Sunday news

Those of us who came of age in the middle of the last century grew up in a different world. There were newspapers, radio, movie theatres, and magazines. I know these are all still with us. They are just no longer at the core of the American socialization process. They do not shape our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren as they shaped us.

Billie and I were recently talking about this. Anybody remember to the last time they saw a movie magazine? Head’s and Palace Drug had dandy magazine racks stuffed with movie magazines for the young ladies. Well, People is perhaps close. Maybe. I’m told it is not Photoplay either. Now I wait for Arizona Highways while Billie embraces Southern Living. I do enjoy Rick Bragg’s column on the final page of each edition of Southern Living.

Remember The Sporting News? I’m betting on all of us grey-haired baseball fans who still enjoy box scores remember this weekly newspaper well.

Or waiting for a stack of the Stigler News-Sentinel and the Haskell County Tribune to appear on top of the glass cigar case in Heads. Was it a nickel or a dime? I just can’t remember.

Newspapers. Reading the Sunday edition of The Tulsa World was a ritual in my family. It still is.

Last Sunday, I saw that OSU’s School of Veterinary Medicine was in an awkward position. Because we are a small rural state, I consider maintaining a top-notch veterinary medicine school very important. This school has long provided our state, our communities of all sizes, with well-educate Veterinarians.

There are people who think Oklahoma is composed of Oklahoma City, Tulsa and their suburbs. It most certainly is not. Our very soul remains agricultural. The farms and ranches and the small towns who supply them.

I believe we must understand the importance of our rural newspapers. One of the many important accomplishments of such newspapers is to keep people like me in touch with their roots. Those of us who received our formal and informal education in the homes, the schools, on the playing fields, in the stores and in the church pews of rural Oklahoma need these weekly reminders. They keep us in touch with what is truly important.

After surviving D-Day, Richard Winters of Band of Brothers fame recorded, “That night I thanked God for seeing me through that day of days and I prayed that I would make it through D plus 1. I also promised that if some way I could get home again I would find a nice peaceful town and spend the rest of my life in peace.”

Each time I read this quote I think of Monty Bankhead. I believe I always will.

There is a prayful quiet to nightfall in a small town here on the edge of the prairie.

When I read “To Kill a Mockingbird, I was so struck by the universality of small towns. – Tom Brokaw

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