A Life Between the Cobblestones
Getting to Know the 'Teditor' and his 30 Years Covering New Castle
Though he was not raised in New Castle, Theodore (Ted) Joslin II grew up with the historic, riverfront town, where time spent with family formed some of his fondest early memories. After marrying in 1986, Joslin moved to New Castle himself with his own family. Working full-time in the News-Journal’s advertising office, Ted made time to become a reporter as well, covering events in town for the New Castle Eagle and later the New Castle Weekly (predecessors of The Weekly that we know today).
These days, though, Ted is perhaps best known around New Castle as the ‘Teditor,’ publisher of the Cobblestones newsletter, which he described as a “labor of love” during a recent interview. As the masthead of the newsletter proclaimed, “what happens between the Cobblestones is on everyone’s lips!” And it truly was: with nearly a thousand eager, weekly readers, Joslin’s publication became a local touchstone over the ten years he produced it, informing and moving the New Castle community.
It was a pleasure to speak with Ted for this profile, and also with those who know and have worked with him. Special thanks to Kat Zane helping with several details, providing a great trove of photos, and of course for getting me in touch with the man himself.
Update, 3/11/24: After several years at the Parkview Nursing and Rehab Center in Wilmington struggling with his health, Ted Joslin passed away today. This inset will be updated further once his obituary has been published.
New Castle in his Heart, Ink in his Veins
“Growing up, my grandmother’s house was on The Strand… I just, all my life, have enjoyed New Castle. It really is a great town,” Ted said very fondly of a childhood that included much time spent at the home of his grandparents. They were well known residents of the Strand for many years, civically active, with his grandmother once having kept a shop on the first floor of Old Town Hall and both very involved in New Castle’s busy social calendar. Later, after marrying his wife Anne and moving into town himself to settle down, Ted “was on The Strand for thirty plus years, really a part of the neighborhood. It was my wife, and my son and myself.”
New Castle and journalism seem to have snared Joslin early on, entwined as they were in the person of his grandfather, a former press secretary for president Herbert Hoover and a distinguished reporter himself. Though his own journalistic path and artistic flair led to a career designing and creating print advertisements for the News Journal rather than ‘covering a beat’ in Wilmington or Dover, in time, Ted also felt the itch to write. Fortunately, his own adopted home town provided rich fodder and a welcoming outlet in the New Castle Eagle.
Helped along by a powerful dose of the ‘gift of gab,’ Ted made himself a fixture, especially at New Castle’s various great restaurants. He reminisced about the various incarnations of eatery preceding Jessop’s Tavern, drinks with friends at Nora Lee’s, and his two personal favorites: Porto-Fino’s, and - before it closed - the David Finney Inn, in whose middle booth the Joslins could be found quite frequently. “My fondest memories are sitting in the middle booth, the three of us.”
Involved in town events like Day in Old New Castle and others, Ted took special joy in meeting visitors to the city and sharing New Castle with them. As he recalled, “One year, my wife and I met some people from Scotland at the Arsenal and got to talking about the history in town. And I just said, ‘why don’t you come over to the house? I’ll show you the inside.’ The basement was the old, original kitchen… and it had one of the neatest fireplaces in town. They were fascinated.”
Another chance encounter with distant-out-of-towners also stood out:
“One of my fondest memories was at the DFI. We were sitting in the middle booth… and this couple was up front, a mom and dad with two boys. We nodded to them and talked a bit and eventually they came over and joined us. Turns out they were from California.
“One day the oldest boy had come home from school and said, ‘I have a report due this year on the state of Delaware.’ Well, the father didn’t even know what DE was, they had to … look it up in the Encyclopedia. And he told the kid, “if you get an A on your report, we’ll go see DE, how about that?’
“The boy worked feverishly and he got the A. So they flew into BWI and got a Rent-a-car. I think they were from northern California, and everything was Adobe where they were from because they had never seen houses with bricks. To them, this was mind-boggling!
“We welcomed them to New Castle. I told them, ‘this is history on the streets.’ And they were just amazed at the cool town, and that we took the time to tell them all about it.”
Over the years, Ted became a fixture in the ad room at work as well, leading and guiding others in his department, and helping others grow into the business. “Ted Joslin isn’t just one of the best bosses I’ve ever had, but he was also a treasured mentor and friend,” recalled Tony Smith, who worked with him there. “In all the years since we’ve worked together, I’ve met very few other people who can look at a layout and say, ‘there, that’s your problem,’ and be as dead-on accurate like Ted is.”
Yet the turn of the century was a hard time for local news rooms, and the News-Journal was no exception. Ted was blunt about it. “There at the end of the road, they just came and told me one day, ‘your job doesn’t exist anymore.’ Gotta take out the dead wood, I guess, the old timers. They wanted to bring in youngins.”
These were difficult years for Ted, who also lost Anne in May of 2000, at the age of 42. A civically-active painter, cook and pilot-in-training, Anne was Ted’s close partner in everything, even joining him to work at the News Journal for their last seven years together, and had deepened his love of the town where they shared their lives. In the years after her passing, it was the town, and the many friends they shared in it, that helped Ted eventually look forward again.
