There's been a lot of discussion lately about how newspapers are a dying breed. As the internet becomes more and more the dominant means by which people seek information, daily newspapers in the big cities are cutting staff, cutting size and cutting quality. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Ironically, small weekly rags like the Varmint County War Whoop & Exterminator will probably still be around long after the big city papers have all disappeared online. Coach B. O. Snodgrasss, one of the handful of locals who owns a laptop computer, pointed out the obvious: "I can't sit on the throne and read my laptop, and it's not nearly as useful as the War Whoop & Exterminator if I run out of toilet paper."
Archie Aslinger pointed out another flaw of the e-news format, "You can't wrap fish in a danged CD or floppy disk."
More important, possibly, to the survival of the small town newspaper is the fact that you may be able to go online and find hundreds of stories about Iraq, health care or some Louisiana rube refusing to marry a bi-racial couple, but only in the War Whoop & Exterminator will you find out who got married this week in Varmint County, or who got divorced, arrested or sued.
Down the road in Pikeville, one of our sister newspapers, the Bledsonian-Banner, states it pretty well on its masthead: "The only newspaper in the world that gives a hoot about Bledsoe County." Our former publisher, H. Harley Hamm, cried when he saw a copy of that newspaper, bemoaning the fact that he hadn't thought of it first.
While small town newspapers provide an important service to our communities, our reporting does on occasion have unexpected consequences. A story just a few months back resulted in Ella Sue Crib suing her husband Leo for a divorce. Leo worked for the street department at Lower Primroy, or at least he was employed there. Most folks don't recall him ever doing a whole lot of work.
Back in May, Leo was leaning on his shovel, watching two other fellows dig a ditch, when the handle broke and he took a tumble, breaking his arm. Leo naturally filed for workman's comp and sued the city for negligence in maintaining faulty equipment. Lawyer Philbert McSwine, after a few weeks of legal wrangling, was able to get Leo a nice out-of-court settlement.
The War Whoop & Exterminator ran a story about the lawsuit and quotedVice Mayor Gertrude McQue as saying, "Many more $20,000 settlements like this and our workman's comp premiums are going to go through the roof."
Lawyer McSwine was on the phone the next day, demanding a retraction. "Leo didn't receive $20,000 from that settlement. He only got half that amount," McSwine insisted. "Now his wife Ella Sue wants to know what he did with the other $10,000."
Our publisher, Virginia Hamm, got on the phone and handled the lawyer. "Well, Philbert, we can't run no retraction, because we were quoting the Vice Mayor and that's the amount she gave us. If you want, we can run a clarification saying that Leo only got half of the $20,000 settlement because his attorney's fees took the other half."
"Uh, that's OK, Virginia-just leave it alone," Lawyer McSwine quickly replied.
Poor Leo. Because of our little news story, Ella Sue got the house, the kids, the dogs and half of the $10,000 settlement. Lawyer McSwine got half of what was left to defend Leo in the divorce case.
A couple of years back, our little newspaper nearly rejuvenated a century-old blood feud between two clans. It happened when Corky Botts brought an old photo down to the paper one day. It showed three men laid out in old-fashioned caskets, the kind with glass tops so you could see the loved one through the glass without smelling him, in those days before embalming fluid came along.
Surrounding the three coffins were a group of mourners, and clearly visible on the foreheads of the three men were little round holes. "That's my great grandpa Phoebus and his sons Hiram and Tobias. They were deputy sheriffs over in Stinking Creek when they was ambushed by old Milo Huffaker and his boys while riding over the pass below McCracken's Nose," Corky explained. "Those black spots on their foreheads is bullet holes."
Well, I thought this photo, depicting a hundred-year-old feud on Stinking Creek, would make a nice historical piece for our "Looking Back" section, so we ran the photo along with Corky's explanation.
The day after the paper hit the streets, I got a call from Coretta Huffaker. "That story Corky Botts told you is all wrong. The Botts clan bribed the Sheriff to make 'em deputies so they could wear badges and terrorize my family. My great granddaddy Milo Huffaker was a minister with the Church of Everlasting Love in Jesus' Name. He was riding circuit with my two great uncles when the Botts clan tried to bushwhack them and they was just defendin'themselves."
Publisher Ginny Hamm decided, in the interest of fairness, to run Coretta's version of the story the next week as a letter to the editor. That was a mistake. The next day, old Phineas Botts showed up at the newspaper office, mad as a wet hen.
We refused to run his letter, which stated simply, "The Huffakers has always been a bunch of bushwhackers and low-down liars, and if they want to settle this thing once and for all, we can all meet up at the pass below McCracken's Neck next Sunday after church."
On top of all that, retired Sheriff Smoky T. Bandit showed up later the same day. "That letter about my grandpa, Sheriff Rufus T. Bandit, taking bribes to give the Botts clan deputies' badges, is baloney. He got tired of the Botts and Huffaker men killing each other off in that feud and figured if he made them responsible for enforcing the law, it might settle the feud. He alternated, deputizing Milo Huffaker and his sons for two years, then deputizing Phoebus Botts and his sons for the next two. Obviously, it didn't work."
This could have ended in disaster, as Phineas Botts sent his challenge out to the members of the Huffaker family in the mail and quite a few accepted his offer to show up at the pass. Ironically, the elders of the two most prominent feuding families in Varmint County, Elijah Haig and Caleb Hockmeyer, also showed up on the mountain that Sunday afternoon. "You folks can bury the hatchet and make peace over something that happened over a hunnert years ago," Caleb insisted. "Look at our families. We've been feuding since the Civil War and we've found a way to make peace with each other," Elijah added. "If you'uns gotta start this all over again, you can join our young men in the annual free-for-all at the Fairgrounds on the Fourth of July."
To make a long story short, the Huffaker and Botts clans made their peace by all agreeing on one thing - the War Whoop & Exterminator was the cause of all the fuss by publishing that old photo. Nobody mentioned that Corky Botts, who was laying low through all this, had brought it into the office to begin with, but there is justice in the world, eventually.
About six months after all this transpired, our newspaper got a visit from old Granny Lila Mae Botts, who was living in a retirement community down in Florida. "I want to know-what gave you the right to publish a picture of my daddy's dead body in your newspaper? I thought I took up all the copies of that slanderous thing and burned 'em years ago."
"Miz Lila Mae, the source would be your own nephew, Corky. He brought that photo in and asked us to run it, and even gave us the story. We returned the photo to him," I said with a wicked grin, knowing that justice was really about to be served.
")