Remove not the ancient landmarks

Sourcing: Everything here rests on The Landmark’s own printed history (its annual anniversary editions of 2020, 2025 and 2026), its August 27, 2026 sale announcement and the three farewell columns that ran beside it, the Kansas City Business Journal’s 2023 oldest-businesses list as reprinted by the paper, the Institute for Rural Journalism’s 2016 award notice, and a Missouri State Archives finding aid. A newspaper’s account of itself is a primary document for what its owners say and a secondary one for everything else, and the piece marks which is which. The one fact the histories do not supply, a first name for the owner who died in 1916, is said so in place.

In September 1865, five months after Appomattox, a weekly newspaper appeared in Weston, Missouri, with a line from Proverbs on its masthead: Remove not the ancient landmarks. It has come out every week since. Wars, the Depression, two pandemics, and the collapse of the business model that sustained every other paper like it: none of it produced a missed edition, by the paper’s own account, which is the only account there is for a claim like that and which no one has contradicted.

Yesterday, September 1, The Platte County Landmark changed hands for the sixth time in 108 years. We reported the transaction when it was announced. This is about the pattern underneath it, which is the thing worth honoring: for more than a century, this newspaper has kept being sold to people who already worked in the building.

The apprentice

The paper moved from Weston to Platte City in 1871 and settled, in March 1899, into a brick building at 252 Main Street that a doctor had put up in 1869 as a drugstore and post office. That same year it installed a sheet-fed Babcock press so large it was run by a gasoline engine until an electric motor arrived in 1928. A gasoline engine, in a room where they set every letter by hand.

Seven years before the press came, in 1892, a 16-year-old named Max Jones had started an apprenticeship in printing at The Landmark. He became shop foreman. When the owner died in 1916 (the paper’s own histories name him only as Jenkins; his first name has fallen out of even the paper’s own telling), Jones ran the paper for the estate. On January 1, 1918, he bought it. He was editor and publisher for the next thirty-eight years, until he died in 1956. In 1923 he bought the Linotype that let one operator do the work of five or six hand-compositors; it sat in the front window on Main Street for a hundred years afterward, where people walking by could see it.

His widow, Lucile L. Jones, took over. She ran The Landmark for twenty-three years.

The man who fixed the press

By the 1970s the Babcock was seventy years old and the Linotype fifty, and when they broke, or when her staff was short, Mrs. Jones would call a newspaperman from northeastern Kansas named Dwayne Foley, who owned two weeklies and a printing plant and knew how to keep old iron running. He came when she asked. In November 1979 she sold him the paper.

The first edition under his name was the last one printed the old way. Foley switched The Landmark from hot lead to offset with that issue and left the pages of October 26, 1979, in the bed of the Babcock, where they stayed, the paper reported in 2020, for the next forty years.

He owned the paper for eight months. In July 1980, Dwayne Foley died of a heart attack at 50.

His widow, Ethel Mae Foley, became publisher. A veteran Kansas City newsman named Clay McGinnis, who had worked at the Independence Examiner, took the editor’s chair and held it for thirteen years. In the summer of 1982 the family sent its youngest son up to Platte City to help out.

The son

Guy Speckman, who wrote a column for The Landmark for six years and once owned the Savannah Reporter, put the next part more plainly than the paper’s own histories ever have:

Young man, still in high school. Parents are fully entrenched in news business, and they buy this Platte County paper when papers were still king. Then a few months after buying The Landmark, his father dies tragically as Ivan was starting his senior year in high school, and it changes the course of history for Ivan, his family and for Platte County news. Ivan was dispatched to The Landmark over the summer of 1982 to lend a hand. Young Ivan’s career path became a little less choice-oriented that day, I suppose, and he did something most would not. He embraced it.

Ivan Foley started in May 1982 with, as the paper puts it, “reporting and managing duties.” He covered news and sports and ran the business side while McGinnis edited. In August 1993 McGinnis died after heart surgery, and Foley added editor to the list. Three months later the paper bought its first two desktop computers. The histories all use the same phrase for what happened after that: the news and editorials “began taking a more aggressive approach.”

That is the paper’s own modest description of a reputation that eventually reached Kentucky. In 2016 the Institute for Rural Journalism gave Foley its Tom and Pat Gish Award for “courage, tenacity and integrity” in rural journalism, citing a career of “holding accountable public officials and those who would hold public office” in the face of “competition, intimidation and retribution.” The nominator was Bill Hankins, a Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame photographer who worked at the paper for thirteen years and whom Foley, in his last column, credits with picking and preparing every contest entry that won the paper its dozens of Missouri Press Association awards. Hankins’s line in the nomination, as the Institute reported it: “He is the best advocate for the Missouri Sunshine Law of any journalist I know.”

