James A. Flood Sr., Dover Post founder
James A. Flood Sr., the former publisher of the Dover Post, died Saturday, May 13, 2023, after a long illness at his home in Sherwood, Md. He was 95.
Flood started the Dover Post in 1975 and remained publisher until 2008, when the Flood family sold the company to GateHouse Media. The Dover Post Co. included weekly papers up and down the state and a web printing plant.
Flood was born March 12, 1928, in Biddeford, Maine. His earliest memories would have been of the Depression. Even before the 1929 crash, Biddeford was considered a hardscrabble mill town. Mill owners lived across the river in Saco. Working families lived in Biddeford.
As a boy, Flood liked to jump from trees with a knife in his teeth and challenge new boys in the neighborhood to a fight.
The family’s Depression-era privations must have deepened with the death of Flood’s father in 1942, but he rarely spoke of hard times, perhaps because his mother Florence wasn’t one to complain about raising four children on her own. She supported the family as a telephone operator.
His newspaper career began in high school, covering sports for the Biddeford Journal. Paid a nickel per column inch, he churned out reams of news copy, once earning $4.55 for stories from a single issue. He also caddied and cut grass at the local golf course, hitchhiking to and from work.
After high school, he joined the Army and served as editor of the base newspaper at Fort Belvoir, Va. His service qualified him for the GI Bill, allowing him to attend Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
There he met Mary Storch, a dentist’s daughter from Paterson, N.J. They married in 1952. That same year Flood began working for the Baltimore Sun, covering Maryland’s Eastern Shore from his office at the newly opened Tidewater Inn in Easton.
Part of Flood’s job was to appease rural residents provoked by the Sun’s storied and scathing H.L. Mencken. A giant of 20th century journalism, Mencken loved nothing more than lampooning what he considered the uncultured “booboisie” of the Eastern Shore. The perennially sunny Flood fit in just fine with the locals.
Mrs. Flood stayed home with a rapidly growing family. Within three years they had three children; within 11 they had seven.
The Flood family spent much of their summers on the Eastern Shore in the Sherwood house that Mrs. Flood had inherited from her parents. The family fished and crabbed, and Flood presided over surprisingly ruthless games of croquet with his children. To beat him, they had to earn it, be it chess, checkers, croquet or quoits.
He also enjoyed playing bridge and boldly bid three-card suits, in the apparent belief that if he didn’t have the cards, his partner did.
From 1957-59, he served as editor of the Cecil Whig in Elkton, Md., and then moved to Dover, where he was bureau chief for the News-Journal newspapers.
In 1963, he went to work in Washington, D.C., for U.S. Sen. Caleb Boggs of Delaware, serving as his chief of staff. These were tumultuous times, his six years on Capitol Hill bookended by the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 and the turmoil of the late ‘60s. Those would be his only years outside the newspaper business.
In 1969, he became editor of the Delaware Coast Press in Rehoboth Beach, then part of Coastal Communications, a subsidiary of Anderson-Stokes, a large real estate firm. He also served as publisher/part owner. During his tenure, Coastal Communications purchased a web press and added newspapers along coastal Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina.
At age 47, when many men are long settled into careers or counting the years to retirement, Flood launched a new venture, the Dover Post. It became his defining achievement. It did not come easy.
Dover at that time had a dominant newspaper, the Delaware State News. Flood thought readers and advertisers would flock to a newspaper with a friendlier approach.
That turned out to be wrong. The State News boasted market penetration the Post couldn’t touch.
To spark interest on the paper’s first anniversary, Flood had the Post delivered free to the entire town. Readers and advertisers responded. A nearly unknown business model was born: a free distribution weekly newspaper.
Still, the Post was in trouble. Advertising inches were growing, but so were printing bills. Both the company and Flood were broke, bankruptcy a mere matter of filing the paperwork.
Facing oceans of red ink, Flood remained relentlessly, even irritatingly, upbeat. But with the help of his family, he persevered. From the beginning, Mrs. Flood helped with bookkeeping. Later the children joined the company. Mary Kaltreider and her husband Fred handled advertising, Jim Jr. ran the business and printing, and Don edited the paper.
All seven children, which also include David, Ruth, John and Paul, worked for and contributed to the company.
Gradually, the Post emerged from its debt and began to expand, moving to a large white elephant of a building on Route 13 in Dover. A former airplane hangar, the building was large enough to house a printing press. The company soon added one.
The first move outside Dover was the purchase of the Middletown Transcript. Eventually, the company also owned newspapers in Georgetown, Milford, Smyrna, and the suburbs of Wilmington. All of these papers were printed, along with many others outside the company, on the company’s second printing press.
It’s sometimes said that people, on their deathbeds, never say, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.” Flood might not have said that, but he could have. He loved going to the office. He loved the people working there. They were his extended family and they loved him back. And he loved watching newspapers roll off the press.
His annual company Christmas party poem was an eagerly anticipated romp. He mentioned each department and named each of some 200 employees. Straight-up, shameless doggerel, the poem was loaded with bad jokes, puns and rhymes so tortured the English language begged for mercy. The employees ate it up. Mrs. Flood could be seen rolling her eyes.
Outside the company, the Greater Dover community enjoyed his weekly column, “From a window overlooking the St. Jones.” It was a breezy bits and pieces column, always ending with a joke and not necessarily a good one, despite a well-thumbed stack of joke books.
The column continued without fail for 35 years, including a hand-written one from his hospital bed two days after a quadruple heart bypass operation.
His wife Mary died in 2012, during surgery. They had been married for nearly 60 years and lived to see many grandchildren. Following the early lean years of the Post, they had the opportunity to travel widely, including trips to Russia. They often attended concerts of the National Symphony in Washington, D.C.
Following the sale of the company, Flood was inducted into the Maryland Delaware D.C. Press Association Hall of Fame in 2009.
Flood later married Kathleen Casey of Charles Town, W.Va., who had spent her newspaper career working for New Jersey dailies. She cared for him in his final years.
In addition to Kathleen Casey Flood, survivors include: daughter, Mary Kaltreider and husband Fred of Dover; grandchildren, Jimmy Kaltreider and Mary Clark and husband Miguel Batiz; and great-grandson, Rooney; son, James and wife Ann Marie of Wyoming; grandchildren, James and Julia and her husband Adam; and great-granddaughter, Johanna; son, David and wife Carolyn of Lewes; grandson, Chris and wife Heather; and great-grandchildren, Irving and Florence; and grandson, Adam and Nancy; son, Don and wife Helen of Lewes; and grandson, Josh and wife Maggie; daughter, Ruth Clifton and husband Don of Milford; and grandchildren, Bill Clifton and partner Lea Rosell; great-grandson, Kane; Rebecca Clifton and husband Lance Hansen; great-granddaughters, Dolly and Louisa; grandson, Lucas Clifton and wife Joanna; great-grandsons, Arlo and Dashiell; granddaughter, Mary Ziegler and husband Joe; great-grandchildren, Calvin and Daphne; granddaughter, Sara Antonis and her husband Steve; great-grandchildren, Emilia, Elliot and Elowyn; grandson, John Clifton and fiancée Sylvie Smith; grandson, Patrick Clifton and partner Molly King; son, John of New York City; and son, Paul of Arlington, Va.; and grandson, Alex.
Flood is also survived by his brother, David, who lives near Montreal, Canada, and his sister, Florrie Belisle, who lives near Saratoga, N.Y., with her husband Jerry.
He was preceded in death by a younger sister, Ruth “Bo” McPadden and her husband Joe.
A memorial service will be held at noon, Monday, June 12, at Holy Cross Church in Dover.
