Here’s to you, loyal readers

Little is known about the first newspapers to operate in the Mat-Su Valley. That honor belongs to the Sunny Knik News and the Wasilla News, both of which published for a time around 1917.

We know a bit more about some of their modern offspring, such as the Palmer Daily, first published on May 14, 1935, by Presbyterian minister Bert J. Bingle.

The Palmer Daily ceased publication when the Alaska Rehabilitation Corp., the government agency running the Colony project, started the Matanuska Valley Pioneer on Aug. 22, 1935, which was edited by Jack Allman.

He resigned as a corporation employee on Dec. 15, 1935, and continued publishing the Pioneer as a private enterprise. Its first printed — not mimeographed — edition published Oct. 26, 1936. But the antique press Allman purchased collapsed a few months later under the pressure of regular publication.

In an editorial in the Dec. 19, 1936, edition headlined “It Can’t Be Done,” Allman announced the suspension of the newspaper.

Next came the Valley Settler, a weekly mimeographed effort produced by the Matanuska Farmers’ Cooperating Association. But this newspaper effort failed, as did the Matanuska Valley Post, which followed it.

It seems purely a coincidence that former Anchorage Daily Times reporter Viola Daniels picked Sept. 17, 1947, as the date to publish the first edition of the Valley Frontiersman.

Monday was a special day for us. Not just because it marked the beginning of our 65th year of publishing the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, but also because Sept. 17 was the 225th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution.

We are proud and humbled to be in such illustrious company. After all, it is the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that guarantees the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman and other U.S. media the freedom to operate without government oversight or review.

In broad terms, freedom of the press is one of our most cherished national values. In local terms, the Frontiersman also is an archive of local news from the last 65 years. That’s important.

Lots of reporters cover world and national news, but we are the only media archive dedicated to reporting the Mat-Su Borough’s places and faces.

Our on-site archives store an important part of our shared past as a community. For some families, we have traced the arc of their lives in our pages, from birth announcement to school news and graduation notices, engagement announcement and 50th wedding anniversaries, their children and grandchildren’s birth announcements and, finally, their obituaries.

Though our big city cousins are struggling financially, community newspapers like the Frontiersman have faired better. We know it will take hard work on our part and a supportive, dedicated community if we are to continue to serve readers in the Mat-Su Valley.

So here’s to you, loyal readers. It is your support that has seen us through the ups and downs of our first 65 years, and it is you who will carry us into the future.