Writing 1939/2009 -- Kerry

My grandfather bought a newspaper in Bemidgie, (pop. 800) Minnesota in 1939 and published it weekly with the help of my grandmother and one part-time assistant. He called in the debts for the back issues of deliveries. One farmer paid him with a pig. Another brought in pies. The depression was just ending, and they wanted him to keep the newspaper going.

My grandmother was the editor, reporter, obituary writer, columnist and advertising director. As an English major fresh from the University of Wisconsin, she relished the task.

To write the obituaries, she had to walk through the hardware store into the mortuary, where the body of the day was laid out only a few feet away from a display of garbage cans and hoses.

Her column themes revolved around the farming community and often resulted in inadvertent dilemmas.

"Fertile Woman Marries" (Fertile, Minnesota) was one of her headlines that sent my grandfather into orbit.

She would have been 100 years this year. I ponder the changes the in the writing world she never saw, like automatic typewriters, the web, blogging. Her writing environment and mine may be radically different, but the basis remains the same, trying to write something, anything amidst trips to the hardware store and occasional blooper blog headlines.