The Greenbelt News Review turns 85 years old on November 24 (coincidentally Thanksgiving Day this year), but the paper’s name dates back only to 1954. The paper was first called the Greenbelt Cooperator, a name the Journalistic Club selected as appropriate for a town founded on cooperative principles. Not everyone liked that name, though, evidenced by a letter to the editor in the December 22, 1937, issue. Greenbelt resident Howard Custer complained that the name sounded “preachy; syrupy” while also suggesting a “trade journal” or “house organ.” He thought The Greenbelt Town Crier was a better name for a paper that reported on happenings around town. The next week resident Samuel Maryn wrote in to support the original name and to criticize Custer’s alternative, which Maryn thought evoked “powdered wigs and knee-breeches,” not the town of the future that Greenbelt was seen as, with its “electric ranges, casement windows and underpasses.” The paper invited residents to send in postcards expressing their views.
Discussion of a name change mostly was shelved through the next decade. (And Custer became a contributor to the paper, writing the Custer’s Last Stand column, which commented on town affairs and life in general, from 1938 into 1941.) The paper’s name was formally considered by its membership at an October 1949 meeting of the Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Association, with proponents of change wanting to clearly separate the paper from the town’s other cooperatives, particularly Greenbelt Consumer Services, Inc., which had helped launch the paper in 1937 and had been its major advertiser. Opponents of a name change felt that Cooperator suited a newspaper that supported cooperatives – indeed, “to serve the best interests of the cooperative movement” had been added to the mission statement on the paper’s masthead in 1946 – and that it was a name full of tradition, since that was what the paper had been called from the start. The vote on whether to change the name was split but then reconsidered, with members finally voting to change the name at a meeting on November 27, 1949. A committee was appointed to consider new names and make a recommendation, with the name change to be adopted within three months.
The committee issued a plea for name suggestions from readers in an editorial in the February 23, 1950, issue, but there was no progress to report at the annual membership meeting in October 1950 or for a few years after that. Finally, in July 1954, then-editor Harry Zubkoff, perhaps in exasperation, forced the issue by dropping Cooperator from the name on the paper’s banner, and the paper was published as solely “Greenbelt” until a decision could be made. (See, for example, the July 29, 1954, issue at greenbeltnewsreview.com/archives.) Public opinion was again sought, with readers asked to vote on a choice of 15 names or to make another suggestion. The response was disappointing, with fewer than 100 ballots cast: about one-third of the votes were to keep the name Cooperator and the remainder were scattered among the other options. So, in the end, the name choice was made by the paper’s staff members and board of directors. When the September 23, 1954, issue came out, Greenbelt News Review was the name atop the banner.