Word: blantons
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...word reached the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that H. J. Blanton, 71-year-old editor of the Monroe County (Mo.) Appeal (circ. 2,996), was planning to retire. Indignantly the Globe wrote: "The newspaper [Blanton edits] is one of Missouri journalism's choice assets . . . We herewith and to his face call Jack Blanton a quitter, a fellow with a future who is deliberately passing it by to dally down the primrose path with a niblick in one hand, a fishpole in the other...
...turned out, this was nothing but a canard. Quitting was the last thing in the mind of Jack Blanton, a dignified, slender man with alert eyes and a bald-eagle head. One of the best-known country newspapermen in the U.S., Editor Blanton, winner of a University of Missouri award for Distinguished Service in Journalism in 1939, was still at work, and was going to stay there for a long time...
This spring, at 80, Editor Blanton of Paris, Mo. (pop. 1,388) took on a new chore: a twice-a-week column of reminiscences for the Globe-Democrat (circ. 293,404). By last week, Blanton's nostalgic, witty and folk-wise column was bringing in more reader mail than almost any other Globe-Democrat department. This new success did not surprise Jack Blanton. Says he: "City people, down underneath, are just like rural folks. You run a Tom, Dick and Harry paper, like I have for 60 years, and you begin to see it's the warm...
Funerals & Fires. "When I was a boy . . ." Blanton begins each Globe-Democrat column. Then, taking his readers by the hand, he roams through the green gardens (and occasionally down the primrose paths) of his remarkably precise memory of Paris and northeastern Missouri in the good old days. In successive columns, Blanton revisited his one-room rural schoolhouse (the teachers are better-schooled, nowadays), his aunt's funeral (no flowers, but plenty of lugubrious singing), a riotous Democratic political rally (music by Barney's Band, composed exclusively of Republicans) and a bucket-brigade fire...
...expressions of neighborly interest" at the drunkard's bedside. This was guaranteed to cure all but the most stubborn cases. But one drunkard's wife sewed him up in a sheet, tied him to a bedpost, and called in the neighbors to look at him. Added Blanton: "He never touched liquor again. This was because he was so humiliated that he went out and hanged himself...