Local Angles

Book excerpt: It was still The Fifties in the summer of 1963. By the next summer, the fan was spraying it against every wall. In less than a year, Martin Luther King went to Washington with his dream, President Kennedy was dead, and something happened in Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin. The Waldo Sun-Advertiser, a small daily newspaper in suburban New Jersey, reported the events with its community news. It assigned a reporter to cover local civil-rights advocates who went to the March on Washington. When the President was gunned down in Dallas, the Sun-Advertiser got reaction to the assassination from town fathers. The Sun-Advertiser's main stories about Vietnam came from wire services. But, it did run staff-written obituaries on page one to honor the war dead from its circulation area. This is the story of what happened on the Sun-Advertiser when the trouble started.