STEPHEN M. O'KEEFE capped off a 57-year long career, all of it with the newspaper that in time became the Courier-Post with writing the article below, a seven-part history of the newspaper, which published its first edition on October 7, 1875 as the Camden Daily Post on October 2, 1875.

On the whole it is a very good recounting of the history of the Courier in particular with some insights into the times and the people who played a role in Camden's newspapers and political world. One thing worth noting, is that O'Keefe, who apparently never let go of some hostility towards David Baird Jr., chose to refer to him as a "Night Rider" in his business dealings with J. David Stern, with "Night Rider" implying that Baird was in some how affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. That Baird referred to Stern as a "carpetbagger" is indisputable, as is his accuracy in using that term, especially given the actions of Stern, who had no local connections, involving himself in local politics. A good case can be made that the "reforms" Stern backed, especially the abandonment of the ward-based City Council in favor of five at-large commissioners was a terrible idea and did not serve the city well at all, placing politicians in charge of departments where they had no expertise whatsoever. Two wrongs do not make a right, however, and there was no need to imply that the long-dead Baird Jr. was in anyway associated with the KKK.

NOTE: In the interest of speeding up the process of getting the seven-part history on the website, I have not followed usual practice and reformatted long columns. The source material, microfilm images, was not optimal for use with OCR software, and I do not have the time to manually transcribe the images. For now at least, the reader will have to some scrolling. Also on the interest of time, I have not provided hyperlinks to pages about people mentioned below. These will be forthcoming at a later date.

Camden Courier-Post - October 7, 1975