“By the absence of an irreverent press, Europe for a thousand years has existed merely for the advantage of half a dozen seventh-rate families called Monarchs, and some hundreds of riffraff sarcastically called Nobles. Our papers have one peculiarity — it is American — it exists nowhere else — their irreverence. May they never lose and never modify it. They are irreverent toward pretty much everything, but where they laugh one good king to death, they laugh a thousand cruel and infamous shams and superstitions into the grave, and the account is squared. Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” ~Mark Twain
138 years ago this week our founder, James Lyttle, published the first edition of the Meeker Herald — Volume 1, Issue 1. This week we commence with Volume 139, Issue 1.
Sometimes I spend time in the “morgue” — the vault where we keep the bound copies from every year the paper has been in publication — for encouragement, for inspiration, and to remind myself that every paper we publish builds on the foundation laid by those who’ve gone before.
Those “giant books,” as my grandson describes them, contain stories of our county’s residents: their births, deaths, successes and losses. They tell the tale of local government: the good, the bad and everything in between. The tone and temperament of societal culture is caught in those pages, for better or worse.
In the years that I’ve had the privilege of sharing our work with high school interns, I’ve explained more than once that comments made by our county’s forebears probably don’t identify them as raging racists, bigots, or misogynists, that’s just how people, places and things were talked about then. In the same vein, things we find acceptable to talk and write about now, words and phrases we use, would never have been used in a public forum back in the day.
Conversely, nowhere is it more apparent that hindsight is 20/20 than in the reading of that “rough draft” of history. Sometimes years later, new information has come to light that changes our perspective on a story, or a person. Sometimes facts that weren’t available then shine a new light on a story, and sometimes people’s true colors are exposed over time, changing how a story is told. Looking at all those bound copies is a reminder that 50 or 75 or 100 years hence, people will likely look back and wonder why we were so unevolved.
As we embark on another volume, I’d like to thank all of you for your support as advertisers, subscribers, writers, photographers, and more, helping us continue this important tradition. It matters, past, present and future.
By NIKI TURNER – editor@editorht1885.com
