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They had a garden party. I did not go. Not because I didn’t want to see old friends, but I wasn’t invited. I could have gone anyway, and I would have been welcome. However, I would have felt like the little boy who attended the first two football practices, dropped out, and then wanted to sit up front for the victory celebration. I wasn’t there because I didn’t earn my letter.
The party I’m writing about was held May 18 at Washington Park in Cedar Falls and was called a Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reunion. I know many who were there. Attendees included Tim Jamison, who knows more about city budgets than any other Iowan; and Pat Kinney, who has interviewed every successful person in the Cedar Valley for the past twenty years (and still believes Leo Rooff, the former mayor, gave us the Avenue of the Saints).
I know they probably said things to each other like “Where are you now?”; “Are your parents still with us?”; “Do you remember Phyllis Singer? Or the Iron Duke? What about a good political reporter Bob Casey or the sportswriter known as Sully? I’m sure they discussed the circumstances of their departure from Lee Enterprises. But I bet they didn’t take the time to think about what they did.
You see, to understand newspapers you have to realize that the document you are reading lives for 24 hours. I don’t care if thirty years ago you saw a kid riding a bike tossed in the general direction of your porch in a snowstorm, grabbed it from a special messenger tube or got it on your phone last night, you’re reading about yourself, your city and your neighbors. You read a document that is immediate and current.
You are told what is happening in the nation and in the world. All presented by a group of people (we call them journalists) who, sometimes under deadline pressure, identified the most important paragraph, decided what was relevant and tried to include the opinions of supporters and opponents. Then turn around and do the same again for the next publication. Unlike TV or the computer, once printed, a newspaper never disappears and is not immediately replaced to race on to the next, eternal, breaking news story.
And what a story this newspaper has told about us. I still remember a photo from The Courier of the sheer joy of the crowd that gathered at the intersection of Fourth Street and Jefferson when victory in World War II was announced. The descriptions of Reggie Roby’s blossoming minds or the hostility of people as some, braver than others, marched for civil rights. (Dave Dutton, a local attorney, told me that when he was spotted by an important client marching, the man ended his relationship with his firm the next day.)
We heard about the hard times when Rath shut down and Deere laid off thousands of people. The Courier writers chronicled the economic recovery of the 1990s and the fight against the 2008 flood. In a nutshell: what we did then and what we do now.
Longtime Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Sam Rayburn said what we are when he defined a small town. He said it is a place “where people know when you are sick and they worry when you die.” I believe that a city, our city, the Cedar Valley, reflects this truth because we have The Courier, which holds the fabric of our community together.
As people left the garden party that I was not at, I hope they remembered the good work they had done during their time at The Courier. Edmund Burke, the British Member of Parliament, once said of a man who achieved something extraordinary: ‘He can live a long time, he can do many things. But here’s the top. He can never do more than what he is doing today.”
To the gathering I would just say: may you live long and well, but what you did during your time at The Courier will always stand out. Your community should thank you.
That’s 30.
This column was originally published in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.
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