NICHOLS: Early reading materials

changing equipment, developing methods, and marketing trends in the dairy business. I’m not sure just why, but I was always interested in keeping up with the farm equipment advertising, which promoted farm tractors, tractorpowered implements, milking machines, milk coolers and such things.

Through the years, newspapers, supplemented by radio and television, have been my main way of keeping up with what is happening in the world and in the communities I have lived in and wanted to keep up with. In all the years we were away from Pea Ridge, we always subscribed to the Pea Ridge paper, beginning with the Pea Ridge Graphic, and the later Pea Ridge papers that followed. We lived in several similar communities in which similar good newspapers were published locally. The most notable was the Atkins Chronicle, published in Atkins, Ark., by the Van Tyson family. Interestingly, Becky Tyson, from the Atkins Chronicle’s Tyson family, was the managing editor of our Pea Ridge newspaper for several years up until about 2005. When we moved to Atkins in 1976, the main writer for the Atkins Chronicle was Tommy Gillespie, best known for his Tom’s Tales column. Tommy always used his column to tease people. He featured me one day when I broke my toe setting up for a garage sale. Also, interestingly, the Atkins area has a Pea Ridge community. Their Pea Ridge is a bit like our Twelve Corners or our Shady Grove communities.

To me, the new ways of presenting news that we have available today by computer or smart phone can never take the place of a good newspaper. I still want to sit down with those big sheets of paper in my hand, and read the news, the political commentary, the letters to the editor (goofy as some of them are), and the comic pages. If I had my druthers, I would shut down Twitter.

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