'Down Near the Grass Roots'

Three of the six newspapers I worked for as a reporter and editor are out of business. The most recent to fold was my first, the Leader Enterprise, a weekly in Montpelier, Ohio. A newspaper, even a lousy one, isn’t like a shoe store or body shop. Its disappearance leaves a scar, especially in a small town, though I won’t get sentimental about it. You can mourn the passing of the newspaper age while understanding why it happened. Much of the damage was self-inflicted.

Next month I’ll observe the fortieth anniversary of my first job in journalism, as editor of the Leader Enterprise. The man who hired me was the publisher, Jack Bryce, who died several years ago at the age of ninety-three. Jack took a chance on a university dropout who had never studied journalism and whose only published work was a sheaf of book reviews. I had an editorial staff of three: an assistant editor (a recent college graduate), a society editor and a sports editor. The last was a high-school teacher who volunteered his services. We worked on typewriters and published on Tuesdays, meaning we worked late on Mondays.

We covered the usual beats, mostly cops and city hall, and much “chicken dinner news” – the small events that occupy people. I wrote a lot of features, mostly profiles. I found that I liked writing about people not politics. One morning a man walked into the newspaper office with an oversized rutabaga he thought resembled Richard Nixon in profile. I took his picture, and his vegetable’s, and we published it. I introduced the occasional book or movie review (Steve Martin’s The Jerk was the first), and every Tuesday after the press run I hauled stacks of papers over to a news stand in Bryan, the county seat about ten miles to the south. Working for the Leader Enterprise was the start of my real education.    

In 1926, Sherwood Anderson bought two weekly newspapers (one Democrat, one Republican) in Smyth County, Virginia, and began writing a column under the folksy pseudonym “Buck Fever.” When news was sparse, Anderson would publish one of his own stories or one by Chekhov. Shortly before his death in 1941, he published Home Town, an impressionistic account of rural America illustrated by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration, including Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, Marion Post and Dorothea Lange. In general, the photos are better than the text but Anderson devotes several pages to small town newspapers. Here he speaks for me:

“The journalist in the small town field doesn’t get rich but, if he has at all a flare for it, he can get by, live rather decently. He occupies a position of respect and responsibility in the community. He can stay pretty close to American life as it is lived by the commonality of Americans, down near the grass roots.”