Karen Waldauer, enterprising local publisher, editor, author, and volunteer, has died at 84

Karen Waldauer, 84, formerly of Rose Tree, retired local publisher, editor, author, 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 akin to 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 Across the Corner, in Recent Jersey by Edward Brown in 1983.

Mrs. Waldauer published Pine Barrens, Legends, Lore and Lies by William McMahon in 1980, and told the Recent York Times that readers within the Mid-Atlantic states were clamoring on the time for more local reading material. “The surface world has really just discovered the Pinelands,” she told the Times. “So far, there hasn’t been much written about this area because most publishers can’t gear themselves all the way down to this limited a subject.”

In a profile she wrote about her profession, Mrs. Waldauer said she sold Middle Atlantic Press within the early Eighties “because a friend needed her help and since she was intrigued by what she saw as a recent publishing and marketing challenge.” So she assumed control of County Lines, oversaw the printing of regional theater playbills, and have become 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 quite a few. For instance, she said, the readership market along Philadelphia’s Important Line was “extremely ephemeral.”

People may reside on the Important Line, she said, “but they don’t totally live there. They produce other magazines to serve their interests, and their interests are very broad. Being confined to Important Line subjects just isn’t appealing to this sophisticated market. … Quite a couple of magazines come, and quite a couple of go.”

Born Jan. 13, 1938, Karen Francia Gordon grew up in Recent York, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, and attended City College of Recent York. She met fellow CCNY student Charles Waldauer, and so 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 firms in Recent York before landing a job within the mid-Sixties as a production editor at Rutgers University Press. She also edited lots of the books and stories she later published, and wrote magazine articles under a pseudonym.

Away from work, Mrs. Waldauer was an lively volunteer. She was former president of the board on 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 on 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 arranged seniors in support of President Barack Obama’s political campaigns. “She was vibrant and inventive and encouraged curiosity and trying recent things,” her family said in a tribute.

Mrs. Waldauer was also an avid gardener who, in her own words, “had an enormous affection for animals, which prolonged even to the deer that dined on her prized flower beds, the raccoons that raided her birdseed stash, and the squirrels that recurrently colonized her attic.”

She and her family cared for dogs, cats, fish, hamsters, mice, hermit crabs, and even helped injured chipmunks and birds once they got here 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 delivered 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.