The first edition of The River Reporter was printed on December 3, 1975. 

The way I tell the story is that the paper was founded by the first managing director of Lincoln Center, Tom DiGaetani. A high-powered art consultant, he was on the board of Julliard and UNESCO. He suffered a heart attack at the age of 49 and his doctors told him to get out of town. He moved, with professional dancer Elaine Giguere, to an A-frame on Crawford Road on the bank of the Upper Delaware. He was going to start a bait business.

The town was celebrating the bicentennial and was putting on a play at the Narrowsburg Central School. Tom quickly got involved.

There he learned that Narrowsburg’s letterpress paper, the Delaware Valley News, had been sold to the Hawley Eagle. Publisher John Dyson tried to keep both papers publishing, but had a serious automobile accident on Route 652 one night on his way back to Hawley following a long day of printing the paper. He combined the papers into the Hawley News Eagle, shutting down the publication in Narrowsburg. 

The town mothers and fathers were not pleased. Narrowsburg had always had a paper and they began kitchen table meetings to strategize how to start a new one.

Meanwhile Tom, being the art consultant that he was, had an idea to start an arts organization. He thought that if the organization provided services for artists, an arts economy would follow. He worked with a founding board and created Tusten Times, Inc. in 1975; and then in 1976, he and Elaine started the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance. 

I met Tom in my senior year of college while on winter break in December 1977. A singer-songwriter artist woman, I and my partner, Glenn Pontier, a talented storyteller, called on Tom in his office in the back of the Anderson Building on Main Street to inquire about performing possibilities. After an audition, he booked us for an evening of stories and songs on February 11, 1978 in Harmonie Hall, upstairs in the Western Hotel.

He quickly made Glenn the assistant editor of the paper, and showed him around the area for a month. “The area is small,” Tom had said, remarking that one mind could know the important players and understand the key issues.

The last time I saw Tom was a Sunday at the beginning of February as I headed back to college. Saying goodbye, he called out, “This is my 19th day without a rest.” 

Glenn phoned me the following Tuesday, telling me that Tom had a heart attack while walking out to his car and died. He had changed his location, but not his lifestyle.

And there we were. Registered with the New York Charities Bureau, the paper published twice a month. It took no advertising, and was funded by 18 businesses that paid $125 dollars a year to be listed on the masthead and in a services directory on the back page. There was nothing to be done but to continue to foster the fledgling paper.

So, from those humble and aspiration beginnings, it is indeed nifty that the paper turns 50 this year.

We look forward to sharing more of our story with you in the coming year.