Arthur Gunther is a Rocklander through and through. He grew up in the Spring Valley-Hillcrest area, graduated from Spring Valley High School and worked at the Journal News from 1964, when he signed on as a “fly-boy,” catching newspapers as they came off the press, until he retired this year as Editorial Page Editor. His first essay under the signature The Column Rule (a printers’ term and also, for him, a metaphor) appeared in 1981, and over the next 25 years he wrote more than 2600. This book collects one hundred of them.

The essays are arranged here in four groups—Rockland People, Rockland Places, Rockland History, Various Themes—each preceded by one of Mr. Gunther’s evocative photographs.

The author’s Rockland people include the well known and those he calls “unannounced.” Helen Hayes, in whose Irish face we can read a gritty determination to do things just so and be stubborn where it counts. Mildred Rippey, whose engaging soul was one of the strongest of human river currents. Gus Weltie, who worked on the farm at High Tor and was paid $5 a month, never traveled farther than New York City (maybe once or twice there) and was a passionate fighter for the protection of the mountain. Many times, the occasion for a portrait is the end of a long life; sometimes the subject is “in the news.” This gallery reaffirms that “we are all characters.”

Gunther writes with keen nostalgia about a greener, quieter Rockland, with narrower roads, busier downtowns. He recalls the evening walk on the Boulevard in Spring Valley, when the village still had summer resort hotels and bungalows and was to many the best resort outside the Catskills. He elegizes fall days in Viola where the remains of a thousand apple trees still nurture the soil of development homes—“gone forever is the taste peculiar to fruit bred of this soil, graced by a special wind, hardened by stiff and chilly nights.”

He counts himself among those county people who can add B.B. (Before Bridge) to their names. “I recall the South Nyack downtown that no longer exists. I built a hut on land now occupied by the Thruway toll exchange at Spring Valley… I have no quarrel with change, but I do dispute the methods by which this county has grown…The doubling of the county’s population… Congested roads. The loss of floodplains. Far too many shopping areas developed at the expense of downtown shopping areas.” His trenchant conclusion: Rockland “cannot accommodate another bridge at South Nyack simply because the cost has been too great for the first one.”

The cost includes the fouling of the landscape. Gunther suggests that an archaeologist digging in the county two centuries hence might well conclude that current Rocklanders disliked their fellow humans so much that they dumped wherever they wanted, regardless of whom it may have hurt.

Back in the all-too-real present, he writes movingly of the deep sense of mourning in Pearl River for those lost in the World Trade Center disaster. These men were a part of the Town brotherhood, “the Brotherhood of deep concern and respect for each officer, active or retired, and son or daughter or father or grandchild of that officer.” Pearl River, home to so many of New York’s bravest and finest, is not the Usual Suburbia. The collection ends with Gunther’s first essay for The Journal News, published in August, 1981. Here he described the use of the column rule and its significance in the newspaper business, noting that it required some effort and the result was worth some pride. He wrote that he aimed to speak, as the column rule did, “of tradition and craft, of the values of the old and of the necessity of maintaining standards in a topsy-turvy world of which Rockland is a small but important part.” This collection bears him out. It is a treasure.

Published by: The Historical Society of Rockland County 20 Zukor Rd. New City, NY. info@Rockland History.org. 845 634 9629 Price: $29.28 hardcover; $21.18 paperback (prices include postage and sales tax).