Years ago, after my father passed away, I began the slow process of cleaning out his office. Each file was its own story, and seeing all of those files was like looking at programs of Broadway playbills, each with different casts of characters. Tucked away in the corner of his filing cabinet was a once yellow-now-beige tattered folder titled “Personal.”
Dad was no longer around to stop me, so naturally, like a kid discovering his hidden Christmas presents, I opened the file. Inside it I found yellowed Bolivar Commercial clipping after clipping of my family’s life dating back to the late 1960’s. Honor rolls, weddings, births, obituaries, pictures, my first by-line in this paper as an 8th grader, every story I ever wrote for the paper as a college student, it was all there. Every clipping meticulously cut as if to be placed in a scrapbook but instead placed in a long legal file for posterity.
Leafing through the brittle paper was like pressing “Rewind” on my life. Most of my family’s triumphs and difficulties crackled in my hands, and a smile came to face about the same time as the tears filled my eyes. Every clipping brought back another rush of memories– the Canadian exchange student that came to stay for a week as part of some Lion’s Club program…my brother, the STAR student at his high school graduation…my dad’s picture at the opening of the Port of Rosedale…my sister, beaming at the camera as a new Tri Delt pledge…my mom, award-winning hospital volunteer…even me, a 6 year old little boy sporting a homemade Dorothy Hamill haircut and holding a soccer ball that is roughly 4 times the size of my own head. It was all in my hands. It was all in the paper.
Back in the days before hitting “Share” made you both a journalist and star of your own world, it meant something to be “in the paper.” What’s the old saying? Everyone’s a celebrity in their hometown. If your name hit the paper, good or bad, then you better believe that you would hear about it from a person or two in the community. Before there was “Facebook official,” before we valued the experts in the Twittersphere, before we posted our group pictures on Instagram, the local newspaper bound us all together. I plead guilty to falling victim to the social media world. I use all sorts of mediums. My phone’s notifications look like Times Square at midnight. Time is not static, and our world evolves and changes.
My awareness, however, doesn’t make me immune to sentimentality. The Bolivar Commercial in tiny Cleveland, Mississippi published a newspaper for 104 freakin’ years. Then one day, it didn’t. Time marches on, but something won’t be right. Heck, Fleetwood Mac kept going with different lineups but it was never the same without Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
I want to thank everyone who ever worked at the Bolivar Commercial and helped produce our wonderful record of small town life. While well-deserved honors came your way over the years, a plaque cannot come close to symbolizing your true impact. You were our community connector and touchstone. You chronicled our highs and our lows, our best and our worst, our births and even our deaths. You did so every day, every week, every month, for years and years, without fail. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
- Originally a letter to the Editor in The Bolivar Commercial in Cleveland, Mississippi on April 29, 2020 — the date of the last publication of that newspaper which had been in publication for 104 years.
