“ . . . the paper is more than a guide to local happenings: It’s a repository of community knowledge. People come to search the archives for birth announcements, obituaries, stories about their families, and businesses that used to be in town. When those stories aren’t written, they’re not kept anywhere. There’s no record.”

I’ve heard it said and believe it to be so, that when a community loses its schools, it is on the way to severe decline, if not collapse. Given my experience of growing up in a multi-generation local newspaper owning and publishing family, I’d say if a town loses even the local control of its newspaper, it’s definitely on a decline.

I started working at the tender age of ten in my family’s weekly newspaper, The Allen Advocate, so named from the moniker of the town, a little village of about 1,200 people in Pontotoc County some 100 miles or so southeast of Oklahoma City. I moved on up from the ignoble position of “printer’s devil,” to operating the Linotype machine (a bygone monstrosity now, but vital equipment then) by about age 13 or 14.

Reading the news while I set it into lines of type was infinitely preferable to sweeping up the metal shards and filings produced by the machine when its small saws whittled down the edges of the lines of type to make them even and then melting said shards in a cauldron, skimming off the dross and saving it in a bucket to be sold to someone somewhere, no doubt for some nefarious purpose. That is unless it was setting legal proceedings . . . but that’s a tale for another time.

We had a faithful and friendly employee, Mrs. Beavers, whose responsibility it was to make multitudinous calls on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays until about noon every week (we printed on Thursdays) that began with UL7 (UL standing for Ulster . . . the phone company must have been really down to the nibs when assigning that prefix) inquiring of the citizens answering the calls if they had any “local news” to share with the community via the Advocate.

It consisted mostly of personal, but no doubt pertinent pastimes such as follows: (The names and locales have been changed to protect the innocent.) “Mrs. Lollabelle Daystar of Sasakwa visited and enjoyed Thursday dinner last week in the Allen home of her daughter and grandchildren, Mrs. Beulah Foundling and children Lottie, Addie and Doddie.” Such tidbits would be printed in a column appropriately headed LOCAL NEWS. A few inches down in the column, one would likely find an item reading something like “On Saturday last, Mrs. Beula Founding, Lottie, Addie and Doddie of Allen greatly enjoyed an afternoon of yard games and homemade ice cream at the home of her mother and the children’s grandmother, Mrs. Lollabelle Daystar, at her home in Sasakwa.” If the item featured details of a trip to visit Cousin Callie in California, replete with facts about points of interest along the way and back, in addition to a recitation of the marvels of beaches, back yard orange trees, and Disneyland’s delights, it would most certainly become a featured article instead.

It may sound trivial now, but back then, it felt somehow comforting to know what your neighbors were up to in their spare time, and that families were at least publicly sticking together, and that if your own family engaged in similar pursuits, you all had things in common. It was a kind of societal glue that sort of helped the center to hold, to either paraphrase or plagiarize the inestimable Yeats.

Other articles would describe what was going on in the schools, games won or lost, field trips taken, prizes or diplomas awarded. Of course, I already knew most of that about Allen’s grade school and combined junior high and high school, but if someone I knew who had graduated was now attending Eastern Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College in Wilburton, 70 miles to the east, it was worth noting what they were accomplishing there.

Barns burned, bridges washed out, birthdays celebrated, big revival campaigns conducted, and especially the births, marriages, and obituaries, became articles written up and avidly read, not only by people in the town, but by emigrees from Allen now living other Oklahoma communities, especially in Texas and California, but also a not insignificant number scattered throughout the states who wanted to know what was going on in the old hometown. If you wanted to know about divorces or criminal proceedings, you’d have to go to the County Court House. We tried to accentuate the positive.

Such intense scrutiny by a population most often already acquainted with at least some of the facts, put powerful pressure on the staff (mostly my family, along with a few highly valued hirelings) to be not only correct in the reportage, but also deeply respectful. Something like a mistaken year of birth in an obituary, or heaven forbid, something that could be taken as an insulting or damaging was assiduously eschewed.

Those who so casually and flagrantly post outright lies and shameless slander via social media these days, comfortable in the consciousness that they’ll likely suffer scant anything beyond an equally egregious reply comment aimed back at them, are so pathetically, ignorant of the potential flammability of yester years’ possible repercussions from such candor or calumny. I know this to be true from profound personal experience.

In November 1961, a few of the younger and more progressive of the citizenry, my dad among them, decided it was time to do something about the large, gaping hole adjacent to the junior high/high school combination along with some additional improvements to the school complex. I know the date because I was able to find it in a digital copy of The Advocate on newspaper.com. If I was in Allen, I could go into the Advocate office and search through the bound volumes there in hard copy. It’s much easier to be able to search for “bond election” and have it miraculously appear on my laptop, but I must admit to an affection for the feel and smell of newsprint that will likely never wane.

With steep, crumbling concrete walls and filled with rubble including cans, broken bottles and other detritus thrown down into it by unthinking or onery students as passed by it over some ten years, the crater where part of the high school once stood was a menace. The only thing that kept someone from falling into it were a few strings of rusting barbed wire loosely hanging on splintered, rotting posts.

