For five decades, starting in the 1970s, Matt Kelly has been a professional journalist and photographer, and now that he's in his sixties he's still at it. He is pictured above at the University of Virginia with historic preservationist, Mark Kutney. The photo was taken by Dan Addison.
Here he is above with with his sons, Liam and and Ronan.
Matt Kelly With Von Haggin's Lion
And here he is in his own words.
I have been carrying photo negatives with me for years, most of them stored in archival plastic pages in three-ring binders, three dozen of them, literally thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of frames of film. I was one of those photographers who never took just one frame of something, because it was film and you did not know what it was like until you had developed the film hours after the event.
Initially, I started scanning family negatives and I had stacks of them, coming from a long line of packrats. And then I started scanning some of the newspaper negatives in part because I had not seen some of these shots in forty years and as I scanned more, I started segregating them in folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders on hard drives and I did this for five or six years. I would pop some negatives into the scanner and digitize them as I worked on other things.
I worked for the Washington County Post, https://www.newspapers.com/paper/washington-county-post/12453/ and The Standard Press, https://www.nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn87070421/, two weekly newspapers in New York that folded thirty years ago, https://www.loc.gov/item/sn87070421,
I also worked for the Bennington Banner, https://www.benningtonbanner.com/ a daily newspaper in Bennington, Vermont, which has recently started down the road of being a weekly newspaper again.
As I scanned I knew that I needed to share the photos. Forty-odd years ago, I suggested to the president of the historical society in Cambridge https://www.cambridgenyhistoricalsociety.com/ that he go around town and take photos of the mayor and the police chief and the village board and prominent citizens and carefully mark the photos with names and dates and locations and put them in a file cabinet and thirty years later people would think he was a genius. He didn’t do that, so I felt I need to fill in some of the gap.
I had photos from Southern Washington County, northern Rensselaer County and Southwestern Vermont, as well as personal photos.
A few years ago, when visiting friends in Cambridge, I spent some time with Ken Gottry and he downloaded onto his computer, sections of the photo archive pertinent to Southern Washington County. https://washingtoncounty.fun/our-county/ I ran into him several days later and he said ‘Do you have any idea how many photos you gave me? It was 64,719.’
I laughed because I had also down-loaded the equivalent number of photos relating to Hossick https://www.townofhoosick.org/, Hoosick Falls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoosick_Falls,_New_York and northern Rensselaer County https://www.ny.gov/counties/rensselaer into the archives of the Louis Miller Museum in Hoosick Falls where former director Philip Leonard had created the ‘Matt Kelly Photo Archive’ on their servers.
I am not sure what if anything the Louis Miller Museum https://hoosickhistory.com/ people are doing with the images, but Ken Gottry has a Facebook page of Cambridge history https://greenerpasture.com/Places/Details/765 and he posts my photos among the other pictures he uncovers. https://v3.cambridgeny.gov/historian
All together, I was shooting photos in that region for about eighteen years.
Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia was portly, grey-haired by the time I photographed him, probably the world’s fastest nine-fingered guitar player who seemed so plugged into the world but who died fifteen years younger that I am now. The Grateful Dead commanded the devotion of huge audiences and with the Allman Brothers Band staged a concert at Watkins Glen, New York, that out-drew Woodstock. The Dead played Saratoga three years in a row in the 1980s, but Saratoga was not prepared for them.
The Saratoga Performing Arts Center, known locally as SPAC, https://spac.org/ was attached to a spa and a golf course and at dawn two days before The Dead show, the grounds keepers and the early tee timers went out to the course to find it pock-marked with popup tents and sleeping bags. The tribe had arrived. The Deadheads, the motley and massive collection of people who simply followed the band, had staked out territory in the Spa City, like mushrooms that pop up after a storm.
The following few years they were better prepared, but the first year was a shock. The fans were part of the show in their own way. I was in the press section during one show and there was a reviewer for one of the Albany papers who had a TRS80, a crude Radio Shack portable computer [considered high tech in those days] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80 and he had the machine on his lap, tapping out a review during the first half of the show which he would have to transmit across telephone lines to make the deadline for the morning paper.
But some of the surrounding fans, who did not know or understand that the row in which we were sitting was the press row, were speculating on what he was doing, such as writing down all the lyrics as Jerry was singing them or trying to transcribe the music.
