Around the Town: Working again with old friends

By Loretta Humble/Around the Town

I had the best time today! I went to Pat Hustead’s house to get together with her and Debra Bacon brainstorming about how to get that Cedar Lake Nursing Home website done. I have been struggling with the words, and trying to collect some pictures, and Pat has been there to keep me at it.

I am more of a dreamer and schemer, and Pat is a git r done person. More than once I have started something that was a great idea and then get all balled up in it, and Pat has come in and helped me get untangled. That’s what happened at The Malakoff News when I owned it. Pat came looking for a job, having never worked before. But she had had lots of experience selling things for school causes and that turned out to have been plenty experience to make her able to sell newspaper ads just fine. She did so well that a few years later Cable TV made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. Somewhere along the way, she came back to the newspaper long enough to straighten things out so we could sell it. She worked for the Cedar Lake Home Health and Hospice for quite a while too. Nowadays she mainly does stuff with her grandkids. But she was still ready to get me unstuck from the website project that has been driving me crazy. Pat doesn’t know anything about websites, but as I told you, she can always get me unstuck. However, we were sort of wondering how to take the next step.

That is why we were overjoyed to discover that Debra Bacon has appeared in our lives again. Debra used to work with us at The Malakoff News years ago. She worked as editor and was in charge of advertising as well, and like Pat spent some years doing some valuable work for Cedar Lake before she moved on to bigger things, which have been too many to count. Somewhere along the way she became city editor for a big newspaper, the Bristol Press in Connecticut But the expertise I was looking for lies in the fact she has done a lot of professional work with websites, and she really understands the Internet.

So we gathered at Pat’s house this morning, three old friends. We got out our laptops and iPads and started looking at the stuff I’ve produced and trying to figure out where to arrange it so it would come out looking like a website. After explaining to Debra where we were coming from, pretty soon it became apparent to Pat and me that if we would just turn it over to Debra and let her go away and get quiet with it for a little while, she can come back with something that makes sense. What a relief to both of us! So then we visited a while there, and then went to Bean and Burger and visited some re. We were going to go the Mr. Sweet Tooth and visit some more over cream, but they weren’t open today.

There was a time when Pat, Debra, Michael Hannigan, creator of Henderson County Now, and Roy Clay, now the owner of Earth and Stone, all worked with me at The Malakoff News. What a great bunch of people! We had such a good time and put out some great papers. The problem was that I got in the newspaper business too late, past the time one little paper could support itself serving one little town. Also, I never was able to keep control of the business side of it. One day I faced the fact I had to do something different and asked Pat to come back and help me get a handle on it. She did, and we began to break even and even make a little money now and then. Then, out of the blue, the owner of Media One, who also owns the Monitor and several other small papers, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: nearly enough to cover all the money I lost over the years I owned it. So I sold it and used the money to fix up my little farmhouse.

The Media One folks have been really good to us, honoring every agreement. They changed the paper’s name to The News hoping to reach a wider audience. Some people have complained about that, but if they had ever owned a newspaper, they would understand. You have to reach enough people in order to sell enough ads to afford to print the paper. It is still a good very good little paper. They still give us plenty of space, and if we would send them more news, they would print it. I wish everybody in town would subscribe, or at least buy a paper every week. The more papers are read, the more advertisers will buy ads. The more ads they sell, the more they can afford to come down here and cover our events.

One more thing—as soon as Debra gets through fixing my website problems, I’m taking her to visit with the little group of movers and shakers who are dreaming up more ways to get downtown Malakoff moving. I think she is going to be a great new addition. For that matter, I have recently met several outstanding folks who are interested in getting involved. Watch this spot.