Word: scimitar
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Over the past decade, however, the ranks of the devotees began to shrink. The paper grew phlegmatic, just as the downtown around it slid into decline, just as downtowns practically everywhere did the same. (To its credit, or tenacity, the Press-Scimitar was wheezing "Forward, Memphis!" to its dying day.) Circulation fell from 127,000 in 1973 to "less than 80,000" this year. Downtown itself was turned into a mall to compete with suburban malls-the same kind of desperate and characterless rearrangement happening all over the country-and still suburbanites clung to the perception of a ubiquitous downtown...
...last edition included a litany of the Press-Scimitar's successes in its 103 years. It had been particularly effective in crusades against corruption in city government, for bringing Tennessee Valley Authority power to Memphis and for conservation. There was also as much information as was known about what was going to happen to the 157 employees who had been told to hit the street. Some had found jobs, some had not, and some were retiring. There was a letter from Ronald Reagan that sort of contradicted a policy the President had in force at the time: "We have...
...been allowed an astonishing amount of latitude over the years. At a time when a Memphis radio station was infuriating a bloated local boy, Elvis Presley, with a weight-mocking song called Just One More Jelly Doughnut, whose background refrain went, "He's gonna pop!" a Press-Scimitar columnist was actually begging in the paper for Elvis to give him a Cadillac. The singer was not moved...
...felt like a family," reporter after reporter said upon leaving the building that final day. As they trudged out, a van pulled up from the city's Pink Palace Museum and took away a Press-Scimitar vending machine with a truly final edition in the window. "We feel like vultures," said Curator Ronald Craw ford Brister. "People hate to see us coming." He noted that when the Firestone plant closed earlier this year, he had had to drop by and pick up the first tire produced there, in 1937, as well as the last tread off the assembly line...
Scripps-Howard is the Cincinnati-based chain that owned the Press-Scimitar, and it made no secret that it shut the paper to pour its resources into its other Memphis paper, the Commercial Appeal, and to make more money. With the cessation of the Press-Scimitar, the Commercial Appeal raised its advertising rate 10%. The "Howard" in the name of the chain belonged to the late Roy Howard, who once set America on fire by wrongly filing, on Nov. 7, 1918, the end of World War I. Armistice came four days later. Howard was a small man who kept...