One year I wrote a column about the Grateful Dead concert experience for The Bennington Banner and later I was photographing a wedding for a family I knew. During the reception, the patriarch of the clan, who was probably in his late seventies at the time, came up to me and complimented me on the column, saying he knew several of his children had gone to these shows but he did not really understand what they were all about until he read my column.
I discovered The Dead https://www.dead.net/ in the early 1970s and they were a part of my life for more than three decades. The Internet Archive has more Grateful Dead shows on file than a lot of bands have played. I can call up these shows and tap into my youth again.
Danny Hatfield
Danny Hatfield was a man-about-town in Hoosick Falls. Danny claimed to be a descendent of the Hatfields & McCoys Feud Hatfields, a claim I never disputed. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hatfields-and-McCoys
Danny was a biker [the distinction being that Danny rode a Harley, motorcyclists ride Hondas and Suzukis] and a business man who developed a barbecue sauce in the 1980s before barbecue sauces became a thing. This sauce, he claimed, was developed from an old family recipe. Its label featured a drawing of a hillbilly carrying a rifle.
I took this picture of Danny at Eagleville, where a wooden covered bridge spans the Battenkill River. Danny had gone there to swim, but when I saw him he was tinkering with his bike. I saw the picture and took it.
Col. Charles Raymond,
Retired
The Colonel is raising his flag on the pole in his front yard. I took the photo of him with his flag early in the morning on a Memorial Day in the early 1980s while I was getting ready to photograph the Memorial Day parade. It is one of my personal favorites and I ran the photo several times over the years in the Washington County Post to remind people of Flag Day, which is June 14th. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Flag-Day Charles Raymond was well-known and well-liked in the community and I view the photo as a reminder of a day when people in this country were patriotic.
The Colonial Mobile
Artillery
This was taken at an
American Revolutionary war re-enactment in Walloomsac, New York, where the
Battle for Bennington was held. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/revolutionary-war/battles/bennington This, of course, is a very
local dispute, with most history books citing the Battle of
Bennington, but Bennington is in Vermont and Walloomsac is in New York State.
Colonel Baum’s troops https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=13918 were on their way to Bennington to raid for supplies, but Ethan Allen https://www.biography.com/military-figures/ethan-allen and his troops stopped them in Walloomsac. While a state park exists there now, which is a nice place for a picnic, the actual battlefield is still a farmer’s field along the Walloomsac River, in New York.
One year, the local historians were able to stage a re-enactment of the battle on the actual field, on the actual date of the battle, August 15, which is still celebrated with a parade as Battle Day in Bennington. This particular re-enactment drew a very large crowd of locals. I had covered many historic re-enactments and realized some of these people got into character as if they were method actors. I tried to interview a re-enactor who was play-acting as a major in the colonial forces and he said he did not have time because he had a war to win. I had to remind him that in reality, he was a Volvo mechanic in Searsburg.
Nevin Busch and
Burgess Meredith
This photo is from one of the more interesting jobs I had at Hoosac School, https://hoosac.org/ photographing its 100th anniversary in 1989. Among the alumni attendees were novelist and screenwriter Nevin Busch, who wrote, among other things “Duel in the Sun,” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038499/ and actor Burgess Meredith, who had great comedic timing. https://www.imdb.com/list/ls053953687/ They are shown here side by each at the dinner table in the Great Hall at the school.
My mother, who was raised up in Hoosick Falls, said she knew Burgess Meredith as a teenager. She would have been around sixteen when he graduated from Hoosac in 1926 and she said he played a pivotal role in the Yule Log ceremony, which is Hoosac’s version of a Christmas pageant. When I photographed him in 1989, Meredith wore a bandage on his face that day because doctors had recently removed a cancerous growth from his face.
Hoosac School is a hidden asset of Hoosick, and smaller Hoosick Falls. It is known internationally, having developed in such a way in order to survive the death of WASP privilege and elitism. About half the people in Hoosick don’t know it is there, at the end of its own road, with its own playing fields and sports center, pond, school rooms and dining and residence halls and the students would caravan into the nearby village of Hoosick Falls when there was a reason to go there and a village to go to and now they probably go to Bennington.
