OLD NEWS

Chrysanthemums for that Old Lady

The front page of the Nov. 20, 1917, Arkansas Gazette.
The front page of the Nov. 20, 1917, Arkansas Gazette.

Strictly speaking, a birthday is the anniversary of a birth. That's why, when we teach kids to show us how old they are, we don't let them hold up a finger for the day they emerged.

We're talking birthdays here because 199 years ago, on Nov. 20, 1819, William E. Woodruff gave birth to Arkansas' first newspaper at Arkansas Post. You might say today is the 198th birthday of the Arkansas Gazette.

Or you might say it would have been. Or you might say, pain-in-the-patootie-like, that inanimate objects cannot have any birthdays, never having been born in the biological sense. And then I might say, "Thank you for your input and, now, goodbye."

That long-ago Saturday, the 23-year-old printer was doing a specific manual form of intellectual labor. As historian Margaret Ross described it in Arkansas Gazette: The Early Years 1819-1866 ...

On the table in the press room was a stack of newspapers, neatly printed on one side several days since. The type for the inside pages was in the form, except for a space left on page three for the election returns for Arkansas Township. Late in the day, Woodruff set the local returns and a news item gleaned from a letter received by a friend, and printed the inside pages of his first issue.

The four pages each measured 18 ½ by 11 ¾ inches, with four columns per page.

He had transported his secondhand press by river -- the final passage up the White River and into the Arkansas River on a large pirogue dug from a tremendous cottonwood tree. A Ramage press, it printed one side of one page at a time, and so to prevent smearing the ink, outside pages were typeset and printed early in the week, inside pages at the last minute.

So the front page of his paper was not the place to look for your latest news. And a lot of the news back then was weeks or months old and reprinted from eastern newspapers. Woodruff's first number included an obituary almost two months old from St. Louis. But hey, if you don't already know about it, it's news to you.

Arkansans subscribe to that motto today, too, but we're embarrassed about it, witness how awful it feels to discover you gleefully forwarded a 4-year-old "breaking" bit of celebrity gossip to all your friends on Facebook.

Often called the Old Lady, the Gazette was fond of its age. In its many Novembers, it remarked upon its march through the years, publishing its own little birthday greetings as well as greetings from other papers, whose long-lost titles make me misty eyed: Gravette News-Herald, Mansfield Messenger, Cabot Guard, Paris Progress ...

I've found the Old Lady congratulating herself as early as 1883. A mere 100 years ago, the Nov. 20, 1917, editorial page held this:

The Gazette's Birthday

Today the Arkansas Gazette enters upon the ninety-ninth year of its existence. When William E. Woodruff began publication of the pioneer journal of Arkansas Napoleon Bonaparte was still alive and the great Napoleonic wars had ended at Waterloo only four years before. Now the Gazette is chronicling the mighty struggle which has gripped Europe these three years past. When the first constitutional convention met in Arkansas the Gazette was 17 years old. After 81 years this newspaper is again recording the proceedings of a constitutional convention, as it has recorded the proceedings of those that have intervened.

The one-hundredth birthday of the Gazette is in sight. We have not the least doubt that November 20, 1919, will find Arkansas a still greater and more prosperous state, we believe that date will see the world again at peace and we indulge the hope that many people will join us in looking forward with peculiar interest to the dawn of this journal's centennial day.

That was a small item on Page 6, and it refers to the Constitutional Convention of 1836 as well as the wartime convention of 1917/1918 which, like most of our eight such conventions, failed to rewrite the state charter.

The last page of that same Nov. 20 Gazette, page 14, included another small birthday notice, a news report tucked in between the North Little Rock notes column and a rally for the Red Cross Christmas fund drive. And the front page quietly marked the anniversary, too, updating the nameplate's reference to "Ninety-eighth year" so it read "Ninety-ninth year."

1917 was only an off-year anniversary. Much more fuss would be made for the big round number in 1919.

Two days later, though, the Page 6 editorials included this note:

The Gazette's Flower

On the Gazette's birthday, the ninety-eighth it has enjoyed, there came to our office some beautiful chrysanthemums and some words of encouragement from the Misses Bell, granddaughters of the founder of this newspaper. By thus remembering the Gazette's anniversary, as they have done on a number of other occasions, William E. Woodruff's granddaughters have moved the Gazette to adopt the chrysanthemum as its flower.

The Gazette's birthday is in November. November is the month of chrysanthemums and many times have descendants of the pioneer who gave the then Territory of Arkansas its first newspaper made these flowers of fall the tokens of their remembrance of this journal's anniversary. It seems to us that the logic of circumstances and events names the chrysanthemum the floral emblem of the Gazette.

The granddaughters were daughters of Mary Eliza Woodruff Bell: twins, Hattie Woodruff Bell Walt (1872-1924) and Eva Bell Reynolds (1872-1966), and Fannie Bell (1874-1955). Fannie and Hattie were teachers in Little Rock Public Schools; Fannie was the first principal of the grade school named for her grandfather, William E. Woodruff School.

Reading the Nov. 20, 1917, paper reminded me of a smart line my dad used to say: "A lady who will tell her age will tell anything."

Next week: No Crime to Burn Your Own Property

photo

This is the masthead from page 6 of the Nov. 20, 1917, Arkansas Gazette.

ActiveStyle on 11/20/2017

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