Karen Waldauer, enterprising local publisher, editor, writer, and volunteer, has died at 84
She founded Middle Atlantic Press in 1968 and later became president of Valleydel Publications, a West Chester-based publisher of County Lines magazine.
Karen Waldauer, 84, formerly of Rose Tree, retired local publisher, editor, writer, and community volunteer, died Monday, Jan. 9, of pancreatic cancer at Foulkeways at Gwynedd retirement community.
Mrs. Waldauer was a longtime publishing entrepreneur who founded Middle Atlantic Press, her own regional book publishing firm, in 1968, and in 1984 became president of Valleydel Publications, a West Chester-based publisher of County Lines magazine and other printed material.
Middle Atlantic Press, based in Wallingford and Moorestown, focused largely on books about local history and folklore, and published titles such as William Penn’s own Account of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians in 1970, The Jersey Devil by James McCloy and Ray Miller Jr. in 1976, The Delaware Indian Westward Migration by C.A. Weslager in 1978, and Just Around the Corner, in New Jersey by Edward Brown in 1983.
Mrs. Waldauer published Pine Barrens, Legends, Lore and Lies by William McMahon in 1980, and told the New York Times that readers in the Mid-Atlantic states were clamoring at the time for more local reading material. “The outside world has really just discovered the Pinelands,” she told the Times. “To date, there hasn’t been much written about this area because most publishers can’t gear themselves down to this limited a topic.”
In a profile she wrote about her career, Mrs. Waldauer said she sold Middle Atlantic Press in the early 1980s “because a friend needed her help and because she was intrigued by what she saw as a new publishing and marketing challenge.” So she assumed control of County Lines, oversaw the printing of regional theater playbills, and became president and owner of Westtown-based Valleydel Publications until she retired in 2006.
In 1986, Mrs. Waldauer told The Inquirer that the challenges of attracting suburban readers to local magazines were numerous. For example, she said, the readership market along Philadelphia’s Main Line was “extremely ephemeral.”
People may reside on the Main Line, she said, “but they don’t totally live there. They have other magazines to serve their interests, and their interests are very broad. Being confined to Main Line subjects is not appealing to this sophisticated market. … Quite a few magazines come, and quite a few go.”
Born Jan. 13, 1938, Karen Francia Gordon grew up in New York, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, and attended City College of New York. She met fellow CCNY student Charles Waldauer, and they married in 1958, had daughters Jan and Kim, and lived in Media for 15 years before moving to Rose Tree. Her husband died in 2022.
She worked for several printing and publishing companies in New York before landing a job in the mid-1960s as a production editor at Rutgers University Press. She also edited many of the books and stories she later published, and wrote magazine articles under a pseudonym.
Away from work, Mrs. Waldauer was an active volunteer. She was former president of the board at the Skating Club of Radnor, spokesperson for the Philadelphia Skating Club, a member of the entrepreneurial initiative advisory board at Delaware County Community College, and on the board at the School in Rose Valley.
She created, funded, and oversaw the publication of a student newspaper at Sleighton Farms School in Glen Mills, tutored adults for the Delaware County Literacy Council, and organized seniors in support of President Barack Obama’s political campaigns. “She was bright and creative and encouraged curiosity and trying new things,” her family said in a tribute.
Mrs. Waldauer was also an avid gardener who, in her own words, “had a huge affection for animals, which extended even to the deer that dined on her prized flower beds, the raccoons that raided her birdseed stash, and the squirrels that regularly colonized her attic.”
She and her family cared for dogs, cats, fish, hamsters, mice, hermit crabs, and even helped injured chipmunks and birds when they came upon them. She was a voracious reader, enjoyed travel, and had eclectic tastes in music, theater, art, and food.
She said in her profile: “The frequent and irreverent humor she brought to day-to-day living was, in her view, a survival skill passed on in her Jewish genes. She observed that it made the inevitable bumps in life’s road easier to navigate.”
Services were private.