Jack Weller
These two photos are of Jack Weller, who ran restaurants. Jack opened his first restaurant on Elm Street in Hoosick Falls in 1928, after getting into a fight with a foreman in one of the mills and quitting. His restaurant was at the top of the hill, across from the American House hotel and across Railroad Avenue from the railroad tracks. He moved to Cambridge in the nineteen fifties, opening his establishment on Route 22 by Albie Messina’s garage and across from what is now Cambridge Central School. He later moved to Main Street, just down and across from the Washington County Post.
Jack’s restaurant had six to eight tables and a counter with fixed stools. He advertised ‘Roast beef as tender as mother’s love’ and served pork chops, one and a half inch thick pork chops, you could literally cut with a fork. As he would set a plate in front of a customer, he would say ‘Now if you don’t like it, just let me know and I’ll get you something else.’
I ate there for several years and I never had a bad meal. Jack had these large plate glass windows on Main Street. Some days he would stick a small sign in the corner of one of the windows, a sign made of a flap torn off a brown cardboard box on which he had written, in Magic Marker, the word ‘Donuts’. People would line up. We are talking home-made, deep-fried doughnuts, which you took away in a grease-stained brown paper sack and if you did not get there before 8:30 a.m. you were just plain out of luck. They were sold out.
Jack was also a dedicated bowler and the formal portrait of him was taken at The Barbecue, a bowling alley on Route 22 south of Hoosick Falls. When he was younger, he would close the restaurant for two weeks and go on a bender. Jack ran this restaurant until he was about eighty-five and his kids convinced him he should close it and retire. He finally relented and closed his restaurant. A few weeks into retirement, he was working down the street at Bud Hungerford’s diner.
He made it several months into retirement and then every system in his body started shutting down and he was gone. He was a class act and a good cook, not in the Gordon Ramsey style but in the small-town county kitchen style, comfort food you crave.
Dale Robertson And The Nolan Brothers Tractor Pull
I think tractor pulls are a sport that is unique to America, where you load weighed concrete blocks onto a stone boat and see if a tractor can pull it a distance. And if it does, you add weight to the stone boat until it can’t. This is a very rural activity. My tractor can pull more weight than your tractor. It’s organized, with big event purses, and it is an element of just about every county fair I’ve ever attended in the Northeastern United States, and it is impromptu.
In the early nineteen eighties, the Nolan Brothers, Jim, Jack and Bill, would sponsor a fall tractor pull on their farm, mostly for their neighbors, such as Dale Robertson, who farmed a half-mile away. They did this for five or six years and it grew over the years and it was an event, something to which people looked forward to and anticipated.
As time passed, annual crowds grew to the point where the pull wasn’t feasible anymore because the Nolans were using an entire corner of one of their corn fields. The brothers themselves were having other problems, as well. One of them was run over by a tractor and a hay wagon, spending the rest of his life in pain and on medication. Another one came down with emphysema.
All the Nolans had children and while the farm was big enough for the three brothers, it certainly wasn’t big enough for all their offspring and there were squabbles about who got what and the last I knew, the main barn had burned down and there were still some of the family around, but the ones who stayed in farming had moved off and set up their own farms.
At the time, the family, the extended family, was a core of the community, the political community, the farming community, the social community and it was perfectly normal for someone to say, Mickey Rooney-like ‘I know. Let’s have a tractor pull.’
And while it looks all
so mechanized and a bit like Norman Rockwell, this is dangerous. These are powerful
machines that can flip over on you in seven-tenths of a second. They are
incredibly dangerous machines. There’s the story of Buster Wilkinson, a
tractor-puller from Greenwich. The Wilkinsons were not farmers, but they had a
machinery dealership and participating in tractor pulls was a form of
advertising, and they were tractor pull enthusiasts, as well. Buster had an
accident during a tractor pull in the late nineteen eighties, when his sister
Barbara was working at the Standard Press.
He was thrown off the tractor and got caught under one of the large rear wheels
while it was still churning. He lingered several days, but it was proof and a
reminder of just how dangerous this hobby could be. This is one of reasons that
tractors are now sold with cabs and roll bars. If the tractor flips, the
operator has a chance of survival.
Going through these photos has brought up memories for me and memories lead to memories, some of them sad. I get to thinking about people I knew and people I let go when I shouldn’t have and how I could have done better in some situations and people with whom I should have stayed in touch and didn’t, and now it is too late.
