It's tough, but confidence is strong

My father popped up in a dream the other night.

He was still a youngish man in the dream, probably in his 40s.

And he was smiling.

He held in his hand a bunch of page proofs and a yellowing sheet of paper with a long, typewritten memo he wanted me to see.

The page proofs were from early editions of The Graphic, which was born on my first birthday in November 1949.

As I flipped through them, I saw the grown-ups of my childhood: John Jaqua Sr., Ray Elliott, Gordon Meeker, Pete Brewster, Lee Hall, Haynes Starbuck, John Shambarger, Ethel Cartwright, Art Harshman and more. Civic leaders, elected officials, volunteers who coached kids in baseball leagues, members of Home Extension Clubs, they were all there. The newspaper pages documented their triumphs, their dreams and their disappointments.

And as I flipped through those page proofs, they became pages from The Commercial Review and The News and Sun. And the faces became more familiar and more contemporary: Gerald Kirby, Skip Mallers, Paul Goslee, Leo Glogas, Ron Liggett, Sue Gillespie and more.

It was as if those pages of old newsprint held in their ink the spirit of all those personalities.

It’s not unusual for me to dream of my dad.

He’ll always be the standard I measure myself against.

But this dream was different: He was smiling.

At first, I couldn’t figure that out.

After all, the newspaper business today is tough, incredibly tough. And there are plenty of sidewalk wiseguys ready to tell you that print is done, the “dead tree media” are finished.

But my father’s smile in that dream told me he wasn’t buying that crap and that I shouldn’t either.

Neither should you.

Starting The Graphic back in 1949 was an enormous leap of faith. My dad had a great job as plant manager for The Jay Garment, but an earlier venture into the newspaper business — The Redkey Times Journal — had been something of a money pit.

To pin the family’s future on an untested enterprise was an expression of optimism at the extreme.

But maybe he had heard an aphorism coined by another Jay County newspaperman years before. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but I know that he ended up in Rensselaer.

His motto was this: “No newspaper is better than its town, and no town is better than its newspaper.”

Today, I’d substitute the word “community” for “town,” but the thought holds true. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

Was it easy back in 1949? Nope. Sometimes the family bank account had to help meet payroll.

Was it easy in the 1960s when aggressive and honest reporting about scandals — one involving law enforcement and another involving embezzlement at the local REMC — led to libel suits seeking damages that would have led to bankruptcy? Nope, but we won those libel suits.

Is it easy today when independent retailers have been decimated by Walmart and other big box stores, when “free” advertising on the internet undermines a 200-year-old business model that has supported an independent press and when the very sense of community itself is fragile?

Of course not. It was tough then. It is tough now.

But what I remember most from that dream is that my father was smiling.

His confidence was strong. So is mine.

Just the same, I wish I could get my hands on that long typewritten memo that he said he wanted me to see.

My guess is that it would echo that old motto: “No newspaper is better than its community, and no community is better than its newspaper.”

And it would focus on putting out the next edition.