2006.08.22_PennySaver, North County News founder John W. Chase dies at 89

2006.08.22_PennySaver, North County News founder John W. Chase dies at 89

Grantham, Kathy and Pezzullo, Rick

"Yorktown History Scrapbook" Binder, Volume 5 - People

North County News

2006.08.22

Compiled by the staff of the John C. Hart Memorial Library

This item is made available for research and educational purposes by the John C. Hart Memorial Library. Rights status is not evaluated.

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2006

John W. Chase, founder of the PennySaver and North County News, dies August 9 at his home in Yorktown of cancer of the esophagus.
He was 89.
"He was probably the most unrecognized person in our town who has contributed more than anyone else," said attorney and former Yorktown Supervisor Albert Capellini. "he was a colossal force in our community. He was really a legend."
Out of work in 1957, with a wife and two children to support, Mr. Chase was a realist.
"I'm 40 years old. Who's going to give me a job?" he said during a series of interviews in 2002 and 2003.
Tough and resilient, he gave himself full-time employment, starting the PennySaver in Yorktown, aware it was either sink or swim. What followed is a remarkable story about the power of freedom to pursue the American Dream, and in so doing, providing employment to hundreds of people.
For 12 years, Mr. Chase earned his living in advertising. With a family to care for, he wanted to move out of the city. An office associate at the Manhattan-based Newspaper Association's Bureau of Advertising suggested he look at houses in Yorktown, which he and his wife, Christa, would call home for 49 years.
He was not unprepared as the bureau began downsizing, with man staffers losing their jobs, but already preparing to go full tilt with his part-time venture.
"When I heard about the world of PennySavers, i went out and sold 16 pages of advertising for a PennySaver, representing business in Yorktown, and sent it to the Huntington PennySaver, where it was printed in a p/s format," he recalled.
The next day, on his way to work in New York, he would drop it off at the post office to be mailed. Christa worked the phone at home for classified ads, and borrowed a typewriter to facilitate her efforts.
"I had my office in a shoe box," Mr. Chase recalled.
The business needed capital for the first two or three years, "so we made a swap deal with a propane tank company, and arranged a barter with the local supermarket in exchange for groceries,
he said.
Taking the work ethic for granted, he was fired up with an idea and a goal. Mr. Chase convinced people to buy advertising in a nonexistent publication, not with intent to deceive, but because he knew it would work. There were 5,000 families living in Yorktown at the time, but the Peekskill Star and Patent Trader had only a few hundred local subscribers between them.
"What do you pay for an ad?" Mr. Chase inquired of a businessman who advertised in the Patent Trader. "None of you business" was the brusque reply. Unflappable, Chase persisted, knowing that advertiser paid $60 for a 500-circulation publication.
"For all $10, I'm offering you 5,000 families right in your area," he told the businessman. That was a offer to hardheaded business man could refuse.
He had 5,000 PennySavers printed, mailing them at the Yorktown Post Office for $75. Today's postage bill for mailing the PennySaver is more than $3 million.
In the early days, when Mr. Chase was struggling to get his PennySaver printed and distributed, Parry Burrell, the first electrician in Yorktown, also had the unenviable job of inspector.
"He came to our house, checking every nook and cranny, searching from attic to basement, looking for a printer. It was against zoning laws to have a printing press at one's residence," Mr. Chase said.
However, no summons was issued because the PennySaver was printed out of town.
Mr. Chase opened his own printing operation in 1962 because "the more prosperous i became, the more printers charged me." Cutting costs, he opened the pressroom 44 years ago with two small presses. Today, about 50 people work there, including the press crew, binding and mailing crews."
The number of impressions made when printing the PennySaver runs into the millions. While the number of books is 350,000, some have 152 to 168 pages, which means about 3.5 million pages are printed weekly in the facility on Front Street.
"It's tricky business," he commented, "because of postage rates."
In 1957, Mr. Chase had no idea that some day the Yorktown PennySaver Media Group would be the largest PennySaver and newspaper combinations in the country.