Third Base Last Stop Before Home
The village of Hoosick Falls was, is, a place of functional alcoholism, where people drank much of the time and beer was not really considered drinking. I started drinking beer at around age fifteen, which was considered late. People drank every day, but considered drinking to involve hard liquor. Third Base, The Last Stop Before Home, was a mill workers’ bar, while T-Bones was a Dead Head bar, and Goober’s was a younger’s person’s bar. Salluzzo’s was a quiet bar for older people and those who liked to watch a little television while drinking beer. The American House served food, so it was a good mid-day bar.
The Third Base had apartments on the floors above the barroom and that is where the fire started. A resident fell asleep while smoking a cigarette and set the bed and then the apartment ablaze, which finally engulfed the building and the one-story insurance agency next door. It happened on a Saturday night, and the bar was full but the only fatality was the sleeping smoker.
The police would not release the name of the fatality for several days and Peter Crabtree, the Bennington Banner’s county editor, suggested that I needed to write or find an upbeat story. He reminded me of a village resident who about a year previous had fallen asleep on the railroad tracks, lying on the ties between the rails, and a train ran over the top of him. The only damage he received was a broken collar bone from a chain dangling under the train. Peter though it would be nice if I tracked him down and found out how having a train roll over him had changed his life.
The next day the
police revealed the fatal smoker, whose body had been badly burned, was Baron
McKeon, the man over whom the train had rolled the previous year. They
identified him by x-rays of the collar bone break. I got to tell Peter the
train incident had not changed his life that much.
The upper floors of the building were demolished, the structure having been too heavily damaged by the blaze. I think proprietor/owner Gregg Zora reopened the bar afterwards. I have no idea what is there now.
Along with photos of
the fire, here’s one of a Troy Record
reporter who was there, John Michael Flynn, and sportswriter Gary Miller, who
was taking pictures for the Press &
Post, the Manchester Journal
retread that replaced the Standard Press
and The Washington County Post.
Gregg Zora owned the building and ran The Third Base.
In the nineteen
sixties, Hoosick Falls had more bars per capita than any other village in the
country. At the time, New York State had an eighteen-year-old drinking age,
while Vermont and Massachusetts had a twenty-one year old drinking age. Because
of this, college students from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts,
and Bennington College in Vermont would come to Hoosick Falls to drink. There
were several local mills as well that kept the bars going, but as the other
states lowered their drinking ages and the mills started closing, the number of
bars dwindled.
Some of them have storied pasts, such as Dougherty’s Hotel, on the corner of John and Main Streets, once one of the classier places in the village, when the Doughertys ran it, descending into a dive later under other owners. It was taken over by A.J. Wirmusky and his wife Linda and turned into a classy place again, serving good food and advertising itself as a restaurant. It suffered a serious fire and now there is a coffee house in the place.
There was Maloney’s on Clay Hill, which was lax in checking the identification papers of patrons. There was the American House, which for years catered to the railroad passenger trade, when there were passenger trains coming through town. Hoosick Falls was an interesting place back then, more interesting than it is now.
The Bell in the Tower
In the 1980s, there was a group of volunteer workers who set about renovating the old St. Mary’s Academy school building. The building was constructed at the intersection of High Street and Classic Street in the 1880s, of wood and brick, but the energy crisis of the 70s and the 80s meant that twelve-foot ceilings were not practical. We installed drop ceilings, replaced the electrical sockets, repaired the failing plumbing, and installed more energy efficient windows.
Sister Ernesta, who was the principal of the school, was one of the Sisters of St. Joseph, born as a Flynn from Buskirk. She and her sister joined the convent and stayed together as nuns, serving at that point near their family home. She came into one of the rooms after we had installed the drop ceiling and was complimenting us on the work.
“But,” she asked, “Where did you get the materials?”
One of the crew said “Oh, don’t worry sister, Oak Materials [one
of the local mills] donated them.”
“That’s wonderful,” Sister Ernesta said. “I’m going back to the convent and write them a thank you letter.”
The worker who had spoken up stepped forward and said “I wouldn’t do that if I was you sister. They’re not aware of it.”
Sister Ernesta thought a moment, digesting the information as
the Irish lass in her ginned up a smile and replied, “Oh, I see, okay.”
We did a lot for the old school which many of us had attended
and some had their children who attended it. It held great sentimental and
emotional attachment for us. When it was first built, the four-story brick
building housed kindergarten through twelfth grade, from the 1880s to the
1960s. In 1961, the high school was built on the hill beyond, at the
intersection of High Street and Parsons Avenue, which then housed grades nine
through twelve. The high school was in business from 1961 to 1986, when grades
nine through twelve ceased by order of the bishop.
