Fred Cicetti

Local Angles: Big News in Small Towns Fred Cicetti

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.