WALTHAM, Mass. — Lewiston Evening Journal’s longest-serving and most influential editor, Frank Dingley, was inducted into the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s hall of fame Friday night.

Dingley, who stood as the giant of Maine journalism from the start of the Civil War to the end of the World War I, was inducted during the journalism organization’s annual spring convention.

A graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, he and his older brother Nelson put together the first edition of the Lewiston Daily Evening Journal as the Civil War heated up in 1861, catching the spirit of the North’s readiness to defend the flag.

According to a profile of Dingley and his career written by Sun Journal Staff Writer Steve Collins as part of the Lewiston newspaper’s 175th birthday celebration in 2022, “For the next 57 years Frank Dingley served as the Journal’s editor, so large a presence in Maine that The Los Angeles Sunday Times called him ‘the philosopher and prophet of New England’ several years before his death in 1918.”

Collins nominated Dingley for the hall of fame and in his nomination letter noted that, in its heyday, the Lewiston Evening Journal was “one of the best and most innovative dailies in the country. Dingley mentored some of America’s finest journalists along the way and grabbed some astonishing scoops of his own, including a firsthand account of the sinking of the Titanic from a former Lewiston resident who had survived the wreck and who Dingley tracked down within hours of her arrival in New York City.

“There’s a reason President Theodore Roosevelt once said there were only two newspapers he read every day: one in Philadelphia, a city far from New England and of no real consequence, and the Lewiston Evening Journal,” according to the nomination letter.

Not long after Dingley’s death, Sprague’s Journal of Maine History noted that he “was strictly a newspaper man and among the greatest of American editors” with “nation-wide fame.”

According to the 2022 profile, Edward Page Mitchell, a Journal reporter who went on to serve as editor of The Sun in New York City, wrote in his memoirs that Dingley focused on the news of Lewiston, where he worked, and Auburn, where he lived in a lovely brick house on the north side of Court Street, now listed on the National Register of Historic Homes.

In his nomination letter, Collins pointed out that Mitchell began his career under Dingley’s tutelage. In his memoirs, Page said Dingley’s attention “was mainly given to the local news of the thriving mill city and the adjacent city of Auburn. His vehemence in the pursuit of intelligence, big or little, was boundless, his fertility of expression beyond exhaustion. He would cheerfully walk miles in mud, if necessary, to capture an item insignificant in any perspective less microscopic than his own. He would brave storm, flood, snowbanks or fire to get an interview on any subject of contemporaneous importance.”

A loyal Republican, Dingley was a man who listened to all sides, sought out compromise and pushed for progress with a practical bent.

“It is an editor’s function,” Dingley once said, “to support evolution, not revolution. Had Lincoln vaulted from the auction block of the slave to the emancipation proclamation, the federal union would not have been preserved.

“Lincoln is immortal because he embodied the natural law of the political world which declares that to move from one point to another, it is necessary to pass through all the intermediate stages.”

Collins, who accepted NENPA’s hall of fame induction on behalf of the Sun Journal, wrote in his nomination letter that “there are many men and women from New England’s storied past who deserve a place in a hall of fame for journalists who lived and worked in this vital region. Over time, perhaps they will all get their due. But among those deserving of the honor, few can match Frank Dingley, a journalist to his core who ensured his community thrived under the guidance of his newspaper and the quality of every issue he oversaw.”

Not long before his death in 1918, according to Collins’ 2022 profile of Dingley, the editor expressed his hope that “the Lewiston Journal may never grow old and never grow indifferent to its responsibility as a political, social and moral educator.”

On Feb. 20, 1893, Henry Wing of Lewiston established The Lewiston Daily Sun. According to Sun Journal archives, George B. Wood became owner of The Sun in 1898 and, soon after, brought his nephew Louis B. Costello into the business as general manager. In 1926, Wood and Costello bought the The Lewiston Evening Journal from the Dingley family and moved the operation from the Dingley Building on Lisbon Street to 104 Park St. The Costello family merged the Lewiston Evening Journal and The Lewiston Daily Sun in June 1989, to become the current Sun Journal, now at 64 Lisbon St.

Reade Brower owned the Sun Journal from 2017 to August 2023; the Sun Journal is now a publication of the Maine Trust for Local News.

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