Eighteen years ago this week, residents received the very first issue of The Hinsdalean on their doorsteps. (Or maybe in their bushes, and for that we apologize!)
To say we were excited is an understatement. Jim Slonoff and I had dreamed of owning our own newspaper, and a number of things lined up in 2006 to make that possible. We were bought out of our old jobs at The Doings and a beautiful office at 7 W. First St. became available for us to sublet. My husband called it the perfect storm.
It's been a tradition since our first anniversary to run a full-page ad in the paper to mark the occasion. The very first year the ad featured a stack of the first 52 issues of the paper with a single lit birthday candle on top. And no, we didn't use Photoshop!
We learned a little something after we ran our second anniversary ad, which listed all the things that had run in the paper and that had happened over our first two years - from 104 editorials to 24 full moons. An astute reader called to point out an error, as a second full moon - or blue moon - had occurred in June 2007.
We've also recreated the cover of "Abbey Road" (substituting Ninth Street for the famous British thoroughfare) and spelled out "16" in baked goods for our Sweet 16.
This year we took our inspiration from Coach Q and Brent Sopel, who lived in town while the Blackhawks were winning the Stanley Cup. The two of them took the cup all over town - Jim and I spent hours to trying to track it down but were always just a bit late.
That day didn't result in any photos, but it did inspire us to create our anniversary ad on Page 23 of this week's paper. We've had a big trophy in our office since we first were named the best newspaper of our size in the state in 2020. We got an even bigger one - the Will Loomis Memorial Trophy - in 2022 when the circulation sizes for the various trophies changed. This year we decided we might as well do something with it besides having it sit on a shelf.
And so we took the Loomis Cup - I mean trophy - out to the places Coach Q used to take the Stanley Cup, like Page's and The Fruit Store. We asked the Hinsdale Central cheerleaders to hoist it in a pyramid. Ben Bradley, our reader advisory board member and TV news anchor, agreed to pose with it on the WGN set.
"Now that is a major award," the audio engineer said when we walked into the studio. (I always like running into other fans of "A Christmas Story.")
And it is a major award. While we write a story each year about the results of the Illinois Press Association's annual contest, we don't celebrate our accomplishment as much as we could - or should.
We had so much fun taking the trophy out and we've come up with a list of other spots we'd like to photograph it. So we've decided we'll continue taking it to different spots in town and share those photos in ads we'll run throughout the year. So if you see us out and about and feel like humming a few bars of "Chelsea Dagger," please do!
- Pamela Lannom is editor
of The Hinsdalean.
Readers can email her at
