The term “blogger” didn’t come into the lexicon until the 1990s. But 60 years before, Arlington almost had the equivalent of one.
From 1935 to 1951, Howard Bradley “Brad” Bloomer Jr. was well known as a major player in Arlington civic life — and perhaps the only one to leave behind a large repository of facts and opinions about a crucial period in the county’s development.
For those 16 years, Bloomer was the majority owner of the Sun newspaper, which focused almost exclusively on Arlington at the time. He penned a front-page column dubbed “Week by Week,” chronicling the issues, foibles and personalities of the era.
Thanks to the efforts of Sara Collins, who was responsible for preserving so much of the county’s history, copies of more than 800 of those columns have been extracted from microfilm and compiled in a large binder available for review at the Charlie Clark Center for Local History at Central Library.
They provide a blow-by-blow history of Arlington from the late Depression Era, through the dark days of World War II and into the post-war boom.
The first year
The Northern Virginia Sun ran its first issue on Dec. 12, 1935. But it wasn’t until seven months later that Bloomer’s very first “Week by Week” column went to print.
“We limit ourselves to no field — all is grist that comes to our mill,” Bloomer said in his debut, while asking readers to play a role.
“Consider yourself absolutely free and altogether welcome to participate,” he said.
That first column looked at the need for new bridges across the Potomac, the lack of attendance at School Board meetings and the “swarm of door-to-door solicitors” who had descended on the county.
Among the topics covered in subsequent columns those first few months:
- Arlington’s continued building boom and efforts of East Falls Church residents to be incorporated into Arlington (Aug. 6, 1936)
- An aside that writing headlines was “one of the most annoying things about putting a newspaper together” (Sept. 17, 1936)
- The new angled parking spaces in Clarendon, which were slightly less convenient for drivers, but were, in Bloomer’s view, a net positive because they allowed more people to park (Sept. 24, 1936)
- Some residents who were “agitating” for Arlington to incorporate as a city, several years after the last attempt (Oct. 8, 1936)
- Court challenges to Virginia’s longstanding practice of regulating milk prices, which had shot up to 13 cents per quart (Oct. 29, 1936)
There were the occasional flights of fancy.
In the Nov. 5, 1936, edition, Bloomer proposed imposing a tax on vehicles with Maryland and D.C. plates coming over the bridges into Virginia on weekends to enjoy the Old Dominion’s countryside. He noted in the column that his idea was “probably illegal or unconstitutional or something like that.”
There also were trenchant observations.
In the Dec. 13, 1936, edition of the Sun, Bloomer noted that D.C. officials had somehow managed to put up a “Welcome to Washington” sign at Route 1 and Columbia Pike (they then connected).
Why was that sign placed well in advance of the actual D.C. border on the Potomac River?
Bloomer surmised it was because the power brokers in D.C. wanted to eventually claim sovereignty over the future airport — today’s Reagan National — to be built on the Virginia side of the river.
His analysis proved prescient. After the airport opened in 1941, Virginia and D.C. sparred for several years over which side had jurisdiction, fighting over the wording of the law that in 1846 set boundaries and the 17th-century land grant from King Charles II that originally determined them.
Congress stepped in and, in 1945, decreed National to be part of Virginia, while also reminding state officials that the federal government through its legislative branch had “exclusive jurisdiction” over operations there.
The woman behind news coverage
Howard Bloomer ran the paper and wrote editorials and opinion pieces, but delegated much of the newsgathering to Margaret Troxell.
When Troxell (1909-2002) first came to Arlington in 1932, “the streets were just a hodge-podge — Wilson Blvd used to be a dirt road,” she recalled in a 1984 oral history conducted by Ellen MacMahon for the Virginia Room at Central Library.
By then, Troxell was living in a 21st-floor unit in one of the buildings in Skyline. For 52 years, she had resided in Arlington, having been one of the original residents of Colonial Village.
A Tennessee native, Troxell had a college degree and some newspaper experience under her belt when she joined the staff of the Sun in its early days. It was a part-time position at first, but went full-time when the newspaper moved into its own building at 2611 Wilson Blvd in 1937.
For 16 years, Troxell reportedly never missed a County Board meeting. At times, she also served as a correspondent and commentator for WARL radio.
“It was always a challenge to see if we could scoop the Washington papers, and fortunately for us, this occurred on many an occasion,” she recalled in a separate oral history interview, conducted in 1986 by Edmund Campbell.
Troxell had covered Campbell when he served on the County Board in the 1940s.
During that 1986 discussion, Campbell opined that the Sun was “the largest single influence, I think, in the entire county.” He said Troxell could be counted on to cover the news with “objectivity and fairness.”
Ultimately, Troxell became a part-owner of the newspaper, but sold out at the same time Bloomer did, in the early 1950s. Her later career included stints doing public relations for the federal government and a number of local political campaigns.
