Looks Like We Might Make 100

With this issue of The Fayette County Record we conclude 99 years of continuous publication.

Next Tuesday we’ll have a little section commemorating the start of our 100th year.

There were actually versions of The Fayette County Record before Volume 1, Issue 1 on Nov. 3 1922. But those earlier ventures failed until L.J. Sulak and Frank S. Baumbach got together 50 stockholders and started this current version of the paper.

America was in the middle of Prohibition then, so if L.J. and Frank made a toast with alcohol when those first issues were rolling off the press, they were doing so illegally. At least twice a week since 1922 (and for a while before the Great Depression it was as often as three times a week), ink was put to paper and the news of Fayette County was shared with thousands.

Births, deaths, the wins and losses of big games and important elections became the first draft of history on these pages.

More than 10,000 different editions of The Record since, you find me here trying to find some words about this operation that is so much bigger than any of us.

There’s several old black and white photos on one wall here at the newspaper office – editors and publishers of this newspaper’s early days.

I never met any of them.

But gosh what efforts they must have made to build this newspaper edition after edition and get it into the hands of the citizens.

They kept this thing going through a World War, that aforementioned Depression, and kept it relevant amidst the rise of radio and television.

There’s still an old dark room here in the office. We use it for storage now, but not that long ago it was filled with chemicals and trays. Just developing pictures to print in the newspaper must have been such a task.

The heroic efforts of people involved to keep putting out this newspaper were not just limited to the early days.

Our current production manager John Castaneda in August 2017 came to the office to work even as his home was flooding in Hurricane Harvey. A few weeks ago, he was doing newspaper work on his laptop when he was on a hospital bed awaiting surgery.

When I was a kid I remember this nice guy who would always come to the school to take pictures of the kids that did well in UIL academic events or who won fire posters.

It was former Record editor and publisher Richard Barton Jr.

He died in 2006 in a wreck driving back to La Grange with the delivery truck loaded down with the Thanksgiving issue of the newspaper. All the copies of that edition were ruined, but it was important to his family which has owned this newspaper since 1976 and still does to this day (his sister Regina is our current publisher), that even in their moment of unimaginable grief, the paper had to be reprinted and distributed on schedule.

Everybody came in and pitched in to make that happen.

I remember longtime society editor Aileen Loehr coming into the office with her oxygen tank in tow to keep working on the newspaper as long as her health would let her before her death in 2016.

She worked here an amazing 44 years.

Lillie Sulak, the daughter-in-law of newspaper founder L.J. Sulak, worked at The Record for 57 years and was still coming in to update the weather box information that appears in the newspaper until she was almost 100 years old.

Today keeping this newspaper going feels at the same time easier and harder than ever before.

Now there’s so many different ways people can get their news. That’s the challenge.

But the physical building of the newspaper is so much easier.

We take photos digitally, build our pages on computers and electronically send those pages off to Bryan for printing.

But some things haven’t changed in the last 99 years.

The news is still something you can hold in your hand, something that you can clip out and keep.

No big tech company can pull the plug on us, or limit what we print. We’re still locally owned.

We know the people we write about and that we’ll bump into them on the cereal aisle at the grocery store or in the stands at the football game. That’s an accountability that I wish all folks in media had to live with. Our world would be a better place because of it.

Anyway, that’s enough reminiscing for today, after all, we’ve got another paper to get out.

There’s – wonderfully – always another paper to get out.

Thanks for reading.