Robert Earle, retired longtime publisher and editor of The Weston Democrat, died Sunday at The Haven, a personal-care home in Cedar Grove. He was 89 and had struggled with Parkinson's disease.

Born in Clarksburg, Earle went to high school there, then on to West Virginia University, where he was in the first graduating class of the School of Journalism. He served in World War II as a cryptographer in the Signal Corps, listening to radio traffic from the Japanese and trying to decode it.

In 1946, he took a job as a reporter at The Weston Democrat, and three years later he and George Davisson bought the weekly. For more than 40 years until he sold the paper in the early 1990s, Earle was publisher and editor.

He covered news and sports events of Lewis County, sold advertising, laid out pages and wrote all the editorials and a column, the Town Topics.

Earle believed a county weekly should be an intensely local newspaper, from its news coverage to its editorials, according to daughter Rosalie Earle, who followed her dad into journalism, first at his paper and then in a variety of reporting and editing positions at The Charleston Gazette.

"No one else was going to cover Lewis County," he told his daughter. "There are a lot of scrapbooks with things I've written in it."

"When I started here, we had something we called the 'Personals' column on the front page," said Julia Spelsberg, formerly the weekly's longtime advertising manager and now the mayor of Weston. "People would call in and say that so-and-so visited over the weekend. The rest of the page was dedicated to what was going on in the county."

Earle was so loyal to local businesses that he declined to solicit ads from businesses outside the county, Spelsberg said. Weston being a small town and Earle a kindly boss, the newspaper experienced very little employee turnover, Spelsberg said. "We all stayed with him."

Born in Clarksburg, Earle went to high school there, then on to West Virginia University, where he was in the first graduating class of the School of Journalism. He served in World War II as a cryptographer in the Signal Corps, listening to radio traffic from the Japanese and trying to decode it.

In 1946, he took a job as a reporter at The Weston Democrat, and three years later he and George Davisson bought the weekly. For more than 40 years until he sold the paper in the early 1990s, Earle was publisher and editor.

He covered news and sports events of Lewis County, sold advertising, laid out pages and wrote all the editorials and a column, the Town Topics.

Earle believed a county weekly should be an intensely local newspaper, from its news coverage to its editorials, according to daughter Rosalie Earle, who followed her dad into journalism, first at his paper and then in a variety of reporting and editing positions at The Charleston Gazette.

"No one else was going to cover Lewis County," he told his daughter. "There are a lot of scrapbooks with things I've written in it."

"When I started here, we had something we called the 'Personals' column on the front page," said Julia Spelsberg, formerly the weekly's longtime advertising manager and now the mayor of Weston. "People would call in and say that so-and-so visited over the weekend. The rest of the page was dedicated to what was going on in the county."

Earle was so loyal to local businesses that he declined to solicit ads from businesses outside the county, Spelsberg said. Weston being a small town and Earle a kindly boss, the newspaper experienced very little employee turnover, Spelsberg said. "We all stayed with him."