Remembering Bill Foster, Longtime Pendulum Publisher

BRADENTON, Florida — Sure it was 35 degrees and blustery outside, but longtime East Greenwich residents — and former Pendulum owners — Bill and Jane Foster were singing Florida’s praises recently even amid the Sunshine State’s longest cold snap in 40 years. After running East Greenwich’s weekly from 1964 to 1988 — Bill handled the publisher’s duties while his wife Jane tended to the more mundane, and critical, task of making sure advertisers paid up — the pair retired, full-time, to this small city on Florida’s Gulf Coast about a decade ago.

Now in their mid-80s, they’ve traded the snow and steps of their second East Greenwich home for a ground-level unit in a well-groomed development surrounded by palm trees and other lush vegetation. “And it’s only 100 feet from the swimming pool,” Bill notes. The new Floridian in him boasts that the place has seven pools, although the flinty New Englander that remains at the heart of the man is quick to ‘fess up that you can only swim in one at a time. There’s a birdbath right outside their patio door, and the couple is as “happy as pelicans.”

The Fosters spend their days visiting and dining with friends, including some who have made the move south from Rhode Island. They keep in touch with  family via e-mail, and tool around town in a Buick. They’ve traded in Bill’s famous wood-paneled Ford Country Squire “publisher-mobile” that showed up at important East Greenwich gatherings for many years. Jane, a star vocalist at East Greenwich’s First Baptist Church, continues her singing at her Florida church.

After raising five children out on Howland Road, the Fosters empty-nested on Spring Street before heading to Florida. They entertain visitors with tales of their new Florida lifestyle, but can quickly step back in time to the decades they and their newspaper were how East Greenwich – including neighboring Cowesett and Potowomut — kept track of itself. Their walls carry mementos of their Pendulum days, including an article in what Bill has always called “the big-city paper” (that would be the Providence Journal) when he and Jane decided to call it quits.

Bill, a former advertising man in Boston (he and his wife are both Bay State natives), ran the Pendulum with a deft hand that took into account local sensibilities while hewing to good journalism. After several years of serving as the paper’s publisher and editor — doing the bulk of the reporting — he handed off that task to a roster of young college graduates eager to hone their reporting skills under his watchful eye. The economics of running the paper kept the recent grads’ salaries low, which ensured they’d stay for only a year or two before moving on to better-paying jobs — some in journalism, some not.

Bill would guide them gently but firmly. “Fine job,” he’d remark to a rookie reporter about a piece highly critical of a town official. “But don’t you think we should get his side of the story?” Sometimes, when the reporter had a controversial story that might generate the subject’s ire, Bill would pick up the phone and conduct the interview himself. While he was interested in a good story, he was more concerned that the article running in his paper be fair and complete.

Part of what made Bill Foster fun to work for was his barely-disguised glee of being the local William Randolph Hearst. He backed his reporters up when faced with a tough story, and would run lengthy articles about important town meetings (stories that would require additional pages, meaning he was pick-pocketing himself because those extra pages cost money). But he was no spendthrift. He’d pay for an editor to undertake a foreign assignment (OK, traveling with the Kentish Guards to Quebec, on their bus) or to chat up the President in the White House (he’d pay for plane fare, but the staffer had to stay with a friend). He’d leaven the burdens of the First Amendment by publishing a four-page wrap-around filled with fake news on April 1. It never ceased to amaze him how many readers thought such made-up stories were true – and whether that said more about the readers or the Pendulum’s long-standing credibility (“121 years young,” it used to proclaim on the front page).

Truth be told, Bill seemed to enjoy the plausible deniability he got by hiring reporters to do the dirty work of digging. That way, he could honestly tell fellow Rotarians or other East Greenwich pooh bahs upset about something in the Pendulum that he didn’t write it. While that was true, nothing ever got into the paper without him sitting behind his desk at 22 London Street and reading every word. He employed the same technique with advertisers who got behind in their payments — Jane was the eagle-eyed bookkeeper, allowing Bill to engage with delinquent bill payers without tainting their conversations with strained talk of money owed.

For years Bill wrote a column called “After 5,” which was simply a collection of his observations and ruminations about life as a small-town newspaper publisher. Decades later, carefully turning the yellowing and fragile pages of what was then called The Rhode Island Pendulum, it’s those columns that remain timeless among all the hurried news of the day.

Once Bill turned over the weekly press of covering the news to a staff of reporters (he called them “editors,” which was job-title inflation run wild), he’d still write an editorial or two each week. They were nearly always intensely local, tied tightly to week’s news, and often were an unvarnished broadside for or against some local policy or politician. They’d end with his initials — WAF — an acknowledgment that a newspaper could hold no opinion on its own (aficionados knew the initials stood for William Allison Foster, while one of its less plugged-in readers thought it stood for “What A Friend”). More importantly, it was a declaration that he wasn’t going to hide behind the anonymity of unsigned editorials. While they didn’t always win friends among those who found themselves zinged, they won respect from the paper’s readers.

All of the Fosters’ kids spent their East Greenwich years doing odd jobs down at the Pendulum, and apparently it wasn’t that tough – two of them became reporters. The eldest, Anne, became the paper’s first editor and now does public relations for one of the biggest banks in the northwest. Mark remains the lone Rhode Islander in the bunch, and is a computer engineer. John is a paramedic in Washington state, and David – a long-time reporter for the Associated Press – lives nearby (hard to believe that three of the Fosters’ five kids now call Washington state home). Beth teaches high school English in Connecticut. All are married, and they’ve blessed their parents with 10 grandchildren.

The Fosters’ children and grandkids created a large “memory jar” crammed with slips of paper detailing family lore and stories from long ago. The Fosters dip into it each night after dinner, each plucking one and trying to guess its author (it has gotten easier over time because every contributor uses paper of a different color). It’s a low-calorie, but very rich, dessert.

While Bill Foster carries only a slight echo of Bill Hearst, there’s a third Bill – William N. Sherman – with whom he has a lot more in common. Sherman was the founder of the Pendulum, back in 1854, and ran it for nearly 24 years, about the same length of time as Bill Foster.

Sherman’s nephew recalled his uncle’s fledgling Pendulum fondly. “Combining literature and story with local news, intelligent, fresh, and racy, it became, almost from the first issue, a favorite in the office, the shop, and especially in the family, where its influence was always wholesome, high-toned, and elevating,” he wrote. Harris Greene recalled his uncle as someone who “fearlessly, regardless of pecuniary gains or losses, promulgat(ed) what he honestly believed to be just, right, and true.” For Sherman, publishing the Pendulum had “been by no means an irksome enterprise” but “a source of pleasure and satisfaction rather than a business care and burden.” While there may be some 19th century hoopla in that passage, it distills the essence of the first — and last — individual Pendulum publishers.

Unlike the Fosters, Sherman hung around East Greenwich after selling the paper. Yet despite their contentment with their Florida life, there are certain things the Fosters will not sacrifice. For a recent lunch date they instructed their guests to a strip-mall seafood house near the Sarasota airport. The reason for their choice became clear once you flipped open the menu: it’s the only place in central Florida serving Block Island swordfish. It’s obvious you can take Bill and Jane Foster out of Rhode Island, but can’t take Rhode Island out of the Fosters.  

You can read Bill Foster's obituary here.

East Greenwich native Mark Thompson was “editor” of the Pendulum from 1975 to 1978. Today he covers the military for Time magazine.