The reasons for this were many. There was a drop-off in devotions to the Sisters of St. Joseph, and with fewer nuns, the school had to hire teachers on the open market. This pushed up tuition costs which drove away customers, since the target audience also had to pay taxes for the public school regardless of whether or not they used it. As the student body dwindled, it became harder to keep the high school going.
Our crew did some work on the high school, a lot of it deferred maintenance and upkeep. Once the high school closed, the elementary operation was moved to the newer facility, where it continued until a few years ago when the entire operation was shut down. The old eighteen eighties building has been converted into an apartment house, and the high school was sold a year or so ago.
When the elementary school building was constructed, a bell was cast in placed in a tower on top of the building on the High Street side. When the pastor sold the building in the late 1980s, the contract specified that the tower contain a bell. This annoyed many people in the parish and I got a call from one of the volunteers to come to the school that afternoon. When I got there, several of the group had rigged up a pulley system and were lowering the bell down four stories to the back of a pick-up truck. They wanted me to take pictures. I told them it was the first time I had ever been invited to photograph a felony.
Once the original school bell was removed, a little metal school bell, measuring about three inches across the widest part, was put in its place. The real bell was spirited off. Once the pastor had been reassigned, the original bell was placed on a frame in the lobby of the old high school, now the elementary school.
A Group Portrait of
the Work Crew
From left, John Nealon, Mike Barber, Bernard Graney, Robert Brott, Robert Hayden [rear], Sister Ernesta, James Shaw, Francis Murphy, Gerald McAuliffe and Matt Kelly. Three of these people are still alive.
A Window Replacement
Hoosick Falls is a poorer place for having lost St. Mary’s Academy. Its graduates went out into the world, but many stayed behind living their lives in Hoosick Falls, working there, raising their families there, continuing the Catholic tradition there. It inspired loyalty of the sort where a group of us would get together every weekend to devote some time to fixing the school, supplying our own tools, in many cases our own materials, asking only to be paid in Piels Real Draft beer, which was a cheap as it got.
As Philip Leonard said a few years ago, “Hoosick Falls is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.”
Losing this school was a huge nail in that coffin.
Washington County, New
York, has several covered bridges, three of which are still in used for
vehicular traffic, and one, at the old Rice Seed Mill in Cambridge village, is
still open for foot traffic. The Shushan Covered Bridge has been removed from
the Battenkill and is being used on land as a museum.
The Rexleigh Covered Bridge connecting the towns of Salem and Jackson, had fallen into serious disrepair and Washington County decided to scrap it and replace it with a metal bridge. This did not sit well with local residents who raised hell with the politicians and raised some of their own funds to repair the bridge. They brought in a wooden bridge expert named Gratton who agreed to repair the bridge.
It took several years to get all the work done and when the television cameras showed up the county politicians who did not like the idea were flocking to get their pictures taken and convince everyone that they were big supporters.
The locals had made
sure that the repairs were kept up on the Eagleville Bridge, so that was not in
danger, though it required continual maintenance. Eagleville is a popular local
swimming spot on the Battenkill and for years youth have jumped from the bridge
into the river.
The Buskirk Bridge, which links White Creek in Washington County and Hoosick in Rensselaer County, is annually threatened by ice. The surface of the Hoosic River freezes over every year and as the ice breaks up it flows downstream in big chunks. The bridge is a chokepoint, where the river narrows to accommodate the bridge and the ice piles up, threating to push the bridge off its moorings. I was taking photographs of this on the bridge in February 2, 1988, when David Armstrong, a well-known local veterinary, stopped on the bridge to look at the ice. We talked for a few minutes. He had been our farm’s vet for years. He was standing at the window of the bridge, looking out on the river and I took a photo of him. By the next morning, he was dead of a heart attack. I have enclosed one of the last photos taken of Dr. David Armstrong, a very pleasant human being.
The Seed Company
Footbridge across the Owlkill in the village of Cambridge was restored and two
years ago I watched the bridge being installed over a restored canal in the
Owlkill. Generations of local children have played on and around this bridge
and hopefully will do so far into the future.
Washington County has
smartened up a bit and now capitalizes on its history and its historic bridges.
