The Adair County News

The Old Home Paper

Kind reader, did you ever live down on the South Fork? Did you ever follow the frost carpet to Winlock's Farm in October for chestnuts and hickory nuts? Did you ever plant your feet in the corn rows or cool them in Dickey's swimming hole? Have you read 'Ivanhoe' by the light of a big log fire and wondered whether Prof. Shipp would switch you next day for not knowing your McGuffey?

If you have done these things, kind reader, then you have lived somewhere in the Kentucky country, and you are a better man or woman for having lived there.

The immediate names related to a vicinage particularly dear to the writer of these lines, an old-fashioned southern county where most of his childhood was spent and where his first and firmest impressions of life were gained. But they in general are names redolent of country life in this State, and to the reader they will probably bring back memories gentle and sweet.

There was always a court-house in the center of the town square, shaded by big maple and elms and beeches, and around it on County Court Day do you remember the country horses and mules that moved restlessly within their tethers attached to the iron rings of the court-house fence. Just across the court-house yard between the old hotel on one end and your grandfather's old store on the other, was the office of the country newspaper. Do you remember that?

Like the hotel and the store it was a pioneer, and you used to watch the grimy printer at his case and the editor at his desk, almost preferring that intriguing sight to the blacksmith's forge and confident that the printer was the deftest and editor the smartest man that ever lived.

Good days. Bright days. They will not come again. But many other boys and girls have been through them since then, and many more are rapturously inhaling them now. They are the sons and daughters of the boys and girls you used to know, and those boys and girls are living lives and having experiences you would like to know about.

The old county paper still is published in the town; it may have a linotype now and the editor may use a typewriter, but it is still full of the doings and sayings of a countryside that is dear to you.

During November all the country editors in the State have installed 'home town paper week' to remind exiles like many of us that it would be pleasant to read of the old town and the old names again. Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit, says Virgil, which freely translated means:

Follow that impulse and subscribe to the old paper in the old home town. -Louisville Times.