No ode to old Gazette building, only epitaph

Since we moved to our new digs on the corner of State Line Avenue and Broad Street, many people have asked me if I will miss the old Texarkana Gazette building, a place to which I figuratively toted my lunch pail for more than three decades.

It is a singular place in many ways to the community, one that is inevitably tied to its history, fortunes locked in an uncomfortable but purposeful embrace.

I am always astonished by the number of people I meet that have had some kind of association with the Gazette. Maybe they worked as a newspaper carrier or clerk, in the pressroom or mailroom, selling ads or as a summer job. Maybe their father, uncle, great-grandpappy or next-door neighbor worked for the newspaper. Maybe they took one of the once-unforgettable Gazette tours that for years seemed a prerequisite to graduating grammar school.

It has its critics, of course, as all newspapers do, but they always knew where to find us, hunkered down in the morning shadow of the Hotel Grim, for 85 years or more.

Love it or hate it, it was always there, its staff churning out news daily in an uninterrupted cadence. It changed, but never moved. It has been as steady as the dates on a calender, never deviating, never flitting around.

It was a place where many an aspiring journalist got their chance, including myself, and thus is ripe for sentimental attachment. It was where I cut my teeth as a young journalist and learned to refine talents I didn’t even know I had. I met my wife on the newsroom floor. That’s pretty significant. But do I miss it? For me, that’s overreach.

It was a job site, a workplace, an information warehouse, an office complex and manufacturing plant all squeezed into an unassuming package. It remade itself several times over the years, functions shifted within the building, offices added and subtracted and moved around, entrances reimagined and remodeled.

Did I love the place? Yes, in ways big and small, personal and communal. Will I miss it? Not a bit.

On the outside, it had a few nice features, but inside its walls, the goal was functionality—high praise in some corners. Essential and without frills, it was built do a specific job. Aesthetics did not factor in the thinking.

I was mostly OK with that. I’m not all that difficult to please when it comes to creature comforts.

But sometimes aging can’t be reversed, or is cost-prohibitive, or is not practical or progressive. It is neither unkind nor untrue to say the old Gazette building had seen better days.

Since the move, I have pulled into the parking lot behind the old building on several occasions, chuckled, then redirected myself to my new locale. Old habits are hard to break; some mornings, the car seems to drive itself along a well-rutted path I have navigated almost unconsciously most of my adult life.

But do I miss the old haunt? When I first moved to Texarkana, I took a small upstairs apartment on Wood Street, north of Wadley Hospital. It was nothing special. I lived above a real estate office and a blind man’s apartment. The rent was $200 a month, which included utilities. It was climate-controlled by window air conditioners and space heaters and had ratty brown carpet and bleak furnishings, but was functional and cheap.

I eventually moved on to other, less humble abodes, and it was eventually torn down to make way for a parking lot.

I pass this place where I once lived most evenings on my way home. On occasion, I slow down and look at where it once stood and remember it fondly.

But I would not want to live there again. That time has passed.

It was time to move on then. It is time to move on now.

I won’t look back. I won’t miss it. At least not very often.