Free-&-Easy Enterprise

George Batchelder was out cutting the grass in front of the store Friday morning, and paused in his labors to tell a passerby about his aunt in Massachusetts. We heard him inside the Enterprise. She's fine.

That kind of news item, and such headlines as BILL CAREY'S PANTS FOUND AT SABUTTUS, sometimes makes the 1,500 Down-East readers of the Lisbon Falls (Me.) Enterprise suspect that their weekly is pulling their legs. But his tongue-in-cheek reporting, besides winning Editor-Author (Farmer Takes a Wife) John Gould, 38, a reputation as a Yankee humorist, has brought his weekly 1,000 "foreign" subscribers from other parts of the U.S.

They turn to the Enterprise with the same escapist hunger that makes thousands of city-pent slickers buy the Old Farmer's Almanac. They delight in the fillers ("This line fills this column"; "What's good for bee stings?") and the editorials, like the recent one that reminded the governor that "the Androscoggin River stinks again. . . . We have not heard from Governor Hildreth in some time. Does anybody know whatever became of him? . . ."

Last week, suntanned John Gould was one of the country's busiest country editors. He started two new radio programs, turned out the editorials for the Enterprise and a down-on-the-farm column for the Christian Science Monitor, worked on a new book, kept up with his 100-acre farm (he is his own hired hand) and between chores drove over to Northeast Harbor to address the Maine Press Association.

The editors blinked at his definition of news: "No news is often the best news. . . . The Enterprise is not above reporting that 'Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Harriman stayed home over the weekend.' This satisfies many of the requirements of the ideal news item, even if no other newspaper [knows] it. It gets Ken's name in the paper, informs his neighbors what he is doing, and entices the attention of people who never heard of him, if only to make them comment that this is one hell of a newspaper. . . ."

The approach has been profitable: the Enterprise was down to 268 subscribers when Gould bought it in 1945. Boston-born and Maine-reared, he knew the town from childhood summers on his grandfather's farm on nearby Lisbon Ridge. When he grew up he bought the farm, worked as an all-round newsman on the Brunswick Record. When its publisher died, a banker friend suggested that he take over the Lisbon weekly. Gould proposed a partnership to Printer J. W. ("Jess") Goud (rhymes with food), who seemed, after the Maine fashion, completely uninterested. Next morning Goud showed up with his eyeshade and line gauge, ready to go into business.

Gould & Goud's editorial staff is blonde Marjorie Beech, imported from England, where she was a telegraph operator in the WRENS. Because names make the Enterprise's news, Marjorie is working hard to develop its squad of eight rural correspondents, all hired because they had no experience. Last week, on one of his new radio programs, Editor Gould had all eight in for an ad-libbed chat. "How many people in Methodist Corner?" he asked one. "About 15 families," she told him. And how did she get the news?,Well, by telephone, mostly. "Are they all on the same line?" asked the boss. "Sure," she explained, "that's how I get the news."

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