The following paragraph is part of an article from The Seminole Producer, dated November 9, 1954, also found on newspaper.com. Although a newspaper had previously been printed in Allen going back years, there was none produced from about 1948 until late 1959 when our family moved in and resurrected it. Thus, Allenites had to read about what was likely the biggest disaster to affect the town both up until then and since in newspapers printed elsewhere, Seminole being about 40 miles away:

“SCHOOL AT ALLEN IS IN SHAMBLES AFTER GAS BLAST

ALLEN, Okla., Nov. 9 — Allen’s high school was in a shamble Tuesday from a natural gas explosion touched off by the school superintendent’s hunt for a gas leak with a lighted match. The blast Monday injured nearly 50 persons seriously enough to require hospitalization. There were no immediate fatalities, although Fire Chief Harvey Butler said, ‘I still don’t see how they got out alive.’”

I will refrain from comment as to the scientific knowledge or public safety acumen of the unnamed superintendent’s method of detecting the presence of leaking natural gas, other than to report a wife of one of the school board members at the time as saying that they weren’t going to blame him for the disaster. My, how times have changed.

Anyway . . . back to the story about my personal experience of the foolhardiness of baring one’s soul, or spleen, unless you are geographically and/ or digitally far enough removed from the target of your venom . . . or either judicious about the audacity of your arguments or sufficiently brave to face the consequences of espousing them . . . or both.

It’s hard for me to comprehend now that dad was not much over 30 years old, an age of which I am more than double . . . and then some . . . when he and the town’s young whippersnappers decided to promote a school bond issue to build a new school cafeteria over the wreckage, thus creating not only a needed facility for the student population, but also a modern, comfortable space for town meetings and community celebrations.

Of course then as now, the suggestion of progress, and especially if it involves the scourge of taxation, was decried by a passel of the town’s mossbacked skinflints. An additional cause for disdain from that ilk toward my dad and his progressive ideas was that we had only lived in the town for less than two years. Whom (I know . . . it would sound more comfortable if I had used Who, but old English teachers will die trying, I guess) did he think he was, coming in and stirring things up?

No doubt having been recently “recharged” at one of the numerous revivals or gospel meetings promulgated on an almost alternate month rotation by at least one of the town’s (remember, population of 1,200 or so) six or seven churches, I was incensed that any of the villains could consider themselves as remotely Christian and then be against the feeding and protecting of the lambs. (No doubt at least a few students were somewhat lamb like . . .)

Having overheard the name of at least one of the miscreants named at what was undoubtedly a prayer meeting where pleas were raised along with outstretched hands, that they would change their wayward ways, see the light, and vote for the school bond, I decided that it would be my duty as a Royal Ambassador (that was the youth organization for boys at the First Baptist Church) to send the old miser a missive of warning about the uncertain circumstance of his immortal soul.

I can’t remember everything I wrote, other than the inclusion of a dire scriptural admonition to not gain the whole world at the cost of losing his own soul, some kind of mishmash of Matthew 16:26 and Mark: 8 in handwritten scrawl that wasn’t illegible enough either to save me from the ensuing wrath or to blame on my younger brother, Bruce.

Oh, but I do absolutely remember that I wrote it on a piece of Allen Advocate embossed stationery.

I will spare you (and my psyche . . . traumatized to this very day . . . ) the horrific details of the wrath that subsequently descended upon my body and spirit after the letter’s recipient brought it in hand to the Advocate, waving it flagrantly in my stunned dad’s increasingly glowering face.

Let us just say that I have survived to tell the tale, and though the bond issue failed that time, when floated once again a few years hence, it passed without my assistance. I’ll add, that the unfortunate experience has not diminish my advocate’s ardor for just causes, but let’s hope more circumspectly and with greater skill.

If you have stayed with me this long, let me conclude by urging you to read the excellent article posted below as a comment about the adverse effects upon our society and way of life by the decline of newspapers, as I urge you, if you care enough to try to put a dent in the demise, to please subscribe to your town’s newspaper if you still have one.

It won’t begin to cover the cost of even the newsprint and ink, but subscription numbers are what attracts advertisers, and especially those who own the local businesses in our towns. They and their businesses are a part of that societal glue that helps make communities places where all of us want to live and that we want to leave to our children and grandchildren and future generations.

May the circle be unbroken, and the center forever hold.

EDITOR’S COMMENT

Our thanks to Bill Guy for this article, however we must correct him on one major fact. The Allen newspaper has been in print since 1904 with the exception of 1944 and 1945. The paper was discontinued those two years during World War II due to a paper shortage.

It was owned in 1942 by Dick Elam; he restarted the paper in 1945. In 1947 it was purchased by E.C. and Allene Brown; bought in 1950 by H.O. Boggs, Augustine Hunter and Mr. & Mrs. Reuber. The Guys purchased the paper in 1959 and sold it to Bill and Dayna Robinson in 1982.