Lloyd Peterson always wanted to be a journalist.
At 15, he purchased a small printing press and began cranking out his own newspaper – The Elmora Globe in his boyhood home of Elizabeth, N.J.
He delivered the 41/2- by 5-inch newspaper to his neighbors' mailboxes. The cost of local news in 1930: one penny.
"I'd write about who's going to college or how they might pave North Avenue," said Peterson, now 90. "I'd pick up the [information] from the local paper."
His publishing career was short-lived, however.
"Someone got alarmed and thought I was distributing communist literature and called the police," Peterson said. " That put a stop to the paper."
Although his dreams of becoming a reporter never materialized, he did become a newspaper man.
Over the years, Peterson has collected more than 2,000 newspapers.
Browsing through Peterson's collection – neatly preserved in the Alpharetta home where he lives with his daughter and son-in-law – would give any history buff an adrenaline rush.
It includes a facsimile of a draft of the Declaration of Independence that was printed in Harper's Weekly in 1876.
"I first started collecting papers in the New York/New Jersey area as a kid," Peterson said. "Then I started obtaining other papers from collectors."
Peterson's dreams of working as a professional journalist quickly faded when the Depression hit, he said. Instead, he became a lithographer in New Jersey and helped produce maps and diagrams for a defense company.
His co-worker Walter Dougherty was an avid newspaper collector with an extensive collection. Dougherty gave most of his historic papers to Peterson when he retired.
"My favorites are the New York papers, because many of them are not around anymore," Peterson said.
The aged papers are kept intact in flat boxes that previously held lithography film. Their headlines tell of wars, with the New York Herald's coverage of the Civil War and the capture of rebel Gen. Jubal Early in 1865 and The Minneapolis Morning Tribune's special edition announcing the end of World War I in 1918. News and a photograph taken just before John F. Kennedy's assassination glare from the New York World-Telegram in 1963 with "President Shot Dead."
"I have so many that after a while I started only collecting papers that covered big events," Peterson said.
Way back when, newspapers came in all sizes. Peterson's oldest paper, from 1727, is London's Whitehall Evening Post. It's about the size of a sheet of notebook paper. Four-fold issues of the New York Daily Graphic in the 1800s are one large sheet of paper with illustrations on one side and newspaper stories on the other.
"You can imagine the work that went into these illustrations and text," Peterson said. "They first had to engrave the image in a wooden block and then cast steel."
Peterson focuses more on preserving than collecting these days. He's going to pass the collection on to his granddaughter.
"She's always had an interest," he said. "Believe it or not, no one else in the family ever thought much of the collection. Everyone just always thought of me as the newspaper man because I had so many."