She also helped raise funds to build what started as Arlington Hospital Center and today is VHC Health.
Additionally, Troxell may be responsible for the fact that so much of the Sun’s archives survived.
She donated an original set of the newspapers to the Arlington Historical Society. They ultimately were used to replace the county library system’s holdings, which were wiped out when a Clarendon library building flooded.
Looking back almost a half-century during those interviews in the 1980s, Troxell said she didn’t believe she ever personally faced unusual obstacles as a woman in what was then a male-dominated profession.
“I think that if you do [your] job, you don’t have to worry about discrimination,” she said. “You were respected for it and judged by that.”
But, she added, “a woman must be more qualified than a man to hold the same job, because of the competition.”
The war years: 1941-45
Reading the pages of the Northern Virginia Sun throughout 1941, it’s clear that locals expected that the war raging across the globe would soon involve the United States.
In his “Week by Week” column of Friday, Dec. 5, 1941, Bloomer took aim at the boasts of Adolf Hilter about Germany’s wartime successes. Few of them, at this point, seemed to be coming true, he said.
Just two days after that edition ran, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor thrust the U.S. into the war. In his Dec. 12 column, Bloomer described the D.C. area, like most of the country, as still being in shock.
“It’s been a long week,” he said. “An impossibility to keep one’s mind on anything for five consecutive minutes without a thought of the war interrupting.”
He noted in the same column that the Sun’s neon sign, installed in 1936 at its offices on Wilson Blvd, had been turned off as part of efforts to combat potential German air raids.
Troxell, recalling the war years during an interview, said the military across the local area was on high alert and residents were pitching in.
“All the bridges were heavily guarded,” she said. “Many of us worked as block wardens, to see that people kept their windows covered.”
In his Dec. 23, 1941, column, Bloomer noted that local air-raid wardens had decreed that lighted Christmas trees were allowable. But in the same column, he looked at the disruption to the civilian federal workforce owing to the influx of military personnel.
With the War Department Building — known today as the Pentagon — not yet finished, as many as 20,000 federal civilian workers in the local area had been told they would be relocated to make room for military personnel needing their space.
Those workers were being dispersed to Philadelphia, Chicago and even the West Coast, with their families remaining in the local area pending their eventual return.
Like many, Bloomer expressed full confidence that the war would end with an Allied victory. In his column on Jan. 24, 1942, he wrote that the new year “will be the year America does the job it has been destined to do,” and he looked forward to that day.
“There is nothing more satisfying to the soul than doing a job that needs to be done,” he wrote.
War’s impact on staff, daily life
The war brought changes to the Northern Virginia Sun’s personnel roster.
A pressman joined the Marine Corps and was serving in the Pacific. The circulation manager was part of an Army Air Forces bomber crew in Europe. Both survived.
As in many professions, women stepped in to fill roles traditionally filled by the men off to war. Margaret Troxell’s duties expanded from covering the County Board and other news to running the machine that stamped addresses on newspapers before they were deposited into the mailstream.
With the war on, those newspapers were now circulating across the globe, bringing the Sun and “Week by Week” to Arlingtonian members of the armed forces.
Sometimes, the papers came back bearing gifts inside. One serviceman’s mother reported that her son had sent her a plant for her garden from a remote but unspecified (due to censorship rules) South Pacific island, all wrapped in a copy of the Sun.
One of the biggest challenges for Northern Virginians throughout the war was obtaining and maintaining tires, as rubber had been diverted for almost exclusive war use.
In early 1942, Bloomer’s column lamented a warehouse fire in Alexandria that destroyed 100 new tires. “Of course, neither you nor we had any hope of getting any of those tires. But still, it’s sad,” he wrote.
Civic life went on in Arlington despite the war, and in the Sept. 10, 1943, edition, Bloomer noted that the Arlington County Civic Federation’s monthly meeting wrapped up at 9:50 p.m., much earlier than its usual conclusion past midnight.
He mentioned that the wife of a Civic Federation delegate, surprised to see her husband return home relatively early, began to wonder if all meetings concluded this early and her husband was spending a few hours elsewhere.
In his column of June 9, 1944, three days after the D-Day invasion of France, Bloomer was in a reflective mood.
“It is a sober and serious time for all of us,” he wrote. “It is, at least, the beginning for which there will be an end.”
Less than 11 months later — May 4, 1945 — he wrote that “the headline on an afternoon paper,” presumably the Washington Star, “just brought the news that the Germans had surrendered in Italy. Maybe by the time this appears in print, they will have given up everywhere else.”
Not quite, but the German capitulation came on May 8, in time for the next edition.
“Half of the war is over,” Troxell wrote on May 11, 1945. But what, he asked, of all the planning for the post-war period that had been conducted in Arlington in 1943-44? He wondered whether the enthusiasm for major change dissipated.
