Happ-enings

It has been a while since I last traveled through Sargent, but the last time that I did, I remember that, along the highway, there remained a relic of days gone by.

A phone booth. I remember that I first discovered this phone booth in May of 2009, when, on the last day of my junior year of high school, some friends and I decided to make a road trip up to Sargent to watch the local legion baseball team —Palmer-Wolbach-Greeley— face off against Taylor- Burwell-Sargent in their first game of the year.

While cruising around town waiting for the game to start, and being ornery like any high school kid is on the eve of their first day of summer vacation, we decided that it would be fun to see if the whole gang could fit into the phone booth. And you know what, we did.

It was tight, but like clowns piling into a car, we managed to get every limb that we had brought with us on the trip into that phone booth.

Nowadays, that kind of stunt would only be performed by young people as a means to generate some content for their various social media accounts. While there are pictures out there on the internet of my friends and I piled into what we considered a Sargent landmark – Facebook and the whole idea of social media was still pretty new at that time – we just undertook the task primarily because of its novel nature, not for the likes.

After all, even in 2009, seeing a phone booth was a rare occurrence.

Fast forward a decade and some change, and phone booths are even more historic than they were when my friends and I discovered that booth along the highway in Custer County. In fact, a lot has changed in that seemingly short span of time.

While change can be hard, as I recently had a chance to discover, it can also produce some unique results.

This year, the Nebraska Press Association is celebrating its sesquicentennial, and at the heart of the trade organization’s celebration will be a special convention featuring events that are aimed at marking the milestone. One of the special projects that was tackled to commemorate the association’s 150th anniversary was a directory that would feature the histories of the Nebraska newspapers that are still being published in the state today.

The prospect of such an undertaking was exciting to me, as there was some irony in the fact that the Nebraska Press Association wanted histories of the keepers of history. That, in my opinion, is almost as rare as the publisher of the local newspaper seeing his picture in print!

As the publisher of four of Nebraska’s newspapers, it took me some time to cobble together the histories of each of my publications. Some, like the Ravenna News, had a detailed history dating back to the newspaper’s founding. Others, like my newspapers in Elm Creek and Palmer, had a complete history in the modern era, but the names and dates of early owners were gathered piecemeal and were, for stretches, hard to string together.

Then, in St. Paul, we had, for the bulk of the paper’s convoluted history, just a litany of names.

Realizing that the project proposed by the Nebraska Press Association could likely be the only complete history of Nebraska’s newspapers to be compiled, I decided that I should at least make an effort to fill in some of the gaps.

While I don’t know if I made any progress in filling in any of the missing pieces, the time I dedicated to the project was educational and informational, as it took me down the rabbit hole of the histories of several area communities.

The first lesson that I learned was that, at the turn of the twentieth century, what they considered front page news likely never would have even made it into our current publications. Sure, they lacked photographs, so they had to fill up a lot more space back then, but after looking through a couple different volumes of publications in search of a publishers’ name, I learned a couple things.

For starters, even in the Great Depression, if you didn’t make the payments on your new piano, it would be repossessed. However, the movers didn’t want to take it far, so you could get a great deal if you wanted a piano and lived in the neighborhood of the debtors.

Secondly, “medicine,” especially some “special remedies”, was very much in vogue. In almost every newspaper I looked at, there were ads, and even articles, touting the cures that various potions and elixirs could offer.

Finally, newspapers weren’t big on checking the facts. On more than one front page, I read an item of gossip, or a “reported sighting” that, in 2023, I would cringe at putting in my newspaper. While a lot of people today espouse the notion that the media is reporting “fake news” when they aren’t, back then the newspapers were and no one seemed to care.

While I could go on and on about the curiosities I discovered in the archives of my various newspapers, I don’t want to ruin the surprises.

After all, I feel like those discoveries, for me, were just like that phone booth in Sargent: More fun to stumble upon than anything