OLD TIMER’S NEWSPAPER PHOBIA!

 By Norris Chambers

             You never heard of the Katzenjammer Kids? When Clifton and I were very young the Katzenjammer Kids occupied a full page of the comic section on Sunday and during the week had a full strip across the page. The pages were large in those days. I mentioned this comic strip because it was among our favorites. We also enjoyed Mutt and Jeff, Maggie and Jiggs and Andy Gump.
            The kids, as we called them, were mean little rascals. They had some sort of glue that was so strong that a little on a chair held the one who sat down in it so tight that the pants would tear before the glue gave up!
            Apparently they lived on a ship. The old fat Captain was in charge and he had a one- legged assistant that was always with him. They played a card game that they called pinochle. We had never heard of this game and apparently my mother was not familiar with it either. We called it pin chole because she thought it spelled something like that. We learned a few years later that we should have called it pea nuckle, regardless of the spelling.
            Some newspapers had another comic strip using the same characters but it was named The Captain and the Kids. The old captain gave the kids so many spankings that it didn’t seem to bother them much.
            We have an old newspaper on display at the White Settlement Historical Museum with a full page comic displaying the Captain and the Kids and featuring the questionable antics of Hans and Fritz. There are also old newspaper accounts of historic events, the last issue of the Fort Worth Press, etc. We have a file of many newspapers covering the early emergence of White Settlement as a city.
            Why is the Old Timer talking about newspapers? It seems that newspapers of one sort or another have popped up periodically to claim a portion of his wild lifetime agenda! My first column in a weekly county newspaper was one of the community news type that most areas provided to inform readers of the antics of local citizens, such as the visit of a grandchild from another state, a neighbor’s illness, the loss of a favorite hound dog, the birth of a new baby, the death of a pioneer or Bill Brown’s purchase of another horse! I sometimes included what I thought was a funny joke.
            The high school elected me editor of The Bow Wow, the annual newspaper. At another school the next year I was editor of The Tiger, another annual newspaper. It was customary in those days for the school paper’s name to relate to the animal representing the sports teams. For instance, the Bow Wow was for the Bulldogs and the Tiger was for he Tigers. In my final year in high school I wrote a weekly column for a nearby newspaper entitled   Children’s Bedtime Story. I’m sure some of these hair-raising tales woke the tots up instead of putting them to sleep. Several years later, after moving to White Settlement, I wrote a weekly column for Mr. Underwood’s newspapers called A Reader Writes. I was also guilty of writing a weekly column called Making Money At Home – For Fun.
        After I acquired my first 11X17 offset printing press, primarily for printing flyers for my TV repair shops, I decided I might try a few flyers using a newspaper format. An eleven by seventeen inch press is pretty small for printing a newspaper. But who said a newspaper had to be a particular size? A folded sheet produced a nice looking letter-size newspaper. I called it The White Settlement Review and pasted up a nice looking front page. I slipped in a few local news items and a full page ad for Chambers TV Repair. I managed to sneak in a column entitled White Settlement – Then and Now. This column featured tales from some of the old timers that were still around and a little bit about the emerging political scene in the new city. My new press would print 6000 copies in an hour so it was easy enough to print the first edition of White Settlement’s first newspaper edited and printed in the little town! I printed 3000 copies and started my delivery boys on door-to-door delivery. The boys who delivered flyers were usually very dependable. Occasionally good flyers found their way into the creek or a trash can.
            For the first time a TV shop flyer, masquerading as a newspaper, was well received. Some would-be readers even came by the shop looking for a copy!
            I printed a paper occasionally for a few weeks. I was shocked, but elated, when the new City Manager suggested that I print the newspaper on a regular basis. His suggestion was tempting but I decided I didn’t have time for another activity. After all, I worked at the bomber plant, did some printing for the public, made rubber stamps, did engraving and did some time consuming mail order work.

            Thus my interest in newspapers – what I needed was Clifton’s assistance!