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Still misses 'Crews News'
A few days ago, my local newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, carried a story about the demise of yet another small-town paper. There are too many stories like that these days. Another death in a vanishing species.
Let me say here that I am 40+ years into a career in the radio business. But I confess to a life-long love affair with a much older medium, newspapers. The end of the line for that small California daily stirred some thoughts about my own hometown newspaper. It certainly wasn't the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune or the San Francisco Chronicle. It was four pages long and it came out once a week. But it was all ours.
Where and when I grew up, the state's newspaper of record was the Omaha World-Herald. The regional paper of record was the McCook Daily Gazette. All of that is still true today. Then you got down to the real bottom line. Ours was the Culbertson Progress.
The Progress had lots of company. The difference between the little towns and the tiny towns was that the little towns had at least one traffic signal and a daily newspaper. The tiny towns had at least one street and a weekly. A few of those weeklies are still alive, but struggling, today. Due to the dwindling rural population, the survivors are usually county-wide in nature.
Most of the time, the Progress was pretty much a one-man operation. Allan Smith, the owner, publisher, editor, reporter, typesetter and printer, put the paper to bed on Wednesday, published on Thursday and had it in the local mailboxes on Friday. He never missed. There were the usual weddings, funerals, engagements, civic and church organization items and high school sports stories. Because people in the tiny towns of the Midwest tended to behave themselves, there wasn't much news on the police beat. One of the infrequent runs by the volunteer fire department was always good for a story.
I was never certain how the Progress made its money. There was not much advertising, and subscriptions were cheap. It was probably a combination of low overhead (Smith, with his own hands, set the type on his ancient Linotype machine and printed the paper on an even more ancient flatbed press) and the fact that most of Culbertson's wedding invitations, advertising flyers and business forms were printed by the Progress. The big advertiser, year in and year out, was the Crews Lumber Company, now long defunct. The Crews Lumber ad, a quarter-page on page four, was called the "Crews News" and consisted of brief advertising messages and extremely corny jokes. It was the first place Culbertsonites looked when they retrieved the Progress from the mailbox.
When Smith passed away, the Progress died with him. His wife and daughters, with typical Midwestern good sense, saw the writing on the wall for tiny-town newspapering and let it go.
The little towns, and the tiny towns, too, are now as media-saturated as the big cities. A dozen radio stations where there once were one or two, hundreds of cable TV channels, the Internet, satellite, the larger newspapers … all have erased the isolation.
Whether you're in Culbertson or Los Angeles, McCook or New York City, you know the same things, at the same time, even if much of what you know deals with such important matters as the latest antic of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears.
What you may not know is the latest on the Culbertson Methodist Wom-en's fundraiser or the school picnic. And you can't meet someone over coffee and start the conversation with, "Did you hear the one about …" from this week's "Crews News." Not a big thing, to be sure. But a lost part of the fabric of life in the little places most of us call home.