Lemont resident found niche in newspaper business

 Betty Shields family was living in Oklahoma at the time of her birth, but she actually was born in Kansas, because that’s where the nearest hospital — on the second floor of a ‘five-and-ten’ store — was in 1925.

Shields was on only child, and when her parents separated, she went with her mother to the Butler, Pa., area. She remembers fondly the trips that alternated between Philadelphia and Bellefonte to visit relatives. Her stepfather was born in Aaronsburg, and the family would go back to that area to visit.

After graduating from Butler High School in 1942, she attended Miss Conley’s Girls School. Her jobs after graduation included working for Westinghouse, and later running her own children’s shop.

Shields and her husband, an industrial engineer, settled in Sewickley, in Allegheny County, after their wedding. Her husband’s family was among the first families in Sewickley, and their family home was an impressive building that still stands.

The couple had one son, and Shields began to find that she had time to spare. She looked around for new endeavors. She had an interest in trees and began to study more about them. That led to her giving talks for the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy on native trees.

“I started to think I should write about them,” she said. She wrote a column, ‘Out in the Open,’ for two years for the Sewickley Herald, and eventually approached the editor to request a paid position. A new career in the newspaper business was born from that day forward.

Shields duties grew along with the weekly newspaper. She did it all, including writing, pasting and setting type. Back then, the newspaper used linotype, a technique that prints an entire line, instead of each character, on a piece of metal known as a “slug.” It was used until the late 1960s or early 1970s, when offset lithography and early computerized methods replaced it.

“I went to yearly seminars in Philadelphia and Harrisburg and learned my craft,” said Shields. “The seminars were for United States editors of weekly newspapers.”

One hallmark of the papers in the days before they went online was that they were primary sources of local history, according to Shields. 

“I was always interested in history and did a column on that, also,” she said. “I was instrumental in starting the Sewickley Valley Historical Society and became its executive director. I’m proud to say that the historical society flourished.”

In researching this column, it was interesting to read an article about the “Sewickley Malaise” of 1950 that eventually turned out to be caused by contaminated water. Shields, then editor of the Sewickley Herald, was instrumental in informing the public and ensuring readers that the information was accurate, both as the illness developed and as investigations uncovered the cause.

Her husband died shortly before 9/11, and Shields moved to Lemont in 2005. She likes the area and is an active participant in community life. She is on the board of The Granary in Lemont and still takes an interest in all things historical.