Morning Thoughts: December 15, 2017

She was a tiny lady of indeterminate age, her back bent and her fingers gnarled from arthritis. Don’t know how she held a pencil, but she did. Each week, she and others like her sent their work in to local papers like the Lonoke County Democrat. After the marriages and obits, theirs were the most highly valued and loyally read pieces in the weekly news.

Her name was Hazel Pall and she died a few years ago. Before she died, though, the paper was sold and her input terminated. What was this marvelous source of news that she and her colleagues provided, that we lost, and that we still miss?

Why, the church news, of course: attendance, visitors, Sunday School lessons, sermon contents, things that contribute to a civilized society. They did it for years, this dedicated bunch of amateur “stringers.” (That’s journalism talk). There wasn’t a person at the Washington Post or New York Times more reliable in meeting deadlines. Their gift to us was a link from the Heart of America to the printed word—a genuine testiment to veracity and honesty long since trampled into the ground by modern “news” sources like Fox, Brietbart, and Drudge.

BigNews bought out the little papers and discontinued the input of Hazel Pall and the others. The new models feature sports news, city council minutes, obituaries, and weddings. The latter doesn’t feature the carefully posed professional engagement and wedding photos of my generation. No. Too often they are cell-phone-photos of an unshaven man in an over-sized cowboy hat and an under-aged girl with tattoos flowing out of her collar and up her neck.

Times have changed. I had one of my eagerly-looked-for lunches with my journalist friend Sonny Rhodes yesterday. We discussed the demise or transformation of the weekly papers. His take was most interesting, as his insights always are. “The readers of church news in local weeklies,” he said, “are often people who live far away and want to keep up with their hometowns, not the folks who are prospects for local advertising.

Thus, money rules. As the president would say, “If it don't make a buck, then you’re out of luck.”

We had an enlightening lunch, Sonny and I. He told me some tales about having to decipher the submittals of the Hazel Palls of the world. He recounted some of the struggles he and his contemporaries had in moving from IBM Selectrics to the computer age. With a little prodding, I’m sure he would have re-told the escapade in which he learned the consequences of accepting a ride in a private plane to see the site of a story he was working on, said flight occurring only an hour after a big lunch at a Chinese restaurant.

We also planned our next "road trip," maybe to northwest Louisiana to see the “Bonnie and Clyde Death Site.” Please don’t ask why. There’s no good answer. Sometimes it is just good to spend time with a friend and see things that have no intrinsic value, but satisfy an “itch to learn.”

You know, it’s fun to have face-to-face talks with a learned friend. It’s also fun to visit places that provide no lasting profit. Yeah, it was also fun reading about who from Colorado visited Donny Ray Albright at Sunday School the past week.

Note: Arkansas' own John Grisham wrote eloquently about small-county newspapers, and the death of their downtowns as well, in one of his better books.