Years ago my wife and I fell in love with a weekly newspaper.

It was published on the Canadian border by our friend Ted Hall.

Ted lived on a house boat and published what he called his “nubby little newspaper,” The Rainy Lake Chronicle.

Ted would report on town council and school board meetings as if reviewing a play. He put you in the room with him and let you watch what was going on.

The public and their elected officials were the actors, sometimes in a comedy, sometimes in a tragedy, often in a farce.

It was not traditional journalism. It was real storytelling, humorous and dramatic.

IN HIS SMALL town, Ted didn’t have a lot of bloody murders, tense court trials and other fodder he and I had thrived on in working for big city newspapers.

Ted wrote in prose that flowed like free verse about changes in the seasons, reported on how the lake gulls were faring and what the town dogs were up to.

He covered weddings as historic occasions that united sometimes warring families who had despised each other until one’s daughter fell in love with the other’s son.

It was a weekly visit to a charming small town in far off northern Minnesota.

When we went up to fish the Canadian waters, Ted’s small town looked like he had described it, from the cool river breezes, Jim’s Fine Cafe, the Northern Lights and mosquitoes slightly smaller than 747s.

We began to dream of finding a small newspaper back home in South Carolina.

IN 1983, I flew home from California after coaching newspaper editors and writers. A virus had me in thrall when my wife picked me up at the Philadelphia airport and said 13 highly welcome words.

“Lets find a little newspaper for sale and move back to South Carolina,” she said. I immediately felt better and we began several months of negotiating to buy The Dispatch News in Lexington.

The owner wanted more than we could afford but we found a silent partner who helped us put up the money needed.

Sept. 6, 1984, was a red letter day. We closed on the enterprise, gave the seller a down payment check and sat down with the staff to talk about the paper’s future.

It was also a red letter day in a way we had not expected. After we audited the books, we found all was not as rosy as the previous owner had claimed.

The newspaper was deep in debt and owed a local printer thousands of dollars. We promised all creditors we would pay if they would be patient and deducted the debt from the seller’s future payments.

THE COMMUNITY was good to us. Over the next year, subscribers began to come back to the newspaper and businesses that had cancelled began advertising again.

Our advertising and journalism began to gain recognition outside the community and we won numerous awards.

Then our partner died and his family sold their majority interest to investors who did not want us as partners. We left and, at the urging of the community, started the Lexington County Chronicle.

I’ll share that story with you next week as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of The Lexington Dispatch.

Next: The rest of the story

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