By ANNIE DECK-MILLER
Buffalo Law Journal

"Buffalo Paper Was Begun Under Adverse Conditions," proclaimed the matter-of-fact headline, from a 1935 newsletter of the association now known as American Court and Commercial Newspapers.

Beneath those words followed a column on the origins of the 6-year-old Buffalo Daily Law Journal by Ray O'Mara, advertising manager. Although there was a need for a daily legal publication in the county seat of Erie County, at that time the 12th-largest city in the country, O'Mara wrote, "several were begun and all failed."

Formed four months before the unparalleled stock-market crash that ushered in the Great Depression, the Journal seemed an unlikely contender to beat that record. According to O'Mara, who spent three decades as vice president and editor of the publication, it didn't publish a single legal notice in its first year.

But we made it.

Now marking our 80th anniversary, we asked some key employees to share their recollections of the Buffalo Law Journal's evolution over these eight decades.

‘A second home'

"I started right out of business school, proofreading. It was my first job," says the former Rose Nati, who worked full-time for the Buffalo Daily Law Journal from 1948, when she was 16, until she had her first child in 1960, working right up to the end of her pregnancy.

"The other two girls in the office used to say, ‘When that baby gets the first slap, she - or he - is gonna come out saying, "In pursuance and by virtue of a judgment," ' because of the proofreading. And, ironically enough, she did go into law," says Rose Hoelscher, now 76, referring to daughter Donna Suchan, a lawyer with Phillips Lytle LLP.

The Buffalo Daily Law Journal had been founded in 1929 by Charles Beringer of Akron, Ohio, who owned three other legal publications. O'Mara, a onetime "rewrite man" for the Buffalo Times who'd started at the Law Journal as a court reporter in 1930, became manager and vice president when the newspaper was incorporated in 1940.

By the time Hoelscher was working there, the paper had moved from its original offices at 66 Oak St. to 125 Broadway, just a few blocks away. She soon graduated from proofreader to bookkeeper and office manager. After she left her full-time position in 1960, Hoelscher continued to help out at the Law Journal until O'Mara died in April 1973, having suffered first a heart attack, then a stroke.

She remembers a family atmosphere and a firm commitment to quality work at the paper.

"It wasn't a big business, it was a second home," she says. "He was a fatherlike figure. He had a genuine interest in our lives," she says of O'Mara.

Journal staff also printed other publications, including the Buffalo Law Review and the Opinion for the University at Buffalo Law School, and handled small print jobs like restaurant menus. And they'd take legal notices and record copy for the Law Journal right up to the last minute.

"The copy runner would pick the last copy up at 4 o'clock, and the fellas (in the pressroom) were waiting to start. So we'd get the last filings, and they would put it in the following day's paper. We took a lot of pride in that," Hoelscher says.

The Holzman era

Not long before O'Mara's death, Joan and Don Holzman heard from one of Don's law clients that Beringer was looking to sell the Daily Law Journal.

"He's the one who suggested, ‘Why don't we buy it?' " Don Holzman, then a lawyer with Jaeckle Fleischmann Kelly Swart & Augspurger, says of Partners' Press owner and onetime Erie County Legislature Chairman Albert Abgott. "And Joan, who was just getting finished getting her law degree, she was going to run it," adds Don, now a partner in Duke Holzman Photiadis & Gresens LLP.

"And this looked like a good business," says Joan.

The two couples - the Holzmans, with Al and Betty Abgott - bought the Buffalo Daily Law Journal on Aug. 23, 1973.

"It was the kind of operation that ran itself," says Joan, who became president and executive editor. "The people that were putting it together had been there for years and years and years. So they were experienced, and it made it much easier."

She does remember daily deadlines - by then the paper was being printed only on weekdays - and printing on a Linotype machine as challenges that went with the job.

"This was before computers, before photo typesetters," she explained. "Somebody on a keyboard had the little brass molds drop down in a line; you did a line at a time. They then went along a rail and were hit by a container with lead and cast into a little strip. And then every one of these little strips, by hand, was meticulously laid in the forms. So you can imagine, when you had an error, what a hassle it is to go back and find it and recast the line."

In the early 1980s, the paper started publishing just two weekly issues, after state regulations governing publication of court calendars were relaxed.

Sale to ACBJ

By 1984, the Buffalo Law Journal was going strong, but a new paper the Holzmans were co-owners of, the Buffalo Business Journal, and Business First of Buffalo, owned by American City Business Journals, were engaged in what a 1985 Buffalo News article described as "Buffalo's business newspaper war."

Both papers started publication in October 1984, immediately competing for subscribers, advertisers and contributors.

"We had made the decision that if we were going to sell the Business Journal, we would package the whole thing. And they were interested," Joan says of ACBJ, which owned 26 regional business journals and three legal publications around the country,

In late 1986, the corporation, then based in Kansas City, Mo., purchased the Buffalo Law Journal, Buffalo Business Journal and Rochester Business Journal from an ownership team made up of the Holzmans, the Abgotts, Buffalo Business Journal Publisher Appleton Fryer and manufacturing executive Jack Davis.

The Holzmans are part owners in Buffalo Newspress Inc., which continues to print the BLJ and Business First today, and sole owners of Buffalo Publishing Corp., an affiliated company.

"It was definitely a learning curve," says President and Publisher Jack Connors, then editor of Business First, of getting into the legal-publication business. "Everything was done on index cards. Nothing was computerized."

New address, new tools

ACBJ moved the operation to 361 Delaware Ave. Among the staff making the move were Advertising Manager Nancy Burgasser, who'd worked at the BLJ since 1982, and Research Assistant Kimberly Schaus, who'd joined the paper just four months prior to the sale.

Both continue on the paper's staff today, 22 years later - Burgasser as assistant manager and Schaus as production coordinator.

"I don't think much has changed except the technology," says Burgasser. "We had an old, old switchboard from the 1890s. We had calculators with a hand crank - you had to pull down the handle to add the numbers up."

Schaus worked almost exclusively from a desk at Erie County Hall, typing public and court records to be published in the paper.

"Someone from the office would pick up the work daily," she says. "I believe it was just photocopied into the paper back then."

Within a couple of years, Schaus was working not on a typewriter, but an early-model Tandy laptop.

"It weighed like 20 pounds," recalls Jennifer Greco, longtime Law Journal general manager, now business manager for both the BLJ and Business First.

The addresses have changed - we moved to 472 Delaware in 1990 and to our current home in the Lafayette Court Building at 465 Main St. in 2001 - and the technology has changed dramatically over the years. But one thing that hasn't changed is our commitment to maintaining the high standards of quality and service that our forebears established.

We strive to live up to these words from O'Mara's 1935 column: "The management of the Buffalo Daily Law Journal ... feels that the best way to win interest for a court and commercial newspaper is to use Courtesy and Service as by-words. No newspaper is so firmly entrenched that it can afford to endanger its good will by ‘high hat' methods."