Cindy Vest was glue binding La Conner newspapers

Cindy Vest was in the truest sense born with ink in her veins, to an Everett family long established in the printing business.

Her own legacy would be that of serving as the lifeblood of La Conner newspapering through parts of six decades, from the 1970s until her retirement last year.

The remarkable impact made in local journalism by Vest, who died April 10 after a brief illness, is best summed up by her friend and former business partner Sandy Stokes. They founded the Weekly News in 2006 with the late Wayne Everton.

“There would not be a paper in La Conner,” Stokes said emphatically, “without Cindy Vest.”

And, for a portion of her long and amazing career, Vest worked simultaneously as typesetter and graphic artist for two La Conner newspapers, the Puget Sound Mail and Channel Town Press.

“Obviously, I couldn’t divulge what was going on at either paper,” Vest said in a 2017 interview with the Weekly News, where she remained on staff for four years after its purchase by Ken Stern. “I didn’t really think much about it at the time. They were paychecks that helped me get by.”

One word describes why Vest’s talents were in such demand.

Versatility.

“She could do just about everything,” recalled Stokes. “She could put the whole paper together by herself. She could look at a piece of copy and know how to make it fit. She was highly-skilled and her skills were very specialized.”

Vest set type, designed ads, handled billing, filled out often complex postage forms and provided customer service with an unfailingly friendly, can-do spirit.

“We made some good memories,” said Stokes. “Mostly, for us, it was a labor of love to keep the paper going for the town.”

Stokes said Vest was a steadying influence, someone who could be relied upon to get the job done amid constant deadline pressure.

As an example, while at the Channel Town Press, Vest arrived at work before 5 a.m. on Wednesdays following Tuesday night Town Council meetings to retrieve stories written the night before and saved on a reporter’s floppy disk. Then, with limited time, she would place the copy in whatever space remained available for that week’s issue.

Still, her work was not done.

Vest would then drive the newspaper pages through all kinds of Pacific Northwest weather to a commercial print shop in Marysville, oversee the printing process and then return to La Conner for each copy of the paper to be addressed and delivered to the post office.

While preferring to work quietly behind the scenes – “flying under the radar,” Vest would often quip, harkening back to a brief stint at the Boeing Company – her work here did not go unnoticed.

“What she did was very important,” stressed retired Everett Herald and Skagit Valley Herald reporter and feature writer Gale Fiege, a La Conner area resident, who met Vest in the 1980s.

“I always respected what she did,” said Fiege. “What Cindy did was very important at the Channel Town Press and all the versions of La Conner weekly newspapers. There is no doubt, she was a very important person in the community.”

That was borne out most publicly in 2019 when Vest was recipient of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association’s Dixie Lee Bradley Award, which honors those in newspaper production for their devotion to and passion for community publications.

Vest’s passion for La Conner newspapering was sparked by her dad, Bob Graff, with whom she had worked alongside at the family print shop and who later would serve as manager of the Shelter Bay residential community.

“Dad,” Vest related five years ago, “said there’s a guy in La Conner who needs somebody to typeset for him.”

That person was Dick Fallis, then publisher-editor of the Puget Sound Mail, at the time the oldest weekly newspaper in Washington state.

Vest was particularly well suited to enter the emerging new era of newspaper production. Her dad’s Everett shop boasted one of the region’s first Compugraphic machines, a forebear of the personal computer.

She would, in time, also join the staff of the Channel Town Press, launched in the mid-70s on Morris Street by Alan Pentz, who had studied constitutional law at the University of Washington before landing a reporting job at the old Mount Vernon Herald, where he built a loyal readership.

“Alan was my major mentor when it comes to the newspaper side of the business,” Vest said. “I was at CTP for over 30 years and would work with some amazing colleagues.”

The feeling was mutual.

“Cindy was a great friend and a wonderful employee who knew and loved her job and did it well,” former CTP general manager Pattie Johns said last week from her Phoenix, AZ. home. “We worked together for 30 years and shared many of the events in our lives.”

Vest enjoyed similar camaraderie at the Weekly News, where Stern was grateful that she offered to become production manager once he took ownership in June 2017.

“I came in not knowing a thing about the La Conner Weekly News,” Stern said. “Cindy was at her desk, as she had been for decades and she knew everything about getting the newspaper to the printer. Her skills and years of experience were impressive – and depended upon.

“Above all,” Stern noted, “she was good-natured, a trooper and did any needed thing to get each issue out.”

At the Weekly News, Vest was reunited with her friend of longstanding, La Conner attorney Pat Paul, the paper’s food editor.

“Cindy Vest was a trusted co-worker and longtime friend,” said Paul. “Our introduction was when I stopped in to see Alan Pentz at the Channel Town Press. Cindy invited me over to the typesetter and she described her workspace as between the east windows to a particular filing cabinet.

“Over the years, we transitioned to work together with Sandy Stokes,” Paul said. “When I stopped in to pick up my weekly check, Cindy would be in the next room, attaching mailing labels to the weekly newspaper. When I brought in my home canned goods she marveled at the spicy ones – gleefully sharing that her husband consumed them with one gulp, without her getting a taste.

“Cindy,” Paul emphasized, “was meticulous, kind and caring.”

All traits, it turns out, that define community newspapering at its best – the goal Vest succeeded at week in and week out for nearly a half-century.