WILLOW CREEK — After nineteen years as editor and publisher, Harold Finch has sold the Willow Creek Gazette to Walter P. Dinsmore of Bangor. The sale price was not disclosed. Finch will stay on as editor for six more months before retiring to a small property on the coast near Belfast.
“I have recorded the passing of the shipbuilding era and the arrival of the railroad,” Finch wrote in his farewell editorial. “I have watched Thorne & Sons close its yard and the Willow Creek Hardwood Flooring Company open its mill. I have written obituaries for men who built vessels with their hands and birth announcements for children who will never see a ship launched from Thorne’s Bend. The town has changed more in the nineteen years of this paper’s life than in the previous fifty. It has been my privilege to write the first draft of that change.”
Dinsmore, who travelled from Bangor to Willow Creek by rail for the signing, was struck by the contrast his predecessor had documented. “I stepped off the train at the Willow Creek depot and walked down Main Street,” he said. “I saw the mill, the rail spur, the library, all built since the railroad arrived. And then I walked down to Thorne’s Bend and saw the submerged launching slip, the silent proof of what came before. It is a town caught between its past and its future. That is a good town for a newspaperman to work in.”