By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

Color was a special thing.

I didn’t understand that 30 years ago, when the newspaper that fed my family came rolling black and white off the press every day.

Back then, we didn’t often use color in the newspaper business; occasionally an advertiser would want his space in blue or red or green, so the paper would have a colored box around the headline, or maybe a border around the whole page. Only the big papers used color without an advertiser to pay for it.

But on that afternoon 30 years ago, there weren’t even enough advertisers to pay for the black and white, so there sure wasn’t any color on page one.

I’m not sure what would have been an appropriate color for the last edition of the Dunn Dispatch; black is the color of mourning, and gray is the color of the unknown. White is supposed to be a color of hope. For our family, April 27, 1978 was a day with a lot of mourning, a lot of uncertainty and seemingly very little hope.

My father went to work for the Popes in 1970; they needed an editor, and came after him for the post. It was a grand opportunity for the Old Man, who already looked ancient to his youngest son.

Indeed, Papa was older than the grandfathers of some of my counterparts, but that never really bothered me. A boy should look at his father as a hero standing a step or two above Charles Lindbergh, George Washington and Babe Ruth. In his dark suit, hat, and short white hair, Papa always looked like a hero to me, not an old man.

Heroes are proud, strong and reliable; they don’t hurt, and they don’t cry. At least that’s what I thought. When we moved to town and he went to work for the Dispatch, he was just doing a better job of providing for his family, which is something else a hero does. That the paper was bigger and well respected just made things even better.

Eight years after going to work at the Dispatch, my father was still my hero, but the paper was no longer what it had been.

The other paper in town was growing and improving. After nearly 80 years, our paper was tired, and Papa’s bosses weren’t as open to change, to keeping up with the times. Slowly but surely the other paper beat ours down, just as our paperboys – Yours Truly included – engaged in beating up their carriers. Most of our paper-boy skirmishes were actually draws, but in the end, the other side won a war far bloodier than any of our sandlot fisticuffs.

Our paper – Papa and Mother didn’t own it, but it was still our paper – was like the lion Robert Ruark once found, an aged and dethroned king of the jungle with a broken back and rotting teeth. Tired, hungry, thirsty, besieged by vultures and hyenas, the old lion was dying but unwilling to give up. Ruark wrote that he cried after killing the noble old beast, even though it was the right thing to do.

For our paper, there was no merciful bullet to end the suffering, only a quick deal and a check from the other paper’s owner and unemployment for my parents.

That meant we had lost, and the good guys, the heroes, didn’t lose. It took me a few years before I lost all hard feelings for the competition, and indeed, it was Papa who taught me not to hold an unnecessary grudge.

A newspaper is a noisy place, except for late at night and early in the morning. Papa liked the pre-dawn times, before the second train of the day rolled through town and past the office, long before the first school buses rolled through neighborhoods, and frankly, before I liked being out of bed. A few times, usually on weekends or the rare times when we went out of town to see Grandmother, I went with Papa to the office early in the day, before the day’s traffic began rolling by and the bell on the front door of the paper office began ringing. The dark old office, with its high ceilings and inefficient lights and dust and smells of ink and smoke and strength, was like a church or a library at those times, quiet yet full of potential and power.

The stillness would be shattered by the chatter of the Associated Press teletype, hammering out words from faraway places while a warning light flickered on the wall overhead. The light was there to let people know something was coming in “off the wire,” and for most of the day, between the presses and the people and the typesetting machines, the only way you could hear the AP machine was when you stood over it.

But in the morning, my father’s time, the trains hadn’t shaken a day’s plaster dust from the ceilings, cigarette smoke didn’t hang in clouds below the swinging light fixtures, and the telephones didn’t ring off the hook. Occasionally Papa’s old black manual typewriter would add some staccato harmony to the AP machine, but usually, things were quiet and still.

In the early mornings, Mr. Buzz wasn’t cussing a blue streak at some piece of equipment, and the society editor wasn’t gossiping at the top of her lungs.

Mother didn’t go to work until after I was off for school, so I never associated her with the quiet times in the office. Usually she was writing something when I was there, her slightly newer typewriter not moving as rapidly as Papa’s but with more care, since she still remembered some of her high school typing classes.

When Mother was at work, trains rolled past and people talked loudly into the big black telephones that never seemed to work right and the paperboys shouted and joshed and Mr. Billy fussed at us to hush.

Big trucks rattled across the railroad tracks ahead of trains that would shake dust from the ceiling and occasionally cause a piece of stained plaster to fall from the wall.

People spoke and cussed and talked and wheedled and argued and laughed and asked for help or a favor or how to write an ad to sell a spare lawnmower.

But on April 27, 1978, the newspaper was nearly silent, even in the middle of the day.

The presses had run the last edition; the carriers were already gone, most of them going to work for the other paper. I wondered if I’d have to start fighting all of them by myself.

Mother and Papa were quietly talking to people who called to say goodbye, and since no one wants to put a wedding announcement in a paper that doesn’t print anymore, the society editor was long gone. With no press to run and no photos to shoot, Mr. Buzz was fishing (and rumored to be drunk).

Virtually everyone was gone, and for the first time I could remember, the paper was silent – not quiet like in the mornings, full of promise like it was when my father would prepare the Dispatch for another day, but silent, like something that was dead.

And even though I was a brave little boy of 12 with a pocketknife, a BB gun, and a good dog, I was frightened. Not of the uncertainty – although that, too, was a feeling I had never before known – but of one sound I did hear in that overwhelming silence.

It was the sound of my father crying, quietly and discreetly. Mother was crying too, but that was okay, because mothers are allowed to cry.

They are, after all, grown-up girls. Mothers could be heroes, or heroines, too, but they could still cry. Fathers, however, are supposed to be heroes, and heroes don’t cry.

I found out that day that heroes certainly do sometimes cry, and sometimes, all it takes is a silence – a black and white and gray silence – to make the first tears fall.

Note: For 21 years, my father wrote a column about a newspaper that died. Sometimes the column was published, sometimes it wasn’t.

On an April afternoon in 2001, the Old Man asked me for a favor. He could no longer sit up long enough to write, so he asked me to carry on the tradition.

I promised I would; he passed away a few days later. Every year since, I have kept that promise.

That day, I promised to write another column every year, too, but I made that promise to myself. You’ll see it in a few days.