Behind the Scenes: Remembering Ailene

On Wednesday of last week, I received an obituary submission from Anderson’s Tribute Center for one Ailene Hibbard — who, as noted in that obituary, was a longtime employee of Hood River News.

When I came aboard at the paper in 2011, Ailene worked as our archivist. She’d come in twice a week and sit at her desk, and cut out and file stories on a variety of topics in a variety of categories — news, people, businesses and obituaries being just some of them.

She also kept files on all of the stories we reporters wrote, which I’d forgotten about until after we became part of Columbia Gorge News and were attempting to locate a new home for those meticulously kept archives.

Ailene had a system for her clip files and preferred that we request the envelopes she kept them in directly from her — she would find them for us and lay them on our desks. She also preferred we put the envelopes in a special tray on her desk so she could put them back — she was a sweet, quiet woman, but she had no qualms about scolding us for messing up her filing system. (She could always tell when we tried to put back files without her knowing.)

Those clip files were absolute lifelines for us — we had decades of history at our fingertips, which was helpful when working on current stories. Need to know how long a business had been around? Ailene had a file on that. Want background on a particular club? Ailene knew. Can’t remember the last time we wrote about ol’ so and so? Again, Ailene had the answer.

All of our Hood River News archives — bound books and Ailene’s clip files — are now at the History Museum of Hood River County. Volunteers there take great care of the vast (like, vast — believe me when I tell you there are a lot of individual envelopes with individual clippings inside) files that she painstakingly kept.

In 2015, as part of our Saturday Spotlight series, I wrote a story about Ailene and her role at the newspaper. She wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect, though I finally got her to relent and let me interview her and take pictures. That story is reprinted below.

What I will always remember about Ailene: She was fiercely independent. She drew funny little cartoons. She liked to decorate for holidays. She kept a frog stuffy on her desk that she used as a paperweight. She would drop what she was doing to help me any time I needed it. She was kind. She was tiny. And she had really great stories about how she came to Hood River and began working for the newspaper back in 1972.

Ailene passed away on Sept. 20 in The Dalles and was buried at Idelewilde Cemetery in Hood River.

Thank you, Ailene, for all of your help. I hope you knew how important you were to our team.

Ailene Hibbard keeps history alive for News staff

Originally published June 27, 2015

You’re on deadline and you really should have done your research earlier, but you’ve been pulled a hundred ways all week (excuses!) and you’re just now getting to your story. Which is due in four hours. And okay, you’re panicking more than a little bit. Because this is going to be impossible.

And then you remember Ailene’s clip files.

The panic subsides. It’s going to be okay.

Ailene Hibbard is in her 80s, but she faithfully comes into the Hood River News on Tuesdays and Fridays to manage the newspaper’s archives. Yes, we have envelope upon envelope of clip files, all sorted by topic: Obituaries, people, businesses and subjects. Those envelopes are filed with stories that date back several decades, and get pulled daily by editorial, front desk and ad staff for a variety of reasons.

“We will never be able to replace what Ailene does,” said News General Manager Chelsea Marr. “She has collected an amazing amount of history about businesses and the people of Hood River County. The collection might seem old fashioned with today’s technology, but the ease of use for our staff is irreplaceable and of immense value.”

Technically Ailene has been retired from the News since 1994 — she began here in 1972, proofreading copy and “pasting up” the paper, and in her spare moments, she’d “come back to archive,” a job she inherited from a previous News employee at the urging of then publisher Dick Nafsinger. Her files used to take up two filing cabinets; now, obituaries alone total around 15,000 files, and she has cabinets spread around the newsroom and in the basement.

“We need more — but I don’t know where to put them. I’m trying to make room for more files, especially obits,” Ailene said.

After her retirement, then publisher Jim Kelly asked her to come back part time and focus on the archives.

“I said OK, for a while. It’s been a long while,” she smiled.

She has a filing system that’s all her own — which is why we’re technically not allowed to put files back after we take them out.

“That’s why I have to go through them once in a while and check everything,” she said. “It’s a chore.”

Ailene’s day at the News starts at 7:30 a.m., and the first thing she does is see if the paper is off the press. If it’s a Tuesday, chances are the B section is already running. If it’s a Friday, she’s looking for the classifieds. Once the paper is off the press, she takes 50 copies back to her work area.

She files 25 copies of each paper, which she keeps for a year. Then, she cuts out the advertising pages as directed by ad staff and looks through the articles in search of pictures, names and places. She cuts out each article and piles them by category, each with a date stamp; next, she goes through her drawers and cabinets to locate the envelopes needed to file them.

Some will already have an envelope, and some will need a new one made. She labels each one clearly on her typewriter and files them away accordingly.

“I’m always looking for new envelopes,” she said (and by “new,” she means “any” — a lot of recycling goes on in the archives). “Sometimes they’re not perfect, but they work. Sometimes I get a box from somebody in the (print shop) without writing on it, but not often.”

She also keeps each by-lined story and files them in the reporters’ or columnists’ envelopes. After a year, “I stick ‘em in the basement with everything else,” she said.

While she sees her job as “just filing,” the News staff benefits from her careful collecting every day.

“I love seeing Ailene’s smiling face each Tuesday and Friday,” said Jody Thompson, Hood River News advertising manager. “I don’t know what we would do without her help with tear sheets and clip files. It makes our job so much easier, having the weekly tear sheets available that we can reference all year.

“For example, if we speak to a customer who missed an article in the paper about a certain person, business or event, we can use the handy clip files that are archived to find that article and make a copy for the customer. If the clip file is not available, we can always use the weekly tear sheets that Ailene provides us that we keep on hand for the entire year.”

Editor Kirby Neumann-Rea said the value of the files are the history they contain.

“Ailene’s files means people are remembered,” he said. “We go to them all the time to learn about our community, and what has gone before us. The clip file, as I like to call it, is an invaluable resource and we frequently draw from that deep well. Be it a business, organization, or individual, we can dip into the files and find what we need.

“The section devoted to obits — an eight-foot cabinet three rows deep — is particularly helpful when we want to learn about people from the past, their family past or alive, or how a business or project that is still with us today got its start. Ailene’s work serves as a history of the community, but it is not just about history. It is about what is happening around us today.”

As a little side note, the News isn’t Ailene’s first newspaper, but it is where she’s worked the longest. She began at the Victorville Press in Victorville, Calif., as a proofreader — she also pasted up pages — and later worked a similar position in Paso Robles.

She had a short stint at the paper in South Lake Tahoe after winning a chamber of commerce writing contest, where she proofread, and an equally short stint in Florida, where she took a break from newspapers to work in a library, and later at her father’s dress shop. On a camping trip in Oregon, she fell in love with the Hood River Valley and put her name in at the News. She was eventually hired by Nafsinger — she thinks the cartoon cards she sent weekly telling him how much she wanted to become an Oregonian finally wore him down — and she’s been with us ever since.