It knows there is some money in tourism and it has seen that the agricultural
economy is fragile when it is run by Cornell and Monsanto.
I find it very therapeutic to write these small histories around the photos in my archive. It stirs up memories of the past and how much I felt at home in the Cambridge and White Creek area. Hoosick Falls is still a problem for me. I have many happy memories associate with it, but it is still a sore spot for me.
As a child living in White Creek and going to Hoosick Falls for school I was looked down upon by people from the village. It was as if living a few miles away I was from Dogpatch. One of the reasons Don Bogardus was mayor was that thought Hoosick Falls was the best place on the face of the planet. This was a common feeling for people whose lives revolved around the village. Now it has sunk to a village that can no longer even support a grocery store.
When I was a child, there were two large markets in the village, Grand Union on Main Street and Millers on Church Street, and each of the four wards had at least one smaller grocery that served the housewives who were within walking distance of it. There were two markets on Clay Hill, which was on the other side of the river. Each ward also had its own elementary school and many of the children went home for lunch. Much of this made for close-knit community that was self-contained.
At the same time, when my mother was a girl in the village, she and my grandmother would send my grandfather off in the morning to tend his store on Main Street, take the train to Troy to shop and be back in the village in time to have his dinner ready when he walked back from his store. You buy just about you needed in the village, clothes, food, shoes, hardware, tools, automobiles, there were restaurants, theaters, social clubs, the Irish had at least four social organizations, the Emerald Society, the Hibernians, the Sons of Erin and another the name of which escapes me. There were Masons, Elks, the Poles had the St. Stanislaw Society on Clay Hill, the Knights of Columbus, there were churches for Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, and the Episcopalians, big churches, and the Jews had a synagogue, all in Hoosick Falls, which is now bordering on being a ghost town.
Maybe I am enjoying drifting into the past because I find the present so
iffy.
Below are some assorted portraits taken over the years for publication.
Konrad Kruger & The Lifesaver
Pilot Paul Mantz
Charles Carelli and his ducks
Father Anthony Tomasi
Robert Brott
Charles Carelli & Bob Beauman
Charles Carelli
Baseball, 1982
Football, circa 1981
Brian Howard & John Davis, circa 1982
You can see it in the way they move, the way they tilt their heads to listen, the way they rest balanced on one leg, their heads, on prehensile necks, tucked under a wing, the way they stick their heads forward when they are being aggressive. They indeed are the descendants of the dinosaurs.
I have also enclosed some aerial photos of Cambridge, a village I love. Cambridge is the home of Pie Ala Mode, created at the Hotel Cambridge.
Cambridge built the Hubbard Hall opera house in 1879, which still exists today and hosts many artistic events, plays, classical music, folk music and many others as well as art exhibits and has been the showcase for many area artists.
Working in Cambridge was like working in the fictional Mayberry. It is a warm, friendly town where people know each other, for generations, and help each other. It has weathered its controversies over the years and still is going through travails. Many of the old Cambridge families still live there, and newcomers, including many Amish, have moved in. Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P fortune, had a horse farm, Black Hole Hollow Farm in White Creek, outside Cambridge.
Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was a visitor during the
Saratoga Race Meet in August. Fleming and the Hartfords would drive from
Cambridge to Saratoga during the flat track season. Fleming set part of the
book Diamonds Are Forever in Saratoga
and the entire novel The Spy Who Loved Me
took place at a motel on Route 9, also in upstate New York. An early PAN
paperback edition of the book has a map of the area which is catching on fire.
The paper came out on Wednesday afternoon and we would carry the per-pound-prices-on-the-hoof from Tuesday night at the local cattle auction house, which was information for the farmers. And some of people who had subscriptions, which the mailman would deliver on a Thursday, would line up Wednesday evenings at the convenience stores so they could buy a copy to read the stats and scores from the bowling leagues. We ran obituaries as news items. Today they are paid advertisements. We ran accounts of weddings and engagements, also vital information in a small town. We covered the plays at school and the high school sporting events and the local politics and controversies and told what colleges local high school graduates were attending. We took photos at the local festivals and church suppers and high school graduations. These were important events in the local community and these were the things we covered and we were proud of it. It was a glue that helped hold the community together, and while local people would make fun of the paper and badmouth it, they missed it when it was gone and they realized how large a hole its absence left in the community.
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