Grass Roots Press

Humbly but firmly rooted in U. S.

journalism are the Sauk Centre Heralds, Archbold Buckeyes, and Oologah Oozings that deliver homey news to 17,000,000 small-town and rural Americans. In the U. S. newspaper business, country weeklies of their kind are a big bright spot. While the urban dailies wane, the rural weeklies wax. Since 1929 they have gained in numbers,* circulation and advertising lineage, while the daily group has fallen off.

Ten years ago the circulation of all weeklies was less than a third of the dailies' 45,000,000; today dailies are down to 40,500,000 and weeklies have 40% as much.

Radio's competition for news and advertising, which has toppled many a city giant, has scarcely rippled the grass roots press, whose most valuable news is the kind that the radio would not broadcast even if it could get it.

Country editors have little chance, however, of getting rich. The average publisher-owner of a small-town weekly earns about $2,400 a year, including income from his job printing. If he lives far out on the range, like Editor Charles Laflin of the Covert, S. Dak., Advance, he must often take turkeys and fence posts for subscriptions. He is likely to be chosen mayor, basketball referee or blood donor at any moment. He works 60 to 80 hours a week, and rarely reads a book. And above all, he has to watch what he prints. A Rockland, Mass, editor was driven into bankruptcy because he told how a townslady had slipped bottom-first on a patch of freshly tarred pavement and added that she was "ready for feathering" when she got up.

Last week TIME surveyed 100 typical weeklies and bi-weeklies in 30 States and found that: 1) Most of them had good business in 1938 and the early part of 1939; 2) boiler-plate and corn-cure ads are disappearing; 3) their news is ably written but editorials are either purely boosterish, overly timid or entirely lacking; 4) many a muted Walter Winchell is doing a bangup job of columning for a few hundred neighbors. Exciting examples: Joseph Chase Allen's "With The Fishermen" in the Martha's Vineyard Gazette (tangy dockside gossip about a picturesque industry); Douglas Meador's "Trail Dust" in his Matador, Tex., Tribune (sentimental homilies on the old Southwest) ; "The Pole Cat Editor" of the Sikeston, Mo. Standard.

Sikeston's "Pole Cat" is Editor Charles Blanton himself, a salty, 75-year-old veteran of small-town journalism whose son Henry is Federal District Attorney in St. Louis, whose daughter, Catherine, is Senator Pat Harrison's secretary in Washington. Incensed by the Negro sharecroppers who camped alongside a road in nearby New Madrid County last month, "The Pole Cat" backed up and let fly as follows: "The question was asked if the babies and small children in the exodus to the roadsides had milk to drink, and was answered by an onlooker that the only milk given the babies was titty milk and when that gave out they were put on black coffee. . . ."

A few other grass roots editors who stand out well above the general crop:

Young Robert Lane Anderson, who took over the Marion, Va. Democrat (circ. 1,400) and the Republican Smyth County News (circ. 1,600, both printed in the same plant) from his father, Novelist Sherwood Anderson, in 1932. An able graduate of several big city newsrooms, Publisher Anderson repeatedly urges his cattle-raising readers to go in for purebred stock and baits the power company for lower electric rates. He has lately installed a one-man photographic and engraving department that feeds his papers shots of local rabbit hunters, sorority initiations, farmers' wives in town to buy perfume. Best-played stories of a typical recent week in the Anderson papers: annual Chamber of Commerce meeting, opening of two new hosiery mills, the tale of a city girl who came to town, scratched her neck with a razor for unrequited love, was arrested as a drunk.

Catherine Prehm ("Mother") Terry, 71, onetime woman compositor on the New York Journal, where she spilled hot type metal on William Randolph Hearst's dress shirt one night, now publishes the Klamath Free Press (circ. 1,050) in Bonanza, Ore., is currently campaigning to wipe out card gambling in tolerant Bonanza.

Jack Robinson, crusty old publisher of the Jewett, Tex., Messenger, whose handset masthead reads: "We Guarantee to Interest, if Not to Please You." When the "shorts" (hard times) come to Leon County, Editor Robinson takes off his shirt, deserts his type cases and rusticates along the river-bottoms. Returning from such" a vacation last year he scared the day lights out of most of Jewett with accounts of a mythical half-beast, half-man he had encountered. Sample Robinson "Town Note": "Some more mules and wagons in Jewett Saturday afternoon and not many cars, a little money floating around among such men as Profs. Travis Shepherd and J. A. Humphrey."

Swift Lathers, whose Mears, Mich., Newz is the smallest (four pages, 5 1/4 by 7 1/4 inches) and oddest newspaper in the United States. A poet and mystic who spends his summers in a tent and many of his nights pacing the dunes of Lake Michi gan, Editor Lathers makes a precarious living for his wife and three children (Thelma, Billo and Forest Glenn Lathers) by publishing such fascinating bits as the following: "Miss Cornelia Vander Zander is crocheting an oval rag rug to put her bare feet on these cold mornings when she steps out of bed. . . . Hooray, hooray, Donna Read is married at last. Her mother couldn't stop her this time. . . . McKinley Schumpf ate too much peanut butter Wednesday and was out of school Thursday with a stomach ache. . . . Murilyn Estes uses her white shoes for an autograph al bum and likes to have all her friends sign their names along with little rhymes of poetry, such as : 'I dip my pen in ink and hope your feet don't stink.' " Editor Lath ers gets into plenty of legal fights, but as a onetime law student usually wins his own case. His paper has one catchall headline in which the first few words change each week, such as "WOOLEN INNER SHIRTS [or NEW RESOLUTIONS or HANDSLEDS] are ripe in the Land of Mears." He has been publishing it since 1914. Few years ago circulation reached 2,740 (population of Mears: 220), and he decided that was too much work. He got out the circulation list and chopped it down to 1,200.

*The American Press Association Directory this month showed that newspapers in towns of less than 20,000 increased by 194 to a total of 10,179 in 1938. All but a handful are weeklies. X. W. Ayer & Son's Directory shows that dailies declined last year from 2,085 to 2,056.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.