Many times, Julius and Harriet talked to me about retiring and selling the business. Every time, I expressed my belief that a non-profit organization could not be “sold,” but they ignored me and never stopped calling themselves the “owners.” The board of directors consisted only of Julius and Harriet and their three hearing children. I thought it was odd and improper for a non-profit agency’s board to consist only of five people from the same family. This concerned all of us on the staff, and we met with a lawyer to discuss the matter. We were told to be patient and wait for them to retire. If we went to the IRS with our concerns, it could mark the end of the newspaper and we didn’t want that to happen.
One day Harriet told me that they had talked with a lawyer about selling the business and learned that they would need to convert back to private ownership and pay around 20 years of back taxes. She was shocked and disappointed. Shortly thereafter, we were called to a meeting about their retirement. The staff looked forward to continuing to run the newspaper from Rochester with minimal involvement from the Wiggins. Instead, Adele showed up for the meeting with a lawyer and accountant and took over the organization in a coup d'état. She immediately started packing up our office and within a week, Silent News was gone from Rochester. Soon the finances began to plummet, and according to IRS tax returns, Julius Wiggins was soon forced to make a personal loan of around $100,000 to keep the paper going. Amazingly enough, they recently found a way to convert the paper back to private ownership (note their domain name went from silentnews.org to silentnews.com) and shortly thereafter began to have severe financial problems again, with no ability to seek out grants to get them over the hard times.
It is important for people to understand the truth about what happened with Silent News. In my opinion, the paper was done in by the greed of the Wiggins family, who tried to have the best of both worlds ... private ownership and non-profit status at the same time. Toward the end of the Rochester era of Silent News, Harriet was paying herself $69,000 a year as part-time accountant and Julius was getting around $48,000 despite doing practically no work on the newspaper. Harriet justified these salaries by saying that for many years they worked for almost nothing. That is fine in a private business, but not acceptable in a non-profit organization.
Left to his own devices, I am almost positive that Julius Wiggins would have let Silent News remain in Rochester to continue all the good work we were doing. Instead, I feel that he was betrayed by his wife and daughter, who were unable to make the transition gracefully. I find it very sad that Julius Wiggins passed away and was followed to the grave so soon thereafter by the newspaper to which he devoted his life.
From Betty Broecker, another former editor of Silent News:
I was pleased to read the summary by Tom Willard about The Silent News demise. Thanks to Tom we all got more information about what happened to a dearly beloved deaf community icon.
I still remember how honored I felt to be asked by Adele Wiggins to take on the editorship in 1996. Like Tom, I had and have the utmost respect for Julius Wiggins and his vision.
However, I soon realized the new management was woefully inexperienced in the way of the business world. Financial mismanagment and misunderstanding was everywhere.
I came to believe that the problems started, as Tom said, when Tom was dismissed and the paper moved to New Jersey. I could see from the files and records around me that Tom had been a very good and professional editor. How very sad the paper had lost such a competent editor.
After I left and much time went by I noticed that Trudy Suggs came on board as editor and was another very competent editor. I believe her resignation was a great loss and set the management up for the final failure.
