I’m not exactly sure what year the Republican moved into this office on Main Street. I know that the paper was on the corner where the nail salon is now. I believe if the cover over the frieze was removed, it would read Watonga Republican, carved into the building.
There is a photo from the 30s or 40s of Elva Ferguson in front of this building, standing in the snow. Since she passed away in 1947, it is obviously older than that. So, at a bare minimum, the Republican has been here at least 76 years.
It must have been quite the operation back in the day. In the basement there are the vestigial remnants from the days when the paper was printed here. Some of it I recognize, but never learned to use. Some items were used by TB Ferguson himself, and grace the cover of one of Elva’s books, They Carried the Torch.
In the back room there remains the slanted table where full sized pages of paper were laid out, the ads glued on with hot wax and the lines taped on. In those days, an Exacto knife and a waxer were tools of the trade. Those pages were photographed and turned into plates, then the plates were put on the press and printed. There is still a huge machine in the back that was part of that process.
In one corner there is a freight elevator and outside the building, if you look carefully, there is a lightbulb that was either lit when the paper was ready or glowed red when the staff was in the darkroom.
There is one of those here, too, from the day when photos were made with film, the film was processed and that was used to print in the paper. There are slots in the wall where the freshly processed film-to-photos were slipped out to the compositors. But as things evolved, the business of newspaper contracted and digital became the norm. No longer was there a printing press in every small-town newspaper office.
The photographers and pressmen, the copy boys and printer’s devils, multiple layers of copy editors have all disappeared into the history books. Oh, some large dailies still have dedicated photographers and multiple copy editors. They have a much larger staff than is the standard in small papers today.
All those factors have the staff of the Republican – all three of us – rambling around in this huge old building that has so much history that it is palpable. There are times when I literally hear Elva Ferguson or Cowboy Curtin on the phone yelling at reporter or a source. From time to time, I get a strong whiff of cigarette smoke and the subtle essence of bourbon. I know there were those in this office who smoked, and journalists have a long and hallowed history of being a bunch of drunks. I draw on their strength and presence when I am working on deadline and the stress builds up.
Be all that as it may, it is time for this paper to relocate, move to smaller, more efficient offices. That will happen at the beginning of November. It breaks my heart to leave here, but it is so much more than we need. I am grief stricken to leave Main Street, close to where the Republican has been since its first edition rolled out in 1892. There just wasn’t a suitable location for us here.
We will be over on Harmon, in Dr. Conley’s old offices, next to the Howry apartments. Even that space is bigger than we need, but there must be adequate storage for our morgue – the backlog of past editions that are kept in bound volumes.
Maybe one day, the paper will come back downtown, where a business this old belongs. I will probably not be in Elva’s chair by then. It will be filled by some pup that the community will have to school on and fill with institutional knowledge.
But please know that even though we are no longer downtown, we are still the town’s newspaper, its heartbeat, so to speak. Even if we are on the outskirts, we will always be in the middle of everything.