“Main Street is the climax of civilization.”
— Sinclair Lewis, “Main Street”
If you have ever tasted small-town life then you know what Sinclair Lewis was talking about. I grew up in a small town and later edited a small-town newspaper. Does that make me an expert? I guess it depends on how you define expert. And you can also get into a complete separate discussion on just what is a small town. I live in a town of about 110,000. Is that small? Compared to Los Angeles or Jakarta or Mexico city or Houston some 90 miles away, yes, it is small.
My hometown had about 2,000 people and the town in which I edited the weekly newspaper was about the same size as well as about 60 miles apart. When I was in the Navy I used to tell people jokingly that the town I was from was so small, its power plant was a Sears car battery. Ba-dump.
Small towns have their charms as well as their shortfalls. But I am not here to deconstruct the American village as Sinclair Lewis so aptly did. Instead I wanted to touch upon an often overlooked and quite possibly vanishing piece of the Americana pie — the small-town newspaper columnist.
Now I wrote a column when I edited the newspaper, but I normally didn’t deal with life inside that small town because, well, I still had to live there. My paper had a regular columnist who had been a fixture there for years. His front-page column told of weddings and funerals and deer hunting trips as well as his own rightist take on world events. I inherited the guy and, frankly, I thought of him as a legend in his own mind.
The paper in my hometown used to have the correspondents from outlying areas and they would write of people coming and going — even if they were coming and going from that community to my hometown. I found that kind of strange until I started understanding more about so-called “community journalism.” The bottom line is people like to see their names or their loved ones’ names in the paper.
But truly some jewels exist in the world of small-town newspapers. I just happened to think about one of my favorite rural stories that was written by a contributor to the “Jasper Newsboy” in Jasper, Texas. The writer, the late Landon Bradshaw, was no Twain but he could spin a folksy tale like the one he wrote about mile markers (or ‘mileboards’ as he called them) being erected on the early highways of East Texas. Bradshaw wrote that years after these signs were installed they were found to be highly inaccurate. Bradshaw postulated a reason for this:
“Legend has it that a crew of two men measured the roads and nailed the boards up. These two men would set out early in the day, carrying a rod chain, a supply of prepainted boards, tools and a jug of whiskey. They’d measure the first mile put a board up, take a drink of whisky and move on.”
These sign installers would repeat their routine until, according to Bradshaw:
“By quitting time, the pair could be seen staggering along erecting mileboards every 200 yards.”
Bradshaw said when he researched the story one of the supposed mileboard men had died and the other denied the story although the man did admit to having:
“… given to strong drink most of his life. The excessive use of alcohol was generally bad, he said and would eventually kill a man, or at least ruin his health. ‘Look what it’s done to me,’ he said. His leathery skin was blotched by an occasional liver spot and his wizened face was plowed with wrinkles. Although his hands were steady, he seemed to have trouble focusing his eyes.
“He said he lost his appetite, he didn’t sleep well at night and he was so tuckered out right then, he didn’t know if he could make it back to his jug or not.
“Oliver Curl was 102 when he told me this and he’d been hoeing peanuts all day.”
A collection of Bradshaw’s columns were published in a book called “These People Actually Lived in East Texas.” I don’t think you will find it on Amazon or Borders. And I know you won’t find columns like that in “The New York Times.” You also may need to look far and wide to see such columns in even small-town newspapers today. And I think we are poorer for that.