Skepticism, balky equipment, traffic tickets and lawsuits couldn’t stop Maine’s first color newspaper from succeeding.

LEWISTON – It was two inches wider than the paper you’re holding in your hands right now. State of the art. A thing of beauty. Never-before-seen design, first-in-the-state color reproduction and, most importantly, packed with news from central and western Maine and from across the globe – brought right to your doorstep on “the day of rest” for the first time ever.

The Sunday Sun-Journal, a multimillion-dollar gamble by the Costello family, was launched 25 years ago this week to broaden their share of a readership and advertising market all but owned at the time by the Portland newspaper, the Maine Sunday Telegram.

The Sunday edition of the Sun Journal has done more than offer readers and advertisers “More color. More news. Quicker,” as boasted back then on company buttons, cups and T-shirts. Despite lawsuits almost immediately after the first papers hit the street, as well as traffic tickets, errors that drove some to drink and other challenges over the years, the paper has earned hundreds of state, regional, national and even international awards for its content and design, and has given thousands of Maine readers their own news in their own Sunday newspaper.

But as the target date approached to produce that first Sunday Sun-Journal, success was far from assured. Says Tom Kelsch, who was hired to oversee the news operation and go after the competition: “What I remember most was how scary it was to take on this project, because the Maine Sunday Telegram dominated the whole state … and we didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Oct. 3, 1983

Chicken was going for 49 cents a pound. Town and Country tires at Lewiston Tire for $19 each (mounting and rotation free). Heating oil was 94 cents a gallon.

Freddie Plourde, a well-respected Lewiston resident who died far too young, was running for mayor. (He won.) “Mrs. Millett,” (today, Sharon, to most) was named president-elect of the Maine Association of Realtors. Tom Delahanty (today, Your Honor, to the unlucky) was being nominated as a state superior court justice. Ominously, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was in Pakistan, offering support to the Afghan guerrillas who later became anti-American terrorists. Walter Mondale was the victor in Maine’s Democratic straw poll for the party’s presidential nomination.

That was just a small fraction of the things delivered to readers of the first Sunday Sun-Journal. Eighty-eight pages – not including color comics, Family Weekly and a weekly TV magazine – all for 60 cents.

The complicated leap to a seventh day and to color had its origins in the heat being put on the Sun Journal from the south.

“We needed to start a Sunday paper in order to offer a seven-day subscription to protect our franchise. At that time, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram was becoming more and more active in our tri-county market selling seven-day subscriptions,” remembers Jim Costello Sr., the Sun Journal’s publisher and owner.

The decision was made to create a Sunday edition, and to be the first to do it in color – take that, Portland – but the challenges were formidable.

The investment would have to include a new computer system, a totally separate Sunday news department, new color press units and a delivery network able to carry heavier loads, farther than ever before, on the traditional day off.

The advertising, sales and production departments would have to be beefed up, to handle more ads, more pages, more design work.

And a new look for the paper – one intentionally different than the daily – had to be created.

But there was no question Ronald Reagan was going off the front page of that first edition, in the form of a congratulatory letter he wrote to Costello.

“It was Tom Kelsch’s idea and regardless of political affiliation … he was president at the time and it was a great honor. Besides, he’s one of my heroes,” says Costello.

The countdown: ‘Total panic’

Months of planning, hiring, decision-making, trial runs, equipment testing and advance story writing took place. But it wasn’t enough to prevent the chaos that ensued on the Saturday that Sun Journal workers “put the paper to bed,” as they say in the business.

“Total panic,” remembers Tim McCloskey, a newsroom editor today who was one of Sunday’s three reporters at the time. “All the Costellos were there. … The high expectation was palpable.”

As the day turned into night, a small group of editors worked to fill the 32 pages being produced “live,” using staff stories and photos augmented by the wire services. (Forty-nine other pages had already been produced earlier in the week, augmented by the advertising department’s own efforts to fill the new product.)

With Saturday evening’s deadline approaching, stories and photos were still coming in. There was the Democratic Straw Poll in Augusta covered by Tom Robustelli (then a political writer, now a Lewiston accountant and community leader) and former Sun Journal editor Lisa Giguere, who died four years ago, also far too young. A plane crash in Livermore Falls. Accidents in Winthrop and Mechanic Falls. The last day of the Red Sox season and scores of high school and college games, including Edward Little soccer coach Dave Morin’s comments on his team’s tough 1-0 loss to Cheverus. The same Dave Morin coaching the team today.

The deadline – somewhere around 11 p.m. – passed and the chaos deepened.

Stories came in later than expected, designing the pages and writing the headlines took longer than expected, the computer system slowed down, machinery balked and the production staff struggled to adhere to new design rules as they put the raw pages together by hand, cutting and pasting strips of text onto large sheets of paper that would be the templates for the actual pages to come.

“The fear of deadline made it crazy,” remembers Heather McCarthy, a design editor that night and the Sun Journal’s night news editor today. “I could barely take a breath. I have never written headlines as fast.”

Even some members of the Costello family took up X-Acto knives to cut the text and paste up the template pages. But the glitches weren’t confined to the newsroom.

“I remember being three hours late the first morning. … We could have inserted (the comics, preprinted sections and other inserts) by hand faster than the machine was operating,” Costello remembers.

The first Sunday Sun-Journal (the hyphen was later dropped) was finally loaded into trucks and placed at readers’ doors and street-corner boxes. But not before tears of frustration had been shed in the newsroom … and tickets had been issued by police in Auburn.

Bill McCarthy, transportation director for the company today, says that as he designed the system for getting the papers around the state, he was told each paper would weigh no more than 1 pound. When the papers rolled off the press that night, they were 25 percent heavier – 1.28 pounds- twice the weight of the average daily paper.

“One of our (truckers) was stopped by the Auburn police,” McCarthy remembers. “They escorted him to the then-steam plant by Pioneer Plastics to be weighed on the scale, had him unload about 25 percent of his load, and gave him a ticket for an overloaded vehicle.”

International awards and missing r’s

The paper that was produced that day was not just the heaviest the Sun Journal had ever published, but was delivered by truck the farthest. From a vending machine in Kittery to deep into New Hampshire to the west, north beyond Bangor and Down East from Bar Harbor south. Twice as many drivers as needed the rest of the week, 16 instead of eight, and almost 1,000 miles more logged.

In the coming years, there would be some trip-ups. Soon after the first papers rolled, several readers would try to sue the Sun Journal because it was requiring subscribers to take the new Sunday edition. There would also be the occasional late paper because of a press breakdown, missing advertisement, bad headline, wrong information in a story and typos. A Sunday classic? A story on the new Super Shaw’s in Auburn gave readers a heads-up to “soft dinks in aisle 10,” a missing “r” that would move one Sunday editor to spend the next day drinking at Marco’s restaurant.

On the other hand, proof of the Sunday edition’s quality would come first in 1987, when the 4-year-old would be judged the best Sunday newspaper in Maine. It would be confirmed four years later, judged best Sunday newspaper in New England in its circulation category. More awards would follow, including national writing awards and international design awards. Proof that it wasn’t beginner’s luck: The publication has been judged best Sunday paper in Maine five of the last seven years.

The future? It will continue to be about local news, well beyond the seventh day of the week, according to Costello. “We’re continuing on to this day with our local news strategy with the acquisitions of our weekly papers to bring our concept of local news right down to the neighborhood level,” he says.

A toast to more to come then? How about a soft drink…