By Patrick Newell,

Former Evening Sun Sports Editor

Earlier this week, I read of Dave Montague’s passing. I wanted to share some thoughts from someone who worked with “Darkroom Dave,” for 20 years.

Dave is in rarified air in the annals of Evening Sun history. A graduate of Norwich High School, Dave attended Broome Community College, then embarked on a half-century tenure working for Chenango County’s hometown daily. 

There are so many cogs in the wheel to produce a daily paper. From the writers and editors to page designers, production, pressmen, and distribution. It’s a newspaper’s version of an assembly line, and Dave executed his role with precision and excellence.

As far as I know, Dave never wrote a story or took a picture that appeared in The Evening Sun, but his fingerprints were likely on more daily issues than any Evening Sun employee in its century-plus history.

Starting at the Sun in the early 1970s, for more than 20 years, Dave was developing staff photos for publication in the darkroom (hence the nickname), before moving over to the production side to get the newspapers pages ready for the printing press.

In the mid-1990s, after Snyder Communications purchased The Evening Sun, Dave also helped produce numerous Snyder Communications publications, which includes The Norwich Pennysaver.

Technology changed, too, under Snyder Communications, but Dave was as steady and reliable as they came. As newspaper design became digital, Dave adapted with the times. While I never saw him angry, I know he was as frustrated as the rest of us when this newfangled technology glitched.   

Still, he remained a constant, unsung hero at the newspaper. I remember his patience early on in my newspaper career.  And I needed it as I was trying something different. 

In later winter, 1996, I did a girls’ basketball feature on the Bainbridge-Guilford versus Greene playoff game. That game, incidentally, would have four eventual Section IV Hall of Fame athletes.

  I didn’t have digital headshots, just black and white print photos of the players.  I needed Dave to create about a dozen headshots from undeveloped film to fit 12 headshot boxes. He sized and reshot the photos, which were team shots, then carefully cut out the photos of individual players from those photos. Then he ran those photos through this gluing agent and inserted each one-inch photo into the small, framed photo box.

It was tedious and painstaking, and it didn’t help that I was looking over Dave’s shoulder to ensure he put the right face with the right name.

But that was Dave. No job was too tedious or challenging. You knew you were getting his best effort, and you also knew he would do it right.

With his trademark walrus mustache, Dave was one-of-a-kind, and he outlasted numerous changes in ownership, management, and probably 10 or more sports editors.   

I only saw Dave one time in the years since I moved to New Mexico. It was a few years ago, and I was looking up some old newspaper information at the Lackawanna Ave. printing site. True to his ethic, he was diligently putting together the images that would find themselves on some sort of publication.

Dave spent a lifetime working behind the scenes at the newspaper, but those who remember him know how vital he was to the paper’s success.