NOEL
Continued from Page 19
In October 1967, he started a career in advertising at the Grand Forks Herald. His first boss was Henry Dibbern, who also taught advertising at UND. Dibbern died at age 51, but taught him a lot. “Henry loved to teach,” LeTexier recalls. “He had me in his office right away in the morning and we’d study advertising – how write copy, ‘benefit headlines,’ how to do layouts. He was an incredible teacher – very ethical. He wanted things done right, and he wanted customers treated right. “I guess I learned those ethics from Henry. You told customers the truth straight out. You didn’t try to jerk them around about what the ads were going to cost or what the circulation really was. You told them what they were getting with their money, and you did what they wanted with their ads. And you didn’t run it unless
you had their OK.” LeTexier learned other things the hard way. He drank too much. Alcohol led to the breakup of his first marriage. But after the wreckage of addiction, he found Jesus Christ and took his last drink July 19, 1981. He spent six weeks drying out at the Glenmore Recovery Center in Crookston, Minn. “I was a new man!” he declares, only half-joking he was “pastorized” off of booze. He would marry his wife, Diana, in 1983.
A new man for Agweek
LeTexier started by selling advertising to urban retailers, but also agricultural clients for what then was referred to as the Herald’s “Farm and Home,” or casually, the “green sheet.” It was the Herald’s farm insert that came out on Thursdays. “One fellow – Roger Plattes – put the whole thing together – editorial, makeup,” LeTexier remembers. “He loved that green sheet and he did a great job with it.”
25TH ANNIVERSARY
AGWEEK / Monday, August 2, 2010 – PAGE 21
“Those were tough years, very tough years – ’88, ’89 and ’90. Very tough going, but we made it.”
Noel LeTexier
Mike Maidenberg came to the Herald as publisher in 1982. The Indiana native observed the success of the green sheet and other ag weeklies in the area – publications like the Back Forty in the Red River Valley and Agri News in the Rochester, Minn. He thought the Herald could produce something like that and more. Fresh out of the Knight Ridder home office in Miami, Maidenberg also knew how to convince his friends in Miami to try for a bigger ag play. Knight Ridder had an interest in specialty publications. The Miami Herald flagship newspaper had launched a Business Monday section, which was an early success. The Herald envisioned an expanded ag weekly – “Agweek” – not as an insert,
but as a free-standing publication. “Once the concept was explained and people I reported to in Miami understood that it was a free-standing weekly, we could show them the importance of ag, the dollars that would come through it, it wasn’t a great hurdle,” Maidenberg recalls. LeTexier wasn’t yet on the Agweek staff, but he heard how it was going. The first step was establishing a circulation presence. “They started out with ‘free’ Agweeks – 55,000 copies delivered every week,” LeTexier says. “That went on for 18 months and then we started wanting to charge for it, and circulation dropped considerably. We had to deal with that for years – people wanting it
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NOEL: See Page 23
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to come free.” But it was always the plan that circulation would be a part of the revenue stream. Happily, subscribers started to see the publication’s worth and the magazine retained its paid circulation status, which was important to advertisers. Agweek’s first sales director was Tom Kuchera, who would go on to be advertising manager for the Herald. Second in command was Roger Brokke. LeTexier, who had been selling advertising both for the Herald and for Agweek, became Agweek’s advertising director on Feb. 1, 1988. LeTexier took on the advertising directorship just as a two-year drought was setting in. “Those were tough years, very tough years – ’88, ’89 and ’90. Very tough going, but we made it,” he says. After the drought, things started to pick up. Farmers and their suppliers were beginning to climb out of the whole financial pit of the mid1980s, and into a recovery period of the early 1990s. The
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