As always, the column contained tidbits that modern audiences can appreciate even decades later.
The June 11, 1945, column noted that a massive brood of insects had again descended on the local region.
“It seems as if the very trees, themselves, have suddenly developed vocal chords,” Bloomer said of the cacophony.
And, he informed readers in that column, the use of the word “locust” to describe them was itself incorrect.
“We just learned their real name is ‘cicadas‘ — and a locust and cicada are not the same things,” he wrote.
Time to sell and move on
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, both the Arlington Daily and the weekly Northern Virginia Sun vied for readers and advertisers.
But with the June 22, 1951, edition of the Sun, that duopoly came to an end.
The front page of that edition announced the acquisition of the Sun by C.C. Carlin Jr., whose family had owned the daily Alexandria Gazette since 1919 and who, in the early 1940s, had established the Arlington Daily.
The relatively brief article did not mince words, acknowledging that “the same economic factors which have compelled numerous newspaper mergers in recent years have happened here.”
The 11,000 Sun subscribers would have their subscriptions moved to the Arlington Daily, which would retain its name (for the time being).
Bloomer and Troxell would not be making the move to the combined publication. In a joint column in that last edition, they said newspapers needed to be “alert, courageous and constructive” and readers needed to avoid “a course of indifference” that ultimately would lead to fewer and fewer independent news outlets.
In his last Week by Week column, Bloomer suggested that those who had run the Sun were ready for a break and perhaps something new.
“We’ve hoed a long row in the last 15 years,” he wrote. “We’re going to knock off and take a rest.”
He praised Troxell profusely, marveling at “how many millions of words [she] has written about Arlington” in the preceding decade and a half.
Also winning praise was J.O. Martin of Falls Church, whose “Solarium” column in the Sun had run in every edition of the paper going back to its first in December 1935.
Bloomer was incisive and pithy right up to the last column.
“Always delightful, to our way of thinking,” he wrote in his last column, “has been the way our Republican friends insisted the Sun was a Democratic organ, while our Democratic friends swore we had sold out to the GOP. Treat ’em all alike was our motto.”
His verdict on the 15 years that had just passed?
“Some [weeks] have been wonderful, some have been so-so,” Bloomer wrote. “Guess we’d do it over again, though, and do it the same way.”
His very last word to readers? “Adios.”
A postscript
Bloomer lived another 19 years following his sale of the newspaper.
Then a resident of Lorton, he died at age 62 in 1970 at Alexandria Hospital — ironically, the same facility where the Sun’s very last editor had been born four years before — and was buried at Pohick Episcopal Church Cemetery in Fairfax County.
The cause of death was listed as carcinomatosis, an aggressive form of cancer.
His widow, Katherine Leadbetter Bloomer, whom he had married in 1934, died in 1992 at age 84.
Not much can be found online about the family, although Bloomer’s father, Howard Sr. (1871-1953), had gained fame and wealth as a legal adviser and confidante of John and Horace Dodge — sibling founders of a car-manufacturing company whose name is still known worldwide today.
The senior Bloomer and his wife funded extensive parkland acquisitions in their home state of Michigan, some of which still bear the family’s name.
The 1940 federal census, available online, noted that the 32-year-old Bloomer Jr. and his 32-year-old wife were living as lodgers with their 2-year-old son (Howard III, also known as Brad) at 414 N. Washington Street in Alexandria.
Catherine Bloomer’s occupation was listed as homemaker, while Howard Jr.’s was noted as publisher. He reported working 50-hour weeks.
Their son, one of two children the couple would have, went on to become president of American Gold Advisors, an investment management firm in New York City.
The post-Bloomer Sun
The purchase of the Northern Virginia Sun in 1951 and its absorption into the Arlington Daily represented only a momentary loss of the title from local homes. Front-page opinion columns would make a return eventually, too.
Carlin sold the Arlington Daily in 1958, and while it remained a daily newspaper, the title reverted back to the Northern Virginia Sun.
In 1963, New Jersey media entrepreneur Herman Obermayer purchased control of the newspaper. He would continue as owner/publisher through 1988, when he sold it to Atlantic Publishing.
During that 25-year run, “Obe” (pronounced “Oh-bee”) resurrected the tradition of the publisher penning front-page columns on issues of the day. Nearly 900 consecutive Obermayer columns ran weekly on Fridays down the left column of the front page, just as Bloomer’s had.
The 1988 purchase by Atlantic Publishing and several subsequent sales and mergers marked the demise of such columns, at least in print.
But with the arrival of the Internet age, the editor and sports editor of the Sun Gazette continued the tradition with five-days-per-week blog musings that lasted until that newspaper ended its run in February 2023.
Some can still be found online at InsideNova.com, which had a news-sharing arrangement with the Sun Gazette.
Thanks to the Charlie Clark Center for History at Arlington Central Library and the Library of Virginia for assistance.