In 2002, twenty years after he was sent up to help, Ivan and Linda Foley bought the paper and the building from Ethel Mae Foley. Which is to say: the son bought the family paper from his father’s widow, the way the apprentice had bought it from the estate — by having already done the work.

The woman who walked in

There is one more hire that belongs in the ownership story even though she never owned anything, because the outgoing owner says so. In his final column, Foley calls hiring Cindy Rinehart “the single most significant decision I made in my 44 years.”

She walked into 252 Main in late summer 1992 and asked to see “Mr. Foley,” expecting, he writes, “some distinguished gentleman or something.” She did not know there was a job open. There was (they needed a typesetter), and by the end of the tour it was clear she understood computers better than anyone in the building. He offered on the spot. Her first day, as he remembers it, was her youngest child’s first day of kindergarten. She stayed thirty-four years, most of them with the title of office manager and, per the paper, a hand in “every aspect of the operation.” She retired Tuesday too.

Columnist Chris Kamler, who has written 654 “Rambling Moron” columns for page 3 since Foley recruited him off Twitter in 2011, is less formal about it: Rinehart “does more work in an hour than Foley does in a month.”

The reporter who came back

Stacy Wiedmaier grew up in St. Joseph, went to Park University in Parkville, and from 2006 to 2008 was a Landmark reporter while she finished school. Foley says she “lived” the paper’s approach to accountability coverage in those years. After graduating she went west to The Desert Sun, the Gannett daily in Palm Springs.

Over Thanksgiving 2022, home for the holiday, she asked Foley whether he would sell her the paper whenever he was “ready to retire,” and mentioned that she and her husband planned to move back to Missouri in the summer of 2026, if that fit. It fit. For nearly four years (Foley writes that the only people who knew were his wife and children, Rinehart, Speckman and “an attorney or two”), they stayed in touch. She moved back in July. She started shadowing in the office, and reporting, the same month; her byline is on the front page of the edition that announced her purchase. The contract was signed the week of August 24.

“I knew there would be no one I’d rather sell The Landmark to than Stacy,” Foley said in the announcement. Her own line: “I really do feel like I have the best job in the world. I get to tell people’s stories and share what’s happening in this community for a living.”

Kamler’s reaction is the one that says what everyone in local news is thinking when a 161-year-old weekly changes hands: “I am THRILLED the paper wasn’t sold to some out of town interest or company.”

What the pattern is

Line it up and it is hard to read as coincidence. Since 1918, The Landmark has changed ownership six times. Two were widows carrying on. Three were sales to someone who already had a desk there — an apprentice who had spent twenty-six years in the shop, a son who had spent twenty in the office, a reporter who had spent two in the field and eighteen years away before asking to come back. The one sale to an outsider went to the man the publisher trusted to fix her press.

Nobody planned that. It is what a small newspaper looks like when the people running it keep choosing the person who already knows where the light switch is over the buyer with the best offer. It is also, not incidentally, why the paper’s 2020 history could describe “a team of Landmarkers” dropping a ladder through a hidden trapdoor in the floor at 252 Main and finding, in the basement, a printer’s box with the name of Thomas W. Park on it — the editor who retired in 1882. Nobody had thrown anything away in 118 years.

The building itself is the one thing that did leave the family. The Foleys stripped a century of paint off its brick in 2008, put four arched windows back on the second floor, and won Platte City’s first-ever William Paxton Preservation Award for it in 2009. They sold it in 2023 to the David Barth family and moved the paper into the former county health department at 212 Marshall Road. The Babcock press, which arrived in 1899, stayed behind with the building’s new owner — it “came in the building 1899 and has not left since,” Blake Barth told FOX4 that fall. The Landmark is now, the Kansas City Business Journal found in 2023, the fifth-oldest business in the Kansas City area and the oldest on the Missouri side but one — founded the same year as Commerce Bank, and fifteen years before The Kansas City Star.

A word on our stake

The Stare reads The Landmark every week, and its work is in our files — including Wiedmaier’s own accountability reporting from the same edition that announced her purchase. We are not a neutral party to whether this paper keeps doing that kind of reporting. We would like it to.

Foley, for his part, is not planning to hover. Wiedmaier asked him to keep writing his column, even monthly. His answer, in print: “thank you, but no, no and no.” He wants her to “carve her own niche without The Former Guy hanging around,” and he knows himself well enough to say why: “A topic needing some sunshine and a series of editorials would arise, I would immerse myself in it and start firing off journalistic bombs. Then I would never get out of here.” He will scout high school football film for his son-in-law’s team in King City this fall, and he and Speckman are talking about a podcast — “no politics. Just information, conversation and smartassery.”

His last column ends with the sentence a person writes only if it is true: “I arrived at The Landmark 44 years ago not knowing a soul in Platte County.”

Her first edition comes out today. The motto will still be on it.