Knowing Where Our Bread is Buttered

There is something special about a local weekly newspaper. It’s news about your friends and neighbors. It alerts you to upcoming events…that actually pertain to you. It will give you every single detail on how Homer Cunningham got his 1955 Dodge pickup entangled with a telephone pole alongside that sharp curve out on the Shiloh Road.

Most often it would include a front-page picture of the vehicle, tilted sideways in the ditch, with the right side still resting against the pole. It was almost like you were at the scene of the accident!

Now, we got the Commercial Appeal out of Memphis every single morning. It was twice as big as our weekly McKenzie Banner, but it mostly told us about the drought that was wreaking havoc with the Kansas wheat farmers. Or, there would be a big picture of President Eisenhower greeting some sultan from Istanbul.

Didn’t none of us give a whistling hoot about a drought unless it was wilting the cotton in our backyard, and you can just imagine how much we cared about a high up mucky-t-muck from Turkey visiting with Ike.

From the Memphis paper we got news about social life in the city, what Elvis was doing, and how the ducks were faring at the famous Peabody Hotel. Didn’t none of that hold a candle to us walking the railroad tracks all the way out to Chestnut Avenue to get a firsthand look at the damage to Mr. Homer’s old Dodge.

The Banner informed us when Mrs. Luther Purvis was out of town, visiting her cousin in Jackson. It was a regular feature to give us the details if someone was lucky enough to go on a trip. You might think this mundane. But it allowed us to keep up with everybody, and it introduced us to places like Tupelo, Mississippi, Cowan, Tennessee, and Paducah, Kentucky.

We read the obituary every week. It was not done out of morbid curiosity. It was more like a roll call of the dearly beloved. You remembered your first encounter with them, or the last. You remembered one’s coconut cake. Or another’s whittling ability, or when the recently departed put the chain back on your bicycle in front of Bailey Moore Wrinkle’s Hardware store.

The first time I saw my name in print was in The Banner. It was in the sports section, after a Little League baseball game. I read it over and over and over. They had spelled it correctly. Everybody in town was going to read it. And that made me feel good. Special even.

There is NOTHING on earth that can replace a smalltown weekly newspaper!

And you can bet the old gray mare, your last dime, and the family farm that I am not the only person that has been touched by “local” news and events.

I moved to Port St. Joe in August of 1969. I knew exactly one person in the whole place. Walter Wilder was kind enough to offer me a job teaching and coaching at the high school.

The first week in town I got my hands on a copy of The Star. It was informative, had lots of news and pictures about the people and scenes from around town, and an obituary. The sports section was huge. And the Garden Club, just like back home, had their own little space to report on what they were planting and what they were planning.

I captured the heartbeat of the town reading The Star each week. I shopped at the stores that advertised in the paper. I “met” a lot of folks for the first time in The Star.

The editor had a column that was witty, poignant, informative, and “down home.” That is a lot to accomplish in any single newspaper article! Yet he did it week after week.

I was impressed with everything about this weekly newspaper. But more than that, it immediately made me feel welcome, comfortable, at home….

The Commercial Appeal couldn’t do that in a hundred thousand years.

It gets tougher on small newspapers every day. The internet is fraught with instant up to the second news, or what they tell us is news. The big networks have their own versions. It is hard to compete with Fox and CNN.

But understand this. None of them can tell you the best place to buy live chickens in your little town. None of them are interested in what time the high school football game kicks off next Friday. They never one time visited Cliff Sanborn’s garden and reported on the size of his tomatoes. And they’ve never eaten one pancake, or contributed one dollar, to the annual Kiwanis breakfast fundraiser….

It’s not that we are uninterested in the wider world. It’s just not our priority. We care more about what happens down the street, the small personal victories of our fellow citizens, and the general kindness that abounds in our midst. One milestone for any of us, is a milestone for all of us!

The hometown paper isn’t trying to change the world, tell you who to vote for, or how to live…. They hope to bring a smile, maybe a little sunshine, and slow you down a mite. And connect you to the community. Getting your name and picture in the “about town” section is an added bonus.

Each week these papers touch our hearts with precious stories of daily life—of people we know—written with humor, dignity, love, magic, patience, and care.

I pray that spirit of “we’re all in it together” brings us ever closer. And the tradition of a great local newspaper, who cares about YOU, lives on forever….

Respectfully,
Kes
kesley45@aol.com

PS: I had one last thought. If it hadn’t a’been for The Tombstone Epitaph, we might not have ever heard of Wyatt Earp, or Doc Holliday, or the O.K. Corral.