There used to be a newspaper here. That sentence can be said in an astonishing number of communities around us.
Glencoe had one. Jennings had one. Oilton had one. Maramec had one. Even Ingalls had one. During Oklahoma Newspaper Week, I went digging through the Oklahoma Historical Society’s Gateway to Oklahoma History, and the deeper I went, the more I realized something: For a long time, a newspaper was almost part of the recipe for building a town.
You needed a store. You needed a post office. You needed somebody willing to sell land. And apparently, sooner or later, somebody needed to find a printing press.
Glencoe had the Glencoe Mirror. What a perfect newspaper name. A newspaper is supposed to be a mirror. It reflects a community back at itself. The important things, the silly things, the celebrations, the arguments and sometimes the things we’d rather not see.
The Glencoe Mirror began in 1900 and continued for decades.
Oilton had an equally perfect name. The Oilton Gusher began publication in 1915. In an oil town, of course it did. There are moments when you have to admire our newspaper ancestors for understanding branding better than most modern marketing departments do.
Then there was Maramec. Maramec didn’t merely have a newspaper. It had several.
The Historical Society’s collection includes the Maramec Captain-Monitor, the Maramec Weekly Monitor and the Maramec News. The Maramec News began in 1912, meaning a town that today has a population of 66, once had somebody gathering local news, setting type, selling advertisements and putting a newspaper into people’s hands every week.
And then there is Ingalls. Today, most Oklahomans who know the name Ingalls know it because of the famous 1893 gunfight between U.S. marshals and members of the Doolin-Dalton gang.
But in 1894, Ingalls had something else: The Ingalls Leader. Only a handful of issues survive in the Historical Society’s digital collection, dating from that year. But they survive.
Jennings had its newspapers, too, while communities such as Lone Chimney appeared in the pages of neighboring papers through correspondence, announcements, school news and the everyday comings and goings that once filled local columns.
Those little community columns, The “Chicken Dinners” are some of my favorite things to read in old newspapers.
Mrs. Smith’s sister came from Kansas. The Johnson family had Sunday dinner with the Browns. Somebody bought a new cow. Somebody’s boy came home from college. The church ladies were planning supper.
Today we might look at those things and ask, “How is that news?”
A hundred years later, historians and genealogists would probably answer: Thank goodness somebody wrote it down. Because that is the strange thing about newspaper work.
We almost never know which ordinary thing we print today will become extraordinary simply because time passes.
A basketball score is just a basketball score until somebody’s granddaughter finds it 70 years later and discovers Grandpa scored 22 points.
A wedding announcement is routine until a great-grandchild is building a family tree.
A picture of a school class is just another picture until everyone in it is gone.
A town itself can disappear while the newspaper remains.
And our corner of Oklahoma knows something about towns changing.
Oil booms came and went, railroads changed routes, highways changed traffic, businesses opened and closed, populations rose and fell.
Some communities became smaller than the people who founded them ever imagined.
But open one of those old newspapers and suddenly the town is alive again.
The stores have advertisements. The school has students. The churches have suppers. The politicians are arguing. Somebody is complaining about the roads. Some things truly are eternal. The wonderful thing about looking through these papers during Oklahoma Newspaper Week is realizing that The Yale News is not the beginning of that tradition.
We inherited it. We inherited it from the people who printed the Glencoe Mirror, the Oilton Gusher, the papers of Jennings and Maramec, and a little weekly called the Ingalls Leader.
Different mastheads. Different presses. Different generations. Same job. Write down what happened. Write down who did it. Spell their names correctly. Put it somewhere people can find it again. Because Google can tell you a million things about the world.
But community newspaper tells the world about us.