Diving Into The Dusty Past

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DIBOLL, TEXAS — I recently spent a day in this logging town just south of Lufkin, once home to the corporate headquarters of Temple-Inland, a community whose fortunes have risen and fallen as that company’s have done the same. I was here to research back copies of the Diboll Free Press in the History Center for a book project I’ve begun.

First, a word about the Diboll History Center. It is a jewel of a facility, beautifully constructed out of yellow-pine beams and decking. It is a valuable repository of the area’s rough drafts of history. The staff is friendly and helpful. I have a special place in my heart for research librarians, and for the philanthropists that have made this fine place possible.

The center’s holdings include back copies of the Diboll Free Press, a weekly newspaper that during its heyday was one of the finest community weeklies in the state, if not the country. The paper then was owned by Temple — the town’s leading employer and lifeblood then — but it was a benign ownership. The force behind the Free Press was Paul Durham, a hard-drinking, cigarette-smoking archetypical country editor who, with generous funding from Temple, put out a truly fine newspaper with a large staff and its own printing press.

For five years in the 1980s I ran a weekly in neighboring San Augustine County. The Rambler had a staff of three, counting me. We got hammered in newspaper contests by the Free Press, year in-and-out, which had a crew of a dozen or so, not counting the pressmen. We deserved the shellacking. Mike Crim’s crisp black-and-white photos, a steady stable of competent writers and free-lancers, clean design and fine reproduction all contributed to create a country newspaper whose pages still sparkle from the battered bound volumes through which I thumbed the other day, chasing down a story.

First there is Durham, whose “Little D” column regularly lambasted Republicans, praised town boosters, railed for potholes to be filled and stadium bleachers to be repaired. He lamented his inability to quit smoking, celebrated three decades of marriage, and chided the county commission over perceived omissions. For me, flipping through the pages of a friendly competitor nearly 30 years later, it was a step back into the early years of my checkered newspaper career. Familiar faces smiled from the pages of the Free Press, many of the characters now dead but not all.

Here’s a shot of Charlie Wilson, a lovable scoundrel congressman who became the subject of a hit movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” starring Tom Hanks. I still have a photo of a youngish Charlie smiling and standing behind Walter Mondale at the Angelina County Airport in 1978, when as vice president he flew in for a fund-raiser for the congressman. A few years later, Durham —who was close to Charlie — gently chided him for not working hard enough to get Mondale elected in 1984, in his long-shot bid to unseat Ronald Reagan.

I spot a brief editorial about S.Malone, Printer, my hero and mentor, the founder of The Rambler. Sam sold the paper but still ran a print shop in the same building during my tenure there. Durham once came over to visit and pick up copies of the arcane Texana titles that Sam reprinted on a battered sheet fed press in order to keep those texts alive. Sam left us a dozen years ago. I still miss his presence and wise counsel.

I come across a photo of a young banker who became a friend in later years and now serves as mayor of Lufkin. I spy young ambitious football coaches who paced the sidelines while I shot matches under dim lights and a harvest moon. They’re all now retired from the sport, maybe selling insurance or in banking. A few photos disconcert. The character looks like someone I know as a contemporary. It takes a few moments reading the caption to realize I’m looking at that person’s father, 30 years ago, when the dad was the age we are now.

A photo by Depression photographer Russell Lee hangs in my living room, which I cadged out of the Rambler office way back when. It depicts a San Augustine courtroom scene from the late 1930s or early 1940s. A passel of old coots perch back in chairs listening to testimony. Once I showed the photo to longtime sheriff Nathan Tindall, trying to identify who was in the photo. He went down the list. “That’s C.L. Boyette’s daddy, there’s Aubrey Mathews’ old man.” And so on. I quickly saw the resemblance, the old men I knew at the time resembling their fathers of a half-century earlier.

Time marches, memories preserved in our middle-aged minds and on the faded pages of old newspapers. I wonder where the present generation, with most everything recorded solely on Facebook or cell phone cameras, will turn to revisit their past. Or will they even care?

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