03/28/2024
Jefferson Weaver
Spread the love

By: Jefferson Weaver

It’s sometimes hard to notice the forest for one or two great big trees that overshadow everything else.

The pages of a newspaper can be like that forest. The lead stories are the biggest trees. They almost always dominate the front page. There will be other important stories on the front as well, but the main story should be the one that affects most people or at least resonates with the majority. Stories that mark a major change, be it good or bad.

At the same time, there are plenty of other stories – smaller trees – that are important to the folks who live them. New businesses, school board meetings, zoning requests, birthday parties, water and sewer problems, people stories, crime stories, church news, photos of little kids with big fish or big squash, or huge watermelons.

We’ve dealt with one big tree shading everything in recent weeks, as the COVID-19 outbreak has fundamentally changed everyone’s lives, at least temporarily.  It’s hard to maintain the balance of news sometimes, especially when we know that some stories will be overlooked as we deal with the “new normal.” A lot of our forest is hidden in the shade of that great big tree.

On April 25, 1978, it was easy to overlook the pending beauty pageant, the promotion at the Belk store, the outlook for the tobacco market, and the mutual stabbing that would result in competing warrants when both suspects were released from the hospital.

Those stories all meant something to someone. Good things for the future, tragedies in at least two families, an upswing in the economy, a well-deserved honor.

But for once, the lead story meant more to me than anything else in the paper.

Across the top of the page was a headline that was bigger than any I ever remember. It spanned all eight columns. The headline was bigger than when Elvis died, or when Nixon resigned. It was bigger than the bold, black type that described the fall of Saigon, or a particularly brutal murder.

But those things didn’t hit home as much as the one that began with the words, “Dispatch ceases publication…”

The newspaper where my parents worked was shutting down. The competition was growing and strengthening. The owners of “our” paper were tired. They received an offer from the competitor that they just couldn’t refuse.

I was 12, and unwilling to accept the loss of the place I considered magical, a place where I hoped to someday follow in my father’s footsteps and become the editor, where for the time being I was content to deliver newspapers, sweep the floor and try to learn to write. I had friends there – not many among the regular paperboys, but adult friends, grownups who at least tolerated me as I generally made a nuisance of myself.

People brought their needs and news and notes through the cracked front door, where dust sifted from the ceiling whenever a train thundered by just a few yards away. Sometimes the customers came behind the big old scarred counter to sit in my father’s tiny cubby of an office, in a rickety office chair beside one of the ancient desks that were each home to a big, heavy black telephone and a typewriter. Some came to see Miss Louise or my mother. Some went to the sports desk to see Mr. Johnny, where leaning stacks of years of statistics and clippings threatened to collapse on a passerby. Some spent time with Mr. Billy, designing an advertisement for their business.

The air was always a mix of dust from old newspapers and lead from typesetting machines and ink from the press and plaster from the hundred-year-old ceilings, borne aloft by cigarette smoke that was occasionally stirred by an antique fan that worked better than the noisy modern air conditioning. It was a magical place.

There were always people in the office: readers, customers, people being interviewed or just visiting, along with the folks who worked there, the ladies who did the typesetting and the men who ran the press and the production equipment, and the boys around my age who delivered papers from fast-moving bikes.

We all existed to feed the great big machine in the back, a Goss Community press that devoured paper and stamped it with ink that formed words and pictures, a rolling, thundering monster that then folded the same paper and spat it out on a conveyor belt so those words and pictures could help people learn what was going on around them.  The running press was kind of a heartbeat for the entire building, something you took for granted after a few days, but something that you missed when it was silent.

On this particular day, there weren’t very many people there. The other paperboys were gone to the competition, forgetting the fistfights and rivalry we had enjoyed with that other paper.

My dad was in his office, but he was busy, too busy to do more than wave at me right then. I knew that meant he wanted to be alone. He was 62 years old, with a wife and child, and as of the following Friday, he would be unemployed and without a paycheck for the first time in his adult life.

I wasn’t worried. My father could do anything. I knew we would be all right.

My dog Dudley flopped beneath my mother’s desk, tired from keeping pace beside my bicycle as we rushed to the newspaper that should have been busy at that time of day.
The phones still rang, but most of the people – Mr. Johnny, Mr. Billy, Mr. Wade, Miss Louise – they were gone from upfront. The back shop was like a ghost town as well, the machinery cool, the lights on the PMT camera dark. The Associated Press ticker was off.

Worst of all, the press was quiet.

If you have ever experienced the unearthly quiet that comes before a big storm hits when even the wind is perfectly still, when the barometer drops, your ears hurt and you feel uneasy but don’t know why – you have an inkling of what I felt that day.

I was a big kid for my age, not just tall but chubby. I didn’t scare easily, at least I didn’t think I did.

But that day, I was scared.

It wasn’t just the silence or the missing people.

It wasn’t just the big, bold black words on the top of the last edition of a newspaper I loved.

It was a sound I never thought I’d hear, in that newspaper or anywhere. For the first time in my life, I could hear my father quietly crying behind the half-closed door of his office.

For the first time in my life, I was really, truly scared.

For 21 years, the Old Man wrote a column every year, saying goodbye to The Dunn Dispatch. Sometimes it made print, sometimes it didn’t. In April 2001, he lay in his hospital bed, too weak to sit up. He asked me to carry on his tradition. I promised I would. Sometimes mine have made it to print, sometimes they haven’t, but I kept my promise to my father. I also made a promise to myself that day, about another column I would always write. Lord willing, you’ll read that one in a few days.

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