When I Was a Boy

In 1941, 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."

As it 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 and simple things make the news people hunger for most."

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.

The forerunners of Alcoholics Anonymous indulged in "a season of songs, prayers and 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 . . ."

Church in Paris in the '80s was a family affair and people took their denominational differences more seriously. "[Today] we have the strange spectacle . . . of people refusing to worship together, while not knowing just why . . . [In the old days] the tobacco chewers always did their spitting at sermon climaxes, the juice hitting the floor with a resounding smack as a sort of substitute for a cheer."

Polecat & Prayer. The office of Blanton's Appeal is sandwiched between the movie theater and the combination city hall and volunteer fire station. When Jack moved into the editor's chair at 21, succeeding his father (who founded the paper), he was aiming high: "Well, sir, I started out to reform the world." In practice, explains Blanton, this meant getting the Democrats back into power in Washington, D.C. Jack was more successful at covering the news of farm, livestock and plain people in Monroe County.

While Jack's late brother, Charles L. Blanton, whip-tongued editor of a Scott County paper, was known as the "polecat editor," Jack always preferred a gentler and humbler approach. The most celebrated demonstration of its effectiveness was the 1942 Monroe County drought. In a 60-pt. streamer on Page One, Editor Blanton proclaimed: LORD, WE CONFESS OUR SINS, WE ASK FOR FORGIVENESS, WE PRAY FOR RAIN. An hour after the paper hit Main Street, the rains came. Recalls Blanton: "Trouble was, it rained so much the farmers couldn't harvest the crops. The farmers still come to me when we have droughts. 'But please,' they say, 'this time, don't put it in 60-pt. type.' "

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