The Glory Days of Forgottonia’s Local Newspapers
By: Harry Bulkeley
Where do you go to get local news (real or fake)? How about sports? And the latest, juiciest gossip? If you're under fifty, you probably go to your phone. But there was a place before phones where everybody went to get their news- the friendly hometown newspaper. Kind of like the Forgottonia Times but one for every little town. From the Abingdon Argus to the Wyoming Post-Herald, every community had a weekly paper that told everybody what had happened in the past seven days.
When I say "everything" I mean everything. The front page usually reported what happened at the school board or city council or maybe the huge cake the bakery made. Unburdened by the affectations of the effete national media, local reporters could tell their readers exactly what happened at local meetings. Who yelled at who, what questions the audience asked (with the actual language they used) and who stormed out of the room. I once went to a meeting of a village board where one member picked up a chair to throw at a colleague. The paper reported it blow by blow. And, of course, they reported which minister opened the meeting with a prayer for peace.
As you turned the pages, you learned everything that had happened in town that week. And I mean everything. Among my favorite items were the reports of who had guests for Sunday dinner. It was not unusual to have stories about which Roseville folks traveled to Monmouth for fried chicken and turnips.
Sometimes folks would just stop by to visit on Wednesday afternoon. A friend whose family was in the publishing business said their paper had a lady who spent two days a week calling subscribers asking if they had any news to report.
The local paper was also the primary source for sporting news. Of course the Friday varsity football game was covered with complete statistics and the basketball games both home and away. The JV teams all got covered along with the junior high. Since girls didn't play any interscholastic sports, the GAA coach would call in the team volleyball scores.
The bigger towns used to have real local reporters at the daily papers like the Monmouth Review-Atlas and the Canton Daily-Ledger. They would also go to the local government meetings, but in an effort to compete with the weeklies, they also had correspondents in the small towns. Several times a week, the Galesburg Register-Mail had columns with local news from Alexis, Roseville, Yates City, and every other hamlet. The books read and the readers at the librairies' Children's Story Hours would be reported.
Each paper had its own name, and some were very inventive. Did you know The London Times was published in Forgottonia? London Mills, to be exact. The Oquawka Current was a great name for a paper in a river town. In the old days, papers were a lot more honest about their political leanings. There was the Fulton County Democrat in Lewistown and the Knox County Republican in Knoxville (even though its publisher was a staunch Roosevelt Democrat). The McDonough Democrat was published in the very Republican town of Macomb before it moved to Bushnell.
Some newspapers just had regular newspaper names like the Cuba Journal and the Farmington News. Avon had the Sentinel and Roseville the Independent. Regardless of the name, the papers were part of the foundation of their town.
The small-town newspapers often reflected the personalities of their publisher, who was usually the owner as well. Fred Shoop was in charge of an old paper in Abingdon called the Kodak. He used to enjoy pushing the buttons of the elite of Abingdon society. Once, a local factory got a new piece of equipment and, as a diligent reporter, Fred ran a front-page story on it. That sounds appropriate but his headline read "Brass Factory Gets New Screw Machine". Factual but it had a bunch of ladies clutching their pearls and fainting on their couches.
One of these local papers had an interesting story. Several years ago an out-of-towner (who happened to be an heir to a fairly large fortune) bought the paper and lived the life of a small-town editor without worrying about making money. There was a Frank Capra vibe to being a small-town editor. One of my cousins followed that dream. Reality eventually crept in, and the late-night meetings and the dwindling advertisers killed off those papers.
At least one of those small-town papers is soldiering on. The Rushville Times has been doing local reporting since 1849. No matter how romantic the small-town papers were, to survive, they needed subscribers who bought from their sponsors. If you are lucky enough to still have a local paper (or if you are reading the Forgottonia Times) go into the stores of the advertisers and tell them you saw their ad. Then spend some money.
Reading those papers was a lot more fun than staring blankly at your phone.