The company distributes 20 PennySavers from Westchester to all the counties in New York as far north as Columbia County. Families alwasy want to buy or sell something, and this weekly giveaway is a pipeline connecting buyers and sellers.
"It fills an economic need," he said, " that's why it exists."
How did he learn to gauge his prices? "By intuition," he said, explaining pricing and objective, as well as psychological.
"Objectively, you know that certain costs must be met, and psychologically, you have to know how far you can go to get to the point where somebody will buy or reject it. And that's intuition," Mr. Chase explained.
He cited the example of trying to sell Grand Union 50 weeks of advertising .
"When I mentioned closing down operations for two weeks around Christmas vacation (the low end of the advertising curve), I saw by the look in his eye that I had lost him."
Upon returning to his office, "Mr. Chase called him back, saying, "I was planning to start my operation 52 weeks a year anyway, beginning next week." The manager asked him to come right back, and signed a contract for the following year to run for 52 weeks.
Jean Secor worked for the Mr. Chase for 44 years and said one of his secrets of his success was loyalty to advertisers, suppliers and employees.
"He was a great boss. He treated everyone with a great deal of compassion," Secor said.
Mr. Chase was approached by several people in the community to start a local news paper after another publication in Yorktown folded. So on October 20, 1966, the Yorktowner made its debut. In 1978, the newspaper, originally set up like a newsletter, expanded its boundaries and was renamed North County News.
"I started a newspaper from an altruistic standpoint because I had a community spirit. I think the community has benefitted from it in terms of having an insight in town and community activities int he area." Mr. Chase said in 1997. "The paper has been pro-environment and for justice and fairness and we've tried to live by that policy."
"I don't think anybody realizes what it takes to put out a newspaper. There's a tremendous amount of work involved. not only editorially but also in the physical production of it," he said. "I would miss it if it didn't come to my house or I wasn't able to produce it."
The Nort County News has a circulation of about 9,000 and is the recipient of numerous awards annually by the New York State Press Association. Last Year, it received 10 awards, including five first-place honors, and finishing fourth overall competing against 242 weekly newspapers across the state.
The newspaper has had 12 managing editors in it's history. Mr. Chase credited George Candreva, who was editor from 1969 to 1973, with giving the newspaper a hard edge. Following in Candreva's footsteps were Nancy Haggerty, who served from 1984 to 1996, and Rick Pezzullo, the managing editor since 1996 who started his career as a high school sports writer in 1980.
Aside from financial control, Mr. Chase stayed in the background of the North County News.
"I read the editorials and allow Rick to run the paper," Mr. Chase said in 2003. "My philosophy is that we are pro-environment, and middle of the road politically, not leaning one way or the other. We're not a pro-Republican paper, and we are not a pro-Democratic paper, although we are accused of being one or the other."
Mr. Chase was born February 18, 1917 in Brooklyn to Russian immigrants Walter and Anna Chase.
He had the best of all worlds for a child: a loving, close family that gave him and his brother, Fred, a solid upbringing.
"My mother did not work outside the home, and she was a great cook," Mr. Chase said, "and also worked very hard at home to care for my younger brother and me."
Mr. Chase remembered the warmth and affection in his mother's voice when she referred to him as "Sonny my little lamb." His father was a precision machinist who operated machines that created springs in all sizes for various types of machines. He also made his own wine and whiskey, and the "best" bathtub gin that eh shared with his family and friends.
Both parents came from farming families in Russia. His father worked in a factory in Vilna. His mother was born in the Ukraine, and lived in Poltava. And ardent student of history, Mr. Chase noted Poltava was a famous battle ground where Peter the Great defeated Charles XII of Sweden. Looking forward to a better life in America, Mt. Chase's parents arrived here in 1912, before World War I.
Mr. Chase's father taught his brother the nuts and bolts of working on precision machinery, but Mr. Chase was not interested because "the work seemed too hard." Mr. Chase said he was ideally suited for an academic high school, rather than one of trades and crafts. Instead, Mr. Chase attended a fine technical high school like Brooklyn Tech, and his brother enrolled at an academic high school.
