For 92 years ...
Telling the story of the Oxford community has been the goal of since its start in 1932, although the very first edition had to be printed elsewhere due to an explosion beneath the concrete pressroom floor.
Since that inauspicious start, the paper has been a mainstay for news of Oxford and the surrounding area of the Talawanda School District. I have written for the paper for 50 years either as a staff member or freelance writer. My journalism training began in high school when, as a sophomore, I signed up for the journalism class for my junior year, trying it out to avoid more math and science.
Miami did not have a journalism major then but I took all 29 class hours offered in that field and heard the advice of Gilson Wright who taught the classes. He advised getting a job with a weekly newspaper for experience for two years and then moving on a daily. I took the first half of that advice.
I learned a lot more in the following years after accepting a job at but the most important came late one night. Dick Taylor, co-owner and business manager of the and I were just talking about newspaper work. Former President Lyndon Johnson had just gone into the hospital in Texas.
“We’re not going to report that Johnson is in the hospital. We’ll cover it if he goes into McCullough-Hyde,” Dick said.
The newspaper started in 1932 as but the paper’s first editor, Avis Cullen, had come to town to work in that position for H.H. Shellhouse, the owner. She and her husband, Bill, soon bought the paper from Shellhouse Printing. In order to cover some of the cost of delivery, she dropped the word “Free” from the name and began charging for the paper.
Now, about the explosion that got the paper off the ground – literally.
Mrs. Cullen explained in an interview in the early 1990s how the very first edition of
under her ownership had to be printed in Lebanon. The explosion in the pressroom, or more precisely, under the pressroom, came at their site in a building in the alley on West High Street adjacent to the current municipal building. The building was standing over underground tanks.
“At 5 o’clock, the man came in to fill the tank — BOOM!” Cullen recalled. “The fumes under the building ignited and it blew all the windows — the glass — all the windows out. It blew the three-ton press a foot or so and if we’d all been in there, it would have killed all of us.”
“We started business with a bang,” she said.
The influence of Avis Cullen has been felt not only in the newspaper but in the community at large. Beautification, fire protection and literacy are among the many efforts she undertook in the more than 60 years she lived here as she always sought ways to make Oxford better.
Her news coverage of the Oxford area included trying to balance rural with town news, finding correspondents to provide news notes from areas such as Darrtown, Reily, Morning Sun, Bath, Ind., and other communities.
Long retired and in her 90s, she remained active in promoting improvements in the community. She could still then be seen early in the mornings planting and watering flowers on the grounds of the Lane Library.
Dick Taylor and Bob White purchased the paper from the Cullens in 1960.
I was familiar with Dick and Bob as well as the staff because I was managing editor of
for my senior year at Miami and the paper was printed at the I worked part-time there the summer of 1971 while I finished enough hours to graduate in August. That summer was memorable for everyone as a fire broke out in the Masonic Temple building at High and Main streets Uptown around 9 a.m.
People lined the sidewalks across the street watching. Dick and Bob were both out with their cameras throughout the day and I was collecting a bunch of comments and reactions from people which ran in that week’s paper as “Fire scene vignettes.” The fire department called in help as the fire eluded them inside the walls of the old building.
Then, a neighborly atmosphere drew tragic as the two-story high front wall suddenly cracked and began to tilt toward the street. Several firemen ducked under the overhanging front but two were not so lucky.
A fire captain from Hamilton died as the building façade toppled over and another fireman was seriously injured and left a paraplegic. Dick caught a picture of the scene as the wall tore loose from the building and began to fall.
I started working full-time a few weeks later.
I remained a reporter for 18 years covering “sports and courts and everything in between” until Bob and Dick retired in 1989. They sold the paper and I was chosen as editor. Cox bought the paper along with other dailies and weeklies in the Butler County area in 2000. I was editor for 20 years, taking advantage of an early-retirement offer in 2009. A year later, I began working as a freelance reporter, retiring from that after 10 years in August 2022.
The Oxford community has seen many significant changes and events in the past 92 years all reported in the pages of
including the opening of McCullough-Hyde Memorial Hospital, establishment of Hueston Woods as a state park, growth of the village of Oxford into a city and geographical growth of both the city and Miami University and the beginning of the Talawanda School District, merging several area school districts.
There were thousands of other stories including business openings and closings, tragic deaths, several murders, hundreds of sports highlights from successful Talawanda and Miami University teams and the day-to-day listings of activities of the town’s residents.
Early in its existence, the paper moved to 32 W. High St. and, in the late ’60s to 15 S. Beech St. Dick and Bob added a job printing operation for a time, moving into the building next door on South Beech Street.
Mrs. Cullen always took an active concern in her community and in her years as editor and owner of always keeping community improvement projects in her view. The Citizen of the Year program and the annual Citizenship Awards presented to graduating high school seniors were started on her watch.
“I have always said that I was as proud of winning a plaque for community service as winning a general excellence plaque for printing a good newspaper,” she said in that interview in the early 1990s. “I think news