Save the date: Courier to celebrate 25 years in Niwot

This is not an April Fool's "announcement.".... The Left Hand Valley Courier will mark 25 years of serving the Niwot-Gunbarrel community on Friday, April 1, with an Open House from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the courtyard outside the offices of Warren, Carlson & Moore, LLP, Attorneys located in Cottonwood Square.

The community is invited to join the founders and current staff of the newspaper for a celebration outside the law office, where the staff meets once a week to plan each edition of the weekly newspaper. The Courier is the only independently owned and operated print newspaper left in Boulder County.

"There are more than 100 people who have been part of the Courier over the last 25 years, including writers, editors, advertising directors and reps, and carriers," according to Vicki Maurer, one of the founders and the current business manager of the paper. "We're hoping to see many of them as they've all been a part of helping us cover the news in the community."

"When we started this, we laid out the newspaper on a ping-pong table in the basement of my home, on Saturday mornings," founder and current senior editor Mary Wolbach Lopert said. "We also used 'sneakernet' back in the day before being online was widely used. We had floppy dishes, which for those who don't know, weren't floppy, but hard disks which fit into slots in your computer. I remember taking the disk and driving it to our layout artist Julia Vandenberg on Friday afternoons.

"We were only publishing once a month back then."

"Little did my family know, that first Thanksgiving in 1997 when they came to visit from out of state, that they would be drafted to help roll and insert into plastic, before delivering a thousand Couriers around town" added founder Karen Copperberg. "As a side benefit, they got to see a lot of the area, as we even delivered up the hill, on the west side of Hwy. 36 in those days."

"In the early days, I had to bring chocolate to Julia, our layout person, whenever I was late delivering an article on a floppy disc," founder and current managing editor Bruce Warren recalled.

"Most of our family members had to help out at one time or another," Warren continued. "My son once convinced me to drive him and his friend through the Twin Lakes neighborhood to deliver papers while riding on their rollerblades and hanging on to the open trunk of the car. I had to field a phone call from an irate resident the next day who witnessed what she thought was such a dangerous practice. I told her I would 'look into the matter' and make sure it didn't happen again."

So please come and join us to celebrate our great little newspaper. As an extra incentive, refreshments will be served. No foolin'.