In 1851, S. B. Champion used some secondhand type to print a small slip of election results as a means of submitting the story to several newspapers without having to write multiple copies by hand. For a lark he titled the slip as the Bloomville Mirror. He was 25 years old and that act created the job he would have for the rest of his life.
In 1905, two years after Champion’s death, his Mirror, which had become the Stamford Mirror and was being run by his son, and the Mirror’s competitor, a relative newcomer, the Stamford Recorder, were sold to Leo DeSilva, another young man of 25. DeSilva ran the two papers as a merged entity, the Mirror-Recorder, until 1948. Toward the end of his tenure as editor, the New York Press Association named the paper the “second best small town newspaper in the state.”
The paper continued until February 1992 under a succession of several other editors, but the story of the Mirror is largely the story of these two politically and temperamentally different men who influenced almost a century of its existence.
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