Bright Ideas

When we first bought the Eagle, we had to drive the paper “paste-ups” to the printer. The pages were photographed, then cleaning up the negatives, then making plates and printing. This was before computers.

The process never went fast enough. When papers had been printed, in early afternoons on Wednesdays, I would drive them home from Bowman. We raced to put on labels and deliver papers to the post office, and to Emerson Pharmacy in downtown Ekalaka. Everyone was eager to see the weekly newspaper.

The mail took longer, especially to rural mailboxes. They only had, and still have service on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That schedule can be changed by holidays, weather, or road conditions, but rural mail drivers try very hard to deliver anticipated treasures.

After our first year printing papers, we decided to print the Christmas paper early and rest until after New Year’s Day. That was Santa’s time to rest, so we rested, too. We published this information on the front page of the paper and in the Calendar of Events, but someone always called to complain, “We didn’t get our paper!”

People looked forward to the six, eight, ten or twelve page paper that had come every week since the first week in January 1909! We changed that to a 51 week promise. But I didn’t read every word, I didn’t know all the country people, or know their visitors.

But their friends and family DID care, and liked seeing their name in print, especially if it were spelled correctly! I didn’t know people’s faces, but I knew who was related to whom. I learned how to spell names, even if their neighbors sometimes didn’t. We performed a service and wanted to treat every person named with dignity. Wouldn’t you want that?

Soon everything was done on the computer, eliminating travel time. Telephone calls were used to solicit ads. Everything went quicker, and our mail service also delivered the newspaper bundles as freight, so the papers came down the next day, Thursday. That doesn’t happen anymore.

Eagle editor/publisher Eric now drives to Miles City to fetch the papers Wednesday afternoon, and tries to have them at the Post Office between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. on Thursday. And now I am just as eager as everyone else to see the new week’s paper; and I read almost every word.