A Weekly Habit Marks 35 Years

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This week marks 35 years of writing a weekly column. This journey began in San Augustine — Behind the Pine Curtain in Deep East Texas — in July 1982 at The Rambler. I was a month shy of turning 27 and had taken a job as managing editor with nobody to manage but myself. I was the sole editorial employee. At that age, I had my hands full with self-management. Still do.

I typed the column on an IBM Selectric. We had no computers, just typesetting machines that, through a complex process turned characters into dots on a ribbon that was fed into another machine, which spat out galleys of type processed in similar fashion to how we developed film and created prints in the darkroom.

That first column was about Junebugs, how they inexplicably seep inside a seemingly airtight house. It is forgettable except that it was the first piece. When I began writing weekly, I made a vow to never miss a week and never rerun a column. The only time I did miss was nine months I spent at Kilgore College in 1987-88. In the past 29 years, I have not skipped a week. There are innumerable pieces I wish had never seen the light of day. And I’ll never catch up with the subject of a biography I am nearly finished writing, about a fellow named Henry B. Fox, the Circleville Philosopher. He wrote a column for 54 years and only missed a handful. I doubt I’ll still be contributing these modest pieces at 80, but you never know.

By my calculations, I have written nearly 2,000 columns in three-and-a-half decades, because I wrote twice-weekly for more than three years. That was tough, since I had plenty of other duties as managing editor of the Nacogdoches paper. But it could not have been as challenging as what Henry Fox achieved in the early 1950s. He wrote a daily humor piece for the Austin American six days a week for nearly three years. When he finally gave it up, he told his kids that nobody could be funny every day.

How newspapers have changed — yet remained the same — in those 35 years. I started in the waning days of hot type at the Longview paper, with lines set in lead and placed in a metal frame. I was a lowly part-time photographer, promotedfrom paperboy, and was banished from the composing room. In college, I was introduced to cold-type technology but again only as a spectator. My time was spent shooting football games, wrecks and ribbon cuttings.

In San Augustine, I learned to paste-up a paper, trimming the legs of type with a ruler and an Exacto knife, running it through the waxer so it would adhere to the layout sheet. I sliced a few fingers with that knife, metaphorically bleeding ink. With computers in the mid-to-late 1980s came pagination, where an entire page could be designed on the screen and printed out as a single sheet. Now, pages are often printed for proofing, but the final version goes straight to the plate that goes on the press. The number of people it requires to produce a paper began to shrink, a trend that continues today.

I was lucky enough to ply this trade when times were good in the newspaper business. Already, circulation had begun to decline but not enough to worry many folks, since owning a newspaper — though not in San Augustine where there were two weeklies and ours was the weaker one financially — was akin to owning an ATM, which had just come into vogue. You had to be an idiot not to make money. I know, since I published daily newspapers during those good times and right up until the bottom dropped out in 2008. It has been a daunting challenge for newspapers since, to retain readers and advertisers, particularly in print.

Now my columns are only online, though they are turned into audio every Friday morning on Red River Radio, the area NPR network. I make most of my living putting together deals to buy and sell newspapers, for which I receive a commission. Newspapers do not make as much money as they once did, but they can still be good investments. And they continue to serve an invaluable role as government watchdogs, providing the rough draft of history for a community, a state or a nation.

It is no coincidence in these turbulent times that the New York Times has seen a massive increase in digital readership. And if you care about San Augustine, or Longview, or any of the communities in which I once was proud to be publisher, you need to read the newspaper to know what is going on. My mentor, Glenn McCutchen, once threatened to rent a billboard that proclaimed: “Don’t Be Ignorant All Your Life. Read The Newspaper.” That still holds true, whether in print or online.

Thanks for reading these pieces, my friends. I plan to keep plugging away until I can’t anymore. God bless.

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