By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
In my youth we had a daily newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle. What we didn’t get every day was local news. That’s what made The Lincoln Journal special. Farmers, grandmothers, country storeowners, housewives, and others pulled news about people they knew from their mailbox.
“The Smiths ate Sunday dinner with the Jones. The fried chicken was delicious.” “The Browns drove through the Smokies. The leaves were beautiful.”
If the personals celebrated friendship and adventure, the classifieds underscored peoples’ connection to the land. “Pens for hunting dogs.” “Trailer for hauling livestock to market.” “Hunting land for lease.”
And food, of course. “Ribs: All You Can Eat.” If patrons’ waistlines revealed the effects of “all you can eat” deals, an ad for the Comf-O-Mate Extender promised relief. “For $3.50 you can attach it to your jeans, pants, or skirt and extend the waistline a whole inch, when you need it” (yeah, like sitting too long in an all-you-can-eat restaurant). Another ad provided an option for those determined to drop a few pounds. “Go-bese” tablets.
The weekly paper proved practical. People ran “engraved” invitations to weddings, an economical, if not polished, approach. Weddings, wrecks, church socials, funerals, football games, and grand jury indictments made for copy more compelling than anything on the national stage. Planting and harvesting, babies, birthday parties, and golden anniversaries provided dependable reading. Who’s in the hospital, who’s out, and who’s passed away. Obituaries aplenty. The people I lived among never moved; they just died.
When children died, heartfelt passages resurrected memories of James Agee’s “Shady Grove, Alabama, July 1936.” In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Agee shares the sentiment parents engraved on the headstone bearing their six-month daughter’s likeness.
“We can’t have all things in life that please us. Our little daughter, Jo Ann, has gone to Jesus.”
Then as now, the reading was sad in that little paper of our own. At other times funny, useful, and interesting in its steady delivery of news, maxims, personal items, and observations. “After church, we enjoyed squash, potato salad, fried chicken, collards, and tea.” “He ain’t got the good sense God gave a rock.”
Historian Avery Craven said reading Southern country newspapers was like “sitting down to a meal of turnip greens, black-eyed peas and corn bread, with a glass of buttermilk on the side.”
Yes. You were in for a treat.
In the sunset of his life Grandfather Walker wrote a letter to the editor to record the stories his grandmother had passed down—how to break a dog from chasing sheep by roping it to a large ram that dragged it about, how a farmer kept Union troops from eating his smoked hams by burying them in a creek.
I remember picking The Lincoln Journal up from my parent’s coffee table in the late 1970s. Things seemed to be changing. Ads for huge satellite dishes, mobile phones, and full-color grocery store inserts looked out of place. A closer look, however, revealed my hometown weekly remained reassuringly the same. The masthead still proclaimed The Lincoln Journal in large type. In the upper right corner sat a sketch of the Courthouse. As always, beneath the paper’s name ran a bit of wisdom. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not be false to any man.” This saying, evocative of Bible verses, is actually a line spoken by Polonius from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Weekly newspapers aren’t limited to the South, but the best ones are. These little papers mirror our hopes, fears, and daily concerns on a weekly basis. They keep us in touch with our neighbors, classmates, and family. My hometown weekly now covers two other towns and flaunts some color. Though it’s been 53 years since I lived in Lincoln County, every time I read The Lincoln Journal I find myself back home again.