Tomorrow will be the birthday of Calvin Andrist, who was born in Ada, MN, in 1887. His son, John, said, “Dad always claimed two birth dates. After celebrating on April 10th for half a century, he had reason to request an official birth certificate. That showed his birth as April 9th. He refused to give up April 10th and declared henceforth and forevermore he would have a two-day birthday celebration.”
When still a youngster, Calvin’s family moved to a Canadian homestead north of Crosby, but his stepmother wasn’t fond of him, so he set out on foot, at age 16, to make his fortune in the town of Portal some 25 miles away. With only an 8th grade education, his career choices were limited, but farm work was plentiful. However, when fall came there was little to sustain him. So, he prepared to distribute Canadian booze in the dry state of North Dakota!
But in the fall of 1907, fate intervened when a newspaper publisher offered Andrist a job. The publisher promised room and board to tide him over until farm work resumed in the spring, but instead, Andrist found work with another paper in Larson, North Dakota. When that building was destroyed by fire, he moved on to the Ambrose Newsman. And in 1912, he got the chance to run his own newspaper when a group of merchants in Noonan bought out the Noonan Miner. They offered the business to Cal, virtually for nothing. He later purchased the Divide County Journal in Crosby.
Calvin went on to become President of the North Dakota Press Association, and was inducted into the North Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 1978.
Meanwhile, son John, began working for Calvin in 1950. After Calvin retired, John took over. John shortened the paper’s name to The Journal in the 1970s, because the paper’s territory now extended beyond the boundaries of Divide County.
John had attended his first North Dakota Newspaper Association meeting in 1947 when still in high school; and he took a spot on the national scene when he served as president at the National Newspaper Association. Like his father, he was inducted into the North Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame.
That brings us to John’s son, Steve, the third generation of Andrists. During the 1980s, Steve worked for the Bismarck Tribune, and then for papers in Winona and Rochester, Minnesota. In 1991, he went back to Crosby to take over his family legacy at the Journal. Today, continuing the family tradition of leadership, Steve serves as executive director of the North Dakota Newspaper Association.
Dakota Datebook written by Merry Helm
Sources:
John Andrist
http://www.crosbynd.com/journal/history.htm
