting Star and Northside News, expanding it to Hammond’s northside. The newspaper only lasted until 1927.

While Farr’s time in Whiting journalism had come to an end, the career of James J. Griffth, one of his former partners, was just kicking into high gear. Griffith took over the Whiting Call and changed its name to the Ben Franklin News in 1928. The newspaper was part of the Ben Franklin Printing Company, or Ben Franklin Press, which moved its entire operation into the newly built Central State Bank Building in 1929, Whiting’s newest and tallest building, located on the southwest corner of Indianapolis Boulevard and 119th Street.                 

“The (printing) company is one of the largest concerns of its kind in the Calumet district,” Griffith wrote. He installed a modern printing press, with “a running speed of 3,500 completed newspapers per hour.” The Ben Franklin News, he said, would be printed twice a week and eventually three times a week. “Whether it will ever have a daily is a question that must be answered at a later date.”

That date came on February 27, 1935, when the Ben Franklin News became the Whiting Daily Times. For the first time, Whiting had a daily newspaper. The Daily Times cost three cents a copy, but there were not enough Whiting businesses buying ads to keep a daily newspaper afloat. The Whiting Daily Times ended its run on December 31, 1935, about ten months after it started.

Although the Whiting Daily Times was finished, Griffith wasn’t. He changed the name of the paper to the Whiting Times in January 1936 and made it a once-a-week publication. During the 1940s, it was Whiting’s newspaper and Griffith was Whiting’s newspaperman. The Whiting Times lasted until 1948. Griffith, who was 54 years old at the time and with thirty years of experience as an editor and publisher in Whiting, was ready to try something different. He started a newspaper called the Times-Grafic.

The last issue of the Whiting Times was February 19, 1948. After that issue, Griffith closed the door on the Times and opened for business as the Times-Grafic. There was no fanfare in the pages of either newspaper to announce the change. There wasn’t even much change in how the papers looked.

It took time for the Times-Grafic to fully make the shift to a publication that relied more heavily on photographs, as well as news stories and community announcements. Photographs of wedding engagements, children’s birthday parties, meetings of local clubs and organizations, and school and community events became one of the main attractions of the newspaper.

In 1949, a competitor appeared, called the Lakeview Beacon. It also relied on a combination of photographs and news stories. By that time, the front page of the Times-Grafic was sometimes entirely composed of photos, with captions being the only copy.

The Lakeview Beacon was operated by Joseph Vrabely Sr., who owned Lake Shore Press, located in Gary. His son, Joseph Vrabely Jr. served as business manager of the paper, and Austin Boyle was the editor and publisher. All three were Whiting residents. But the Lakeview Beacon only lasted until March 1952. It was bought by Harry Hoffman of Gary, who merged it with his Gary publication called The Illustrated Guide. Boyle continued as editor and Hoffman stressed that “a new kind of pictorial journalism will be brought to Whiting-Robertsdale in the Illustrated Guide.”

Nationally, news magazines like Life and Look reached their peaks of popularity in the 1950s, and new magazines appeared that heavily relied on photographs, such as Sports Illustrated in 1954, and Playboy in 1953. Newspapers like the Times-Grafic, Lakeview Beacon, and The Illustrated Guide followed that trend

Although styles changed, the Whiting newspaper market didn’t. It was still a tough place to publish a newspaper. The Illustrated Guide quickly went away. The Whiting newspaper market belonged solely to the Times-Grafic. It became Whiting’s newspaper of the 1950s and 1960s.     

James J. Griffth also became Whiting’s longest-serving journalist. He stayed with the Times-Grafic until his death in August 1966. Griffith started in the newspaper business in 1906, as a newsboy. He worked his way up to every position in the printing and newspaper businesses. In a 1963 story in the Indiana Publisher, he said that “printing and publishing still is and always will be my hobby.” He said he has always enjoyed it, “and will continue to enjoy it until my number comes up.”

Griffith’s widow sold the Times-Grafic shortly after his death, to a newspaper group that printed several area weekly papers. The family tree of the Times-Grafic starts with the Whiting Democrat in 1894. It continued through the Whiting News, Whiting Sun, Whiting Call-Sun, Ben Franklin News, and the Whiting Times. Editor Virginia Allison and publisher Helen Orland kept it alive for almost seven years after Griffith’s death. The last issue of the Times-Grafic was on January 10, 1974. In the end, it was the victim of Whiting’s tough climate for the newspaper and printing industry. Its parting words were almost an echo of what Edwin Farr wrote about a half-century earlier. The paper was ending, it said in the last issue of Times-Grafic, “Due to a lack of interest and financial support through advertising by your local merchants.”

The end of the Times-Grafic was also the end of an era in Whiting newspapers. Griffith and his predecessors tried to make money by selling ads, and by offering other printing services. By the 1970s, it was becoming clear that their business model no longer worked.

Throughout the remainder of the 20th century, what happened in the newspaper industry was similar to what happened in countless other businesses and even school systems. Smaller school systems, for instance, were consolidated into a new, larger school district, and community newspapers went through a similar consolidation. The new business model was for a company to own several different newspaper titles with each title aimed at a specific community. It was a system based on the belief that small newspapers could no longer survive on their own. 