The Cobblestone Life: Becoming the ‘Teditor’
In 2010, Ted found himself “sitting up at Porto-Fino’s one afternoon, me and Kat and a few others, saying how the editors of the old New Castle Weekly needed to take it up a notch.” They chewed over how the paper, then published by the Carpenters, could be more informative about some things “right here in town,” including community events. That’s when Ted, who enjoyed a byline in the paper numerous times, had a realization. “They weren’t going to do it,” he said, “since they had been at it a long time. So I sat down and I said, ‘well wait a minute, why the hell don’t I do something like that?’ And we came up with the name ‘Cobblestones.’”
The idea quickly took life. The following week, Ted “went down to the Apple store and got a little laptop, and came home and started putting stuff together.” The first issues were fairly simple, he recalled, and “barely looked like what it evolved into. It was only one or two pages, with a few tidbits and some sports. But it grew, and became my little baby for ten years.”
What started in 2010 as a couple-page email to “about sixteen or seventeen friends” grew over a decade into a routinely ten-plus page, weekly publication with almost a thousand loyal subscribers. In time, sports results and local gossip would share the pages of Cobblestones with more serious material. The establishment of First State Historical Park, the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, town debates over street cameras, the city website and more… if it was important or just plain interesting to the Teditor, into the newsletter it went to help inform others.
Joslin also remained a regular at his favorite haunts in town, often seen at Porto-Fino’s or Jessop’s with a rotating cast of friends and familiars - any of whom might become a source for Cobblestones. These personal connections also led to the beginning of ads in the newsletter. Ted recalled, “Porto-Fino’s was with me from the word go. I wasn’t in it to make a lot of money, but a little here and there didn’t hurt. I had advertisers [like] Wilmington College, various businesses and others. Folks would call me, asking ‘how much for a little real estate ad?’ or something, and you don’t want to bleed people - these are friends and neighbors.”
For his weekly editorial content, over time, Ted developed a process:
“For ten years, as soon as I was finished my Sunday morning, I’d sit down, copy over [a previous issue] and get to filling it in, start all over…
“Every issue had a ‘This Week in History,’ to educate people about the Delaware history around where we all grew up. Then we had the Phillies and the Eagles, I had to cover that. And there was always a recipe, and a cocktail – and everybody loved that part. As a matter of fact, people said I should go through all those recipes and make a Cobblestones Cookbook, which is still something I’ve got in the back of my mind.
“Then on the back page, you’ve got the weather, sunrise and sunset, just general information… And the rest got filled with whatever was going on that week.”
Cobblestones didn’t exist in a news vacuum, though. New Castle is fortunate to have a printed ‘paper of record’ as well. After the New Castle Weekly was sold to Terry Buchanan and Alice Reihl in 2014, Ted developed a friendly, symbiotic relationship with the new publishers. “The Weekly and I, we work hand in hand, and there was never any competition between us,” he said. “We worked together. When I saw something coming up, I would tell them… Or she would call me up or drop me a note and say, ‘hey, check this out.’”
Ted still got his ‘scoops,’ however. As he explained, “every now and again there was something I’d get to first… Like if I knew this thing with the traffic light was coming up. And I’d take advantage. If something was coming out from the city, like on a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, well I would grab that because I knew they couldn’t do it until next week and I’d get a jump on it.”
The result of the two working together was a better-informed New Castle, Ted believes. And Terry Buchanan Gormley, now sole editor of The Weekly, agreed. “Cobblestones and the New Castle Weekly (long before we bought it) have been traditions in New Castle for a long time and we’ve enjoyed sharing information together over the years,” she wrote. “Ted is a great guy and could always be counted on to show up at city events with his famous ‘Press’ hat or my favorite – his infamous St. Paddy’s Day outfit. The Teditor is a New Castle treasure.”
In 2015, the New Castle Hundred Lions Club agreed, presenting Joslin with their Community Award, which credited him with creating “Delaware’s Most Unique Newsletter.” Ted was a local pioneer in the modern art of citizen journalism and and the subscription news model that is flourishing today (and which Substack, the newsletter site which hosts the blog you are reading right now, is entirely devoted to, along with others like it). Ted wasn’t trying to break ground, though, just share what he loved about New Castle with his friends and neighbors. “For one guy doing this,” he said, “it was a labor of love, I guess you’d call it.”
The last issue of Cobblestones came out in mid-2020. That week, Ted was injured in a fall and has since been recovering at Parkview Nursing & Rehab Center in Wilmington. “I hurt several vertebrae and cracked a rib,” he lamented. “That’s what got me into this…” Fortunately, Ted reports doing well in his recovery and looking forward. “I can’t wait to get back to New Castle, just to get an ice cream at Jessop’s and spend some time with friends.”
As Ted misses New Castle, so do his many friends, acquaintances and readers miss him and his newsletter, and look forward to seeing him again on the Cobblestones… Maybe 2022 will see that ‘Cobblestones Cookbook’ with cocktails! In the meantime, the archive of the Cobblestones newsletter has now become a public resource, available to peruse at New Castle Historical Society alongside the records of town founders, revolutionaries and leaders. By pursuing his love of sharing New Castle and its history with others, Ted Joslin and his work have become part of that history.
Great article hope my buddy is doing good everybody loves Ted hope to see you soon
Great article on you and the news letter. Good luck on a full recovery.