Ann Ruth Levison, 78, editor of Harvard Post

Ann Ruth Levison helped build the Harvard Post into a reputable weekly.

Ann Ruth (Simons) Levison, who helped to turn the Harvard Post into an award-winning publication as its longtime editor, died April 15 at her home in Harvard. She was 78.

For reporters new to the business, colleagues and friends said, Mrs. Levison became the kind of mentor who set the bar high, keeping them on their toes as they were sent out to cover local politics, the economy, and the like.

"The Harvard Post, while she was the editor, had a very good reputation around town," said Connie Larrabee, a former reporter at the paper.

Mrs. Levison started as a feature writer at the weekly newspaper three years after it was launched in the mid-1970s. Her articles focused on such topics as gardening and edible wild foods. In the early 1980s, she became editor with two others. And by the late 1980s, she became sole editor, a position she held for a decade.

The Post was one of the first papers to focus entirely on the town of Harvard, and many officials had to adjust to having a reporter take notes at meetings, lending a sense of transparency to town affairs.

"Before there was a paper, there was a grapevine, there were discussions over the fence among neighbors," said Barbara Kemp, a former editor at the Post and a longtime friend of Mrs. Levison's. "The paper really was just such a channel of communication; it held town officials to account."

Mrs. Levison's family described the atmosphere at the Post as "wacky," with the newsroom crew often working well past midnight the night before the paper was printed.

She insisted on strong, well-written editorials and whipped the first sentence of each story into shape so that it was not cliché or confusing, eager to draw readers into each story. She also did not care for impersonal obituaries, her family said.

The paper relied on a team of reporters - most of whom were not staff - to generate copy. In the days before computerized programs, they pasted the page layout together with glue.

She also provided guidance to many high schools students who wrote stories about sporting events for the paper.

"She was a guide, a role model," said longtime family friend Suzanne Belmont-Peoples of Holderness, N.H. "She was very caring, very intelligent, and interested in every aspect of life."

Although the town of Harvard had just under 6,000 residents toward the end of her tenure, she envisioned the publication would become the best small-town paper possible given its resources. And while colleagues said she was not one to suffer fools gladly, she also lent a certain warmth to the role and had an infectious sense of curiosity about the goings-on in the town, 32 miles west of Boston.

While at the helm, she steered the paper to multiple awards. In 1985, the Post's editorial page won first place for its division from the New England Press Association. Mrs. Levison also netted a first place award for a 1997 feature story she penned.

Mrs. Levison, a Boston native, grew up in Quincy. She spent two years at the now-defunct Cambridge Junior College before graduating from Syracuse University and earning a master's in experimental psychology from Boston University.

She met her husband, Walter, while working at the photo interpretation laboratory at BU's Physical Research Laboratory. They married in 1959, and moved about two years later to Harvard.

Early in her career, she worked at Jordan Marsh, selling artificial flowers and feather hair ornaments. She was dismissed from that job for going up the down escalator during a lunch break.

She spent a few summers teaching youngsters how to swim at Harvard-Roxbury Day Camp, a summer program that brought children from Boston to the town of Harvard.

Mrs. Levison retired from the Post in May 2001, and the newspaper was sold to a chain. She did not put down her pen, however, taking up creative writing and poetry. A book of poetry she wrote with a longtime friend titled "Solstice" will be published in the coming months.

"She had a love for word, for communication, and for literature," Belmont-Peoples said.

Mrs. Levison's husband died in 1999. She leaves two daughters, Jenny of Hoboken, N.J., and Libby of Stow; and a brother, Steve of Hollis, N.H.

Memorial plans are incomplete. Burial was in Bellevue Cemetery in Harvard.