After high school (1935), Mr. Chase took the exam for postal clerk or carrier. Passing with a high grade, he was offered a job in Washington, D.C., working there for six years, until 1941. Remaining in the postal system, he transferred to New York, wanting to continue his education. He attended NYU during the day and worked at night. He was drafted in 1942 when the war broke out. One year of accounting at NYU got him i Post Finance, paying officers and enlisted men at Fort Dunpont in Delaware.
Mr. Chase filed an application for further education, and ended up back at NYU for nine months. he finished the course first in his class, studying to be a specialist on the Soviet Union, and also spoke fluent Russian. It made little sense that he was sent to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and issued a Browning Automatic Rifle (it shoots 550 bullets a minute), well aware that the average life of a BAR man is two minutes in battle. Sent into the Infantry, Corporal Chase carried his 30-lb. BAR in the 69th Infantry Division for about five months, when he learned there were vacancies in Division Finance.
With his experience in accounting and Post Finance, Mr. Chase was now part of the rear echelon. Then began a dizzying odyssey, being shipped to England two months later n 1944, then into the tail end of the Battle of the Bulge about five kilometers behind the front lines. Suddenly, he found himself 125 kilometers behind the front lines, and eventually wound up in Leipzig, Germany with the 69th Infantry Division, and was shortly transferred to Paris. Still a corporal, Chase was recommended as a liaison between the Soviet and American armies, assigned to Czechoslovakia at Pilsen in the American zone for one year.
The American corporal and the Russian officers were very young, in their mid-20s. Whatever their rank, Mr. Chase dealt easily with them, including American and Russian generals. Relaxed and friendly talks were preceded by the invitation, "All right, John, let's have a drink!" His final transfer to Germany at the boarder in Hof, still as Russian liaison, lasted until the war ended in 1945. He was offered a job in Obergammergau (outside of Munich) in Military Intelligence, teaching Russian geography, but decided to go home.
He returned to his job in the post office, working at night and attending NYU during the day. Majoring in economics, Mr. Chase finished the four-year course in three years. After graduation, he resigned from the post office and traveled to California. Resuming old friendships on the West Coast, he also indulged his love of gambling, playing bridge and other card games for small stakes. In the 1950s, he got a job with the Washington State Apple Commission to study marketing of the apple industry at local supermarket chains in Los Angeles. His research concluded with a report written for the Apple Commission in Yakima, Washington.
Mr. Chase received two simultaneous job offers, each paying $70 a week, one in advertising research at the L.A. Times and the others writing articles for the Women's Wear Daily. He chose the latter. He wrote about trends in the apparel industry, finding out what was fashionable for postcard surveys. His next job was in the advertising department of Hearst's Comic Weekly. For about three years, Mr. Chase assisted the salesmen in making presentations for ads that ran on the Comic weekly pages, which ran a circulation of 10 million.
" But television ruined it," Mr. Chase explained. "From then on, nobody could sell advertising in the comics."
Mr. Chase then worked for Newsweek in the circulation promotion department for two years. His next and last jobs was at the Newspaper Association's Bureau of Advertising on Lexington Avenue. Little did he know that fate was about to throw him a curve, while offering the opportunity of a lifetime; loosing his job and creating PennySaver.
"He never forgot where he came from," said Hermann Schulz, owner of Yorktown Auto Body and a longtime friend f Mr. Chase. "he tried to treat people as he himself wanted to be treated. He always has a smile. he always had a good word to say about someone. He was good people."
Mr. Chase is survived by his wife of 54 years, Christina; two daughters, Carla Chase of Yorktown and Claudia Chase of New Hampshire; and three grandchildren.
A funeral service was held Monday at St. Gregory Orthodox Church in Wappingers Falls. He was buried at Amawalk Cemetery.

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