The Calumet Day was the first major replacement for the Times-Grafic. It was Whiting’s newspaper in the 1980s, and it was owned by Panax Publishing. Panax was headquartered in East Lansing, Michigan, and it owned over 40 daily and weekly newspapers. Locally, they included the Dyer Sun Journal, The Griffith Sun Journal, The Daily Calumet (serving the East Side of Chicago), and the Homewood Scene.

Even though the Calumet Day was Whiting’s newspaper in the ‘80s, its focus wasn’t entirely on Whiting. The home office was across the Illinois state line in Lansing, and the newspaper also covered North Hammond and East Chicago, as well as Whiting and Robertsdale. In the years that followed, Panax sold the Calumet Day to Trinity Co., Inc., which then soon sold it to Midland Communications, which then sold it to Pulitzer Community Newspapers. In October 1989, the Calumet Day went out of business.  

Whiting’s newspaper of the 1990s was The Trumpeter. It was owned by Lakeview Publishing, which had its office on the East Side of Chicago. Besides The Trumpeter, which served Whiting-Robertsdale, they printed the Hegewisch Herald, South Chicago Chronicle, and The East Side Times.

Publishers Lee H. Anglin and George Grbic said they would cover local news and hit the streets with their weekly newspaper every Tuesday. It was delivered by carrier to each home as a free publication, although they asked for voluntary contributions of 20 dollars a year. They also stressed that as the “only newspaper devoted exclusively to Whiting-Robertsdale,” its writers and editors would be people who lived in the community. One way they did that was by adding local columnists, like Al Koch and Tom Dabertin from Whiting-Robertsdale, along with Whiting Mayor Bob Bercik, Robertsdale City Councilman Dr. George Jancosek, and Whiting Police Lieutenant John Sopo, among others.  

By 1993, The Trumpeter expanded beyond Whiting-Robertsdale to include North Hammond and East Chicago. Publisher Lee Anglin said they’d like to become a twice-a-week newspaper, “and soon after that a daily community newspaper.” It never happened. The company had severe financial problems and reorganized under different names to try to manage its debt. It published under names like the Calumet Herald, or the Hammond-Whiting Herald for a time in the mid-1990s. By the late 1990s, Whiting was without a newspaper of any kind.

Other papers tried to fill the vacuum, including the Calumet Journal, and even The New Times-Graphic. None of them lasted long. In 1999, the Whiting-Robertsdale Chamber of Commerce recognized the value of having a local newspaper to tell residents what was going on in the community and to promote local businesses. In July of that year The WRite Stuff was published for the first time. It was a monthly publication. The editor was Gayle Faulkner Kosalko.

Like Edwin Farr in the early days of Whiting’s newspaper history, Gayle Kosalko had a sense of humor that showed through right from the start. The first issue was called What Is This? “While What Is This,” she wrote, “certainly works well for our first issue (because it’s probably just what you asked yourself when you first got it) the Whiting-Robertsdale Chamber of Commerce would like to have the second issue of our news magazine christened with a new and permanent title.”

To choose a new name the Chamber held a contest for readers to submit ideas, with the winner getting a $50 gift certificate for Phil Smidt’s restaurant. They received 118 entries. Al Matulewicz was the winner with his suggestion to name it the WRite Stuff. “The title,” according to Gayle Kosalko, “incorporated the fact that the news magazine is for both Whiting and Robertsdale.” Written correctly the “W” and the “R” in the word “WRite” are both capitalized to make that point. She said the title also “is a great play on the idea of writing.”

In his historical text, The Calumet Region: Indiana’s Last Frontier, Powell A. Moore wrote that “Whiting was a fertile field for weekly newspapers in its early years.” There has always been a desire for local news in Whiting. Much of it, after the start of the 21st century is being filled by online social media sites. For print publishers in the 2020s, economic realities make it difficult for even the biggest newspapers in the biggest cities to prosper.

For communities like Whiting, the economics for newspaper publishing have always been tough. As the Whiting Times said in 1939, “Like many other businesses, the publishers had their ups and downs and at best Whiting has been a relatively difficult field for newspapers.”

Despite that, from Rev. David A. Hohman, to James G. and Henry S. Davidson, to Ulysses Grant Swartz, to Edwin H. Farr, to James J. Griffith, to Gayle Faulkner Kosalko, Whiting has been fortunate to have a long line of journalists, writers, and publishers who have overcome the obstacles and kept its residents informed and entertained. 

Whiting has also been fortunate that some of its newspaper history has been preserved for all to examine. The Whiting Public Library collected many of the newspapers over the years, and in 1980 it copied its collection to microfilm. It later digitized that collection. Copies of the digitized papers were given by the library to the Whiting-Robertsdale Historical Society, which has been working to make those newspapers available to the public at no cost via the website Hoosier State Chronicles, which is operated by the Indiana State Library. Many of Whiting’s newspapers were never collected, and others were never microfilmed, but newspapers from the Whiting Democrat, Whiting Call, Times-Grafic, Calumet Day, and many more, will all be made accessible to everyone.