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Remains of Pickaway County newspaper for sale By Mike Harden THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH ASHVILLE, Ohio — When the big rotary press at the Pickaway County News groaned to a halt with the 1971 year-end edition, the frontpage tidings for a prosperous new year had a hollow, bittersweet ring. "We sat down one day and calculated we were making 30-some cents an hour,’’ Mary Ellen Hinkle said of the newspaper business she married into in 1951 — and watched close on the cusp of 1972. For more than 30 years, until Hinkle and her son David decided the auctioneer’s gavel would fall at 10 a.m. Saturday, little has been disturbed in the squat, ceramic-block building on Long Street that had been home to the county weekly. Three days ago, the lead "pigs’’ used to make hot type still were stacked like Fort Knox gold ingots, as the elder Hinkle watched auctioneer Michael Hoffman and a pair of helpers sort through the leavings. "I never could find the fortitude, ambition or strength to come down here and do this,’’ Hinkle said, watching strangers sift through 19 th-century wooden type and Depression-era clip art. Her husband, William, the News’ final editor, died a decade ago. His father, known to the county simply as "S.F.,’’ had purchased the paper for a nickel on the dollar in 1932 after the Depression cost him his agriculture reporter’s job in Upper Sandusky. He checked his young family into the local hotel while he sized up his purchase, his infant daughter sleeping in a bureau drawer at the inn. A taciturn man as frugal with pennies as words, S.F. kept his political views close to the vest, allowing only that he was a "Taft man’’ on policy and letting the locals guess whether he meant William Howard or the elder Robert, his son. "He wouldn’t carry a Roosevelt dime in his pocket,’’ his daughter-in-law said. "If someone gave him one in change, he wouldn’t take it.’’ He was more gracious with the Democratic candidates who wanted to buy campaign ads in the News. He refused to run ads, though, for tobacco products and made clear his views on games of chance when he confiscated a Go Fish deck of cards with which his grandsons were amusing themselves. "I think I was 5 years old when he sawed down the handle of a broom and started me sweeping up around the linotypes,’’ David Hinkle recalled. "In school, they thought I was dyslexic because I was writing upside-down and backwards, because that’s how the type was set.’’ He winced at the memory of setting type for the copy of star columnist Clyde Michael. "I couldn’t have been past the fourth or fifth grade at the time,’’ Hinkle said. "His stuff came in in longhand.’’ The column was titled "Meanderings,’’ though "Loitering’’ might have been more apt. Michael blended his observations on county folk with the business of his other assignment, collecting subscription fees. Thus was a recently visited subscriber likely to find her remodeling touches part of the columnist’s ruminations on the world. "All the rooms in the home are covered with nicely selected paper,’’ he wrote of a fresh renewal in 1953. "Mrs. Brown said she did all the redecorating and I think she did a fine job.’’ The News bounced along, writing about big pumpkins and small wrecks, marryings, buryings and birthings. "On publishing day,’’ David recalled, "we had to get everything bundled, stacked and through the back door of the post office by 4:30 p.m. "If a paperboy got sick or quit, my brother Glenn or I would have to deliver the route.’’ David’s father, William, had defied S.F.’s contention that there was no need for a newspaperman to have a college degree by earning a bachelor’s in journalism at Ohio University. His concession to a disapproving father was to drop his studies each Wednesday long enough to hustle back to Ashville and help put the paper to bed. By 1962, when S.F. handed over the reins to his son, the paper’s future was dimming. Even with side work printing potato sacks, egg cartons, No Trespassing signs and traffic tickets, the News was barely making it. Plummeting ad revenue and soaring production costs spelled the end. No one bothered to take the last edition of the last issue off the press that rumbled so loud it drowned out trains 50 yards away. Brittle and brown, it is stretched across the maw of the printer beside stacked galley trays, "turtle’’ tables and heavy metal plates now awaiting the highest bidder. An ambivalent Mary Ellen Hinkle, frowning at the ink staining her fingers after sorting through wood type, complained, "I don’t want it in my blood. I’ve kept it out so far.’’ mharden@dispatch.com " Date published: Fri, April 30th ERIC ALBRECHT | DISPATCH PHOTOS The final edition of the Pickaway County News, from 1971, is still sitting in the press at the old printing plant.
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