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Sideglances in The MirrorBy SARAH GREENEFOR THE LAST several months the Texas Press Association has been carrying out a project to acquaint small newspapers and their staffs with what their counterparts in other parts of the state are doing. Changing times in the media world are a challenge to newspapers from smallest to largest, so this is a helpful idea. The TPA office in Austin recently mailed us a stack of mailing labels to other papers, so we’ll soon be doing our part by incorporating them into one of our regular mail editions. Up until now, we’ve been on the receiving end. AN EXAMPLE of the interesting papers we’ve received is the May 1 edition of the weekly Dublin Citizen, published in the Erath County town 12 miles south of Stephenville. I knew that Dublin attracts many tourists who come to drink a cold bottle of Dr Pepper at the Dublin Bottling Works, the only place in the world that still uses cane sugar — not corn syrup — for its Dr Pepper sweetener. I had heard that the bottling works, the nation’s oldest bottler in continuous operation (since 1891) had its own museum, witih advertising signs and other memorabilia dating back more than 100 years. The Citizen carried a column, Museum Matters, by Mary Yantis, who reported recent visitors from as far away as Spokane, Wash., Battle Creek, Mich. and Hibbing, Minn. — visitors who were “taking home their great stories about Dublin and its Historical Museum.” CLEARLY this wasn’t the Dr Pepper Museum, so I was curious as to just how much museum action this town of 3,700 was offering. Plenty, I learned from checking the World Wide Web. The Dublin Historical Museum shares a downtown building with the Dublin Rodeo Museum. Why a rodeo museum there? It seems that Dublin claimed to be the Cowboy Capital of the World when it held an annual rodeo in the 20,000-capacity Colburn Rodeo Bowl from 1940 to 1959. Lightning C Ranch, operated by Everett Colburn, and joined later by movie and TV star Gene Autry, was the world’s largest ranch devoted entirely to rodeo. This rodeo made up its events and contestants each year in Dublin and then rode the train to New York and Madison Square Garden to perform their rodeo. LIKE OUR Historical Upshur Museum, the Dublin museum depends on contributions of artifacts to tell the history of this 153-year old town. A recent one, the museum lady reported in her column, was a computer so old it “might have been a computer on the Mayflower.” Actually, she wrote, it was the first computer owned by the Dublin Dairy Queen. Nearby is the Wright Historic Park and Miller Grist Mill. No wonder Dublin considers tourism one of its major economic assets. THE MIRROR “exchanges” regularly with a dozen or more weeklies and semi-weeklies, some as distant as Port Aransas and Gatesville, others as close to home as Gladewater, Big Sandy and Pittsburg. I’ve always made it a point to look through, if not thoroughly read, all of these newspapers; good ideas are where you find them. But this idea the Texas Press people came up with broadens our Texas horizons even more dramatically. From Clarendon in the Panhandle to Fredericksburg in the Hill Country, from Breckenridge to Beeville, from Graham to Goldthwaite, in Albany or Azle, Texas towns have much in common while each maintaining its own special flavor. And this uniqueness comes through in a wide variety of newspapers. As one West Texas publisher said, explaining why he feels like the luckiest guy in the world: “I get to run a community newspaper in my home town.” Sarah Greene Archives sgreene@tatertv.com |
