Background noise from spouse’s TV as a remodeler broke into Sheetrock: “Look, behind the wall it’s a front page from the Delta Democrat-Times.”
I looked up from folding laundry to see and hear what would be read or said next about the front page or about the paper itself, only to see walls coming down and hear Ben and Erin discussing raising a ceiling.
And like that mention of a legendary Greenwood, MS, newspaper, with connections to our area, gave way to the next scene.
Nothing noted about the role the newspaper played in emergence of a new South. Nothing about a newspaper that carried the fight to bigots and won.
Nothing about two journalists from this area who began their careers with The Town Talk before joining the DDT.
Merrit “Pic” Firmin, an Avoyelles native who grew up in Concordia Parish, was a reporter, then an editor on the Town Talk city desk.
Wallace Anthony, from Grant Parish, worked on the Town Talk’s wire/copydesk after a stint in the U.S. Army.
In the mid-1960s Firmin was hired as managing editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. When he left for Mississippi he took Anthony as his copy desk chief.
And they and Firmin’s staff and publisher Hodding Carter III launched several years of setting the pace for civil rights changes in their state and region.
Pic left about a decade later for the editor’s job in Gulfport, where he thrived and his paper was named one of the best 40,000- and-under daily circulation papers in the nation.
Wallace returned to The Town Talk, where he was wire desk/copy desk chief for the next quarter-century, regularly advocating at daily news coverage planning meetings the rattling of cages to get things done.
They died within two months of each other in 2010, Pic at 69, Wallace at 73.
All these years later their trailblazing paper gets only a passing mention. Well, it was home-garden, not a history show. Too bad.
Jim Butler, a Bolton High School alumnus, was an acclaimed writer and editor at the Alexandria Town Talk for 36 years, the last 23 (1977-2003) as editor-in-chief. He led Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina for the Gulfport (Miss.) Sun-Herald in 2005. Butler returned home to Cenla a few years ago, and shares his talents and insight with Rapides Parish Journal readers.
