July 10, 2009 Last deadline passes for Eagle Times Play video

(NECN: Lauren Collins, Claremont, NH) - The doors are locked and the parking lot is nearly empty. The last deadline has passed for the Eagle Times and its three weeklies.

Eagle Publications filed for chapter seven bankruptcy Friday, immediately shuttering the presses in Claremont and laying off 66 full time, as well as 29 part time employees.

State labor officials were just as stunned as the workers who were notified by an email Thursday afternoon.

Arthur McAllister of NH Works says, "I learned of the information this morning."

A rapid response team was already poised to meet with the paper's staff Friday afternoon, a staff that had cleaned out its desks and was long gone by noontime.

Of the team, McAllister says, "we meet with the employees as quickly as possible to explain the services that are available to them from the state."

Services like unemployment benefits, job training and food stamps. All services unfathomable to the Eagle Times operations manager, who did not want to speak on camera, but said that after 12 years with the paper, and more than 30 in the business, that he's devastated to think of what will happen to the 75 people he supervised.

The last edition is apparently the hottest item in Claremont. There's not a copy of the paper to be found anywhere in town.

"Everyone's been coming in looking for it," says Amy Blanchard works at Birney's Mini-Mart. The store opens at 6am. The

"Usually we have a stack like this left at the end of the day so had people been buying them like that in the beginning, they probably never would have gone out of business."

She says paper's sudden end is a surprise to everyone, especially her husband's boss, a professional painter who'd bought ad space just this week.

"They took of pictures them and tried to put an ad in the paper. They did and now all of a sudden the paper's out of business so it's kind of a take the money and run type of deal."

But the paper's publisher, Harvey Hill, explained via email that he'd put a million dollars of his family's own money into the operation and tried for a year to sell the paper, but no takers.