By Leslie Kelly

lkelly@soundpublishing.com

When Ray “Ace” Comstock took over as publisher of the Port Orchard Independent in 1965, subscriptions to the paper were $3 a year. The newspaper office was located downtown on Bay Street and employed seven people. At the time, there were about 7,000 residents in town.

Comstock’s wife, Bernice, and all of their five children worked at the paper through the 12 years that he was publisher.

Bernice, who is now 86 and a resident of Stafford Suites in Port Orchard, has many good — and some bad — memories of the days when they were a newspaper family.

“It was tough work,” she said. “My husband was never anyone to shy away from controversy. That kept our lives interesting.

“Ace Comstock was almost four years older than Bernice and both graduated from South Kitsap High School in the 1940s.

“He was the big man on campus,” she said. “Back in those days the junior high and the high school were all together.

“They were married right after high school. Ace was drafted in the U.S. Army when he turned 18 and he served as a clerk typist assigned to Kawajalein, an island in the Pacific where atom bomb tests were being done and observed by journalists, following World War II. He was charged with escorting the journalists.

“That’s when he got his love of journalism,” Bernice said. “He knew then, that that was what he’d spend his life doing.

“It’s also where he got his nickname. He was born Allison Ray Comstock, and went by the initials A.C. But in the Army, his buddies turned that into “Ace.”

After military service, he attended the University of Washington School of Journalism and soon became editor of the Oak Harbor News Times. “In was the (mid) 1950s and he made $60 a week,” she said. “We had five kids at the time.”

Soon, he moved on to the paper in Stanwood, and for a time also owned the paper in Darrington. Eventually, he came back to be the editor of the South Whidbey Record. All of these were weekly papers, and Bernice spent many hours proof-reading the papers. And she learned to run a line-o-type machine.

In 1965, the Port Orchard Independent became available and the Comstocks moved back to Kitsap County.

“Both sets of (our) parents lived here and we were glad to come back,” she said. At the time, the paper was published on Bainbridge Island, but was put together in the newsroom in downtown Port Orchard. The Independent was owned, in part, by the publisher of the Bainbridge Island Review. “He wanted to sell us the Independent, so gradually we got all of it,” Bernice said.

Those were the days of hot lead type.

“My job was to secure the type to the page,” she said. “We had an electric skillet where we melted the wax and then spread it on the page with a spatula. We thought we were pretty lucky when we got a machine that had rollers and did that for us.”

At times, when news happened and her husband needed help, he’d call on her.

“He’d put a camera in my hands and I’d asked him ‘which button do I push?,'” she said.

She recalled a mistake that came back to haunt her.

“I mixed up two politicians’ names under a photo,” she said. “One of them took it very friendly, but the other one stormed into the office and yelled at me. I told him if he’d come by the newspaper more often we’d know who he was.

“She also recalled another rather tense moment in the newsroom.

“We ran a story about a prosecuting attorney who had cases that had been on his desk for months,” she said. “The prosecutor didn’t like that, so he came in the door and trapped a pair of scissors and went charging toward us.”

Ace was able to wrestle the scissors away from him and it all ended without any bloodshed, she said.

Bernice said her husband was a hands-on publisher and worked many hours. It was only after suffering a heart attack in 1975 that he slowed down and eventually sold the paper.”

He was at the fair, in the middle of the cow-milking contest when he had his heart attack,” Bernice said. “After that, he sold real estate, which I thought was more nerve-wracking.

“The Comstocks later moved to Arizona for retirement, and in January 2001, Ace died. After that, Bernice moved back to Port Orchard and later married Fred Caldron. She, too, outlived him, and about eight years ago moved to Stafford Suites. She has adult children living in Shelton and Port Orchard. Her other remaining children live in Florida and Wisconsin.As for the newspaper business, she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“Most people liked Ace,” she said. “But in the newspaper business, people can get mad at you for any old thing.”