Sunday was a sad day because it was the last day for deliveries for the Town Talk newspaper.
It wasn’t sad in the sense that I’m going to miss the paper being delivered. I haven’t had the Town Talk delivered in a while because deliveries became so undependable. We went to digital for a year or two but dropped our subscription entirely when the total number of employees dropped to three (and now it’s two), and one day there wasn’t a single local story in the paper.
The corporate management evidently didn’t care to put out the best local paper it could, or put out even a fair-to-middlin’ product, so we decided we weren’t interested in paying $10 a month for a digital rag.
No, the sadness lies in the heartache one has in seeing a once proud champion become a chump. Think legendary Willie Mays stumbling and mishandling fly balls in center field in the final year of his career. This is a newspaper where I spent 39 years of my life. In fact, I sacrificed a good bit of my life with my wife and children to work for the paper, often being away on assignments (granted, some fantastic assignments) – often on weekends, as a sportswriter, when most sports events take place.
I recall, especially fondly, during the first two decades I worked there, when it was a family-owned paper. Joe D. Smith, who was born in Selma in Grant Parish, worked at nearly every job at the paper before rising to the top of the ladder as publisher. He was recognized and respected nationally, having served as chairman and president of such trade associations as the American Newspaper Publishers Association and the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. He was also a former officer of the Associated Press news-gathering organization.
We’d complain then, from time to time, about such things as our lack of space to put stories and photos in the sports section, but we didn’t know how good we had it. We had a publisher who was civic-minded and advocated reform in state and local government and had his pulse on the heartbeat of Alexandria, which was reflected in the breadth of coverage of news, sports, editorials, opinion, society and entertainment. Heck, we even had a political cartoonist.
It was a great time to be part of a newspaper respected as among the top mid-sized papers in the country. It all started on Saturday, March 17, 1883, when the first paper sold for two and a half cents. I recall late one night in 1984, when Mr. Smith invited us to come across the street to the annex building where the big, shiny blue state-of-the-art press was going to make its debut. Several of us were there, in the days when our circulation hovered around 38,000 and covered about 11 parishes, to see “Big Blue” begin its thunderous first roll – an impressive sight and sound that brought goosebumps.
I could go on about a newspaper I once called “my baby” – so invested was I in trying to make it the best paper it could be. And this was a feeling shared by others who cursed and shook fists at the place in one moment and reveled in seeing a “hot off the press” paper with the latest news and sports that we had sweated and labored and sometimes won arguments about to get in there.
No deliveries? Say it ain’t so, Joe. But then again, they don’t deliver milk to the back door anymore, either.
Bob Tompkins enjoyed a 43-year newspaper career as an award-winning writer and editor, serving the last 39 years at the Town Talk in Alexandria through most of 2015. He is a member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame as a past winner of the LSWA’s Distinguished Service Award in Sports Journalism. An Alexandria resident, Tompkins is a contributing columnist sharing his talents with Rapides Parish Journal readers.