Just doing business

Once upon a time everyone had preferred magazines. I still do. Arizona Hiways and Oklahoma Coach.

I was thumbing through the October 2023 edition of the Oklahoma Coach and spotted the Oklahoma Football Coaches Association list of 35 under 35, a tip of the cap to promising young coaches. I saw a Kelby Self of Stigler had made the list.

Now, I don’t know Coach Self. But I do know that any coach who was selected for this list is to be congratulated. I ask John Block, the Stigler News Sentinel’s sports reporter, about Coach Self. The major question was one I find myself needing to ask with increasing frequency. “Is he somebody I should know? As in an old Stigler family.”

These coaches have chosen to be in our schools and to work with our sons and daughters, influencing them in a fashion they will come to understand only much later.

So – “Well done Coach Self! Please accept my hardy and sincere congratulations.”

Then, I opened the Stigler News Sentinel and read the headline announcing the sale of the News Sentinel to the Mayo family of Sallisaw. Having long considered the Sequoyah County Times to be the ideal community newspaper, I did not find the sale distressing.

Plus, it provides me with the opportunity to again share a story.

My grandfather, J. H. McBride, was managing Hays and Buchanan at the time Linus and Betty Willliams bought the News Sentinel. 1947ish. The owner of the rival Haskell County Tribune was Roy “Dad” Bankhead. This World War I veteran was my Grandfather’s closest friend. Dad Bankhead did Hays and Buchanan’s printing.

Linus Williams made a periodic sales calls to the store. The calls were cordial but fruitless.

At some point in the early 1950’s, Mr. Williams, his patience likely exhausted decided to take a more assertive approach with my Grandfather. Unbeknownst to Mr. Williams my Grandfather had decided that the new owner of News-Sentinel wasn’t going to leave town and merited some of the business. was bad timing all the way around. When I arrived at 4PM to do the stock room and janitorial task, the men could not wait to tell me what had happened. In summary, Mr. Williams was assertive. Words were exchanged. Mr. Williams left without any printing business. Now Gam and I have exchanged versions of the story over the years. But the end is always the same.

And I think we can visualize the two men, his father and my Grandfather, flushed and steaming, hands on their hips and nose to nose. Unyielding.

But within a few months, a relationship was forged.

Things do not change, we change – Henry David Thoreau

Hal McBride writes a column, Just Thinkin’, published each week.