Guardians of the Advertiser

WHEN WE WENT BACK to school for sixth grade in 1966, there was a new librarian at Bonifay Elementary School. Dianne Williams Smith was returning Holmes County royalty — the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of editor-publishers of the Holmes County Advertiser, whose family founded the newspaper in 1892.

By ninth grade she was teaching us the glories of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and beginning a distinguished career as a tough but respected English teacher.

Her husband, Orren Smith, a native of nearby Greenwood in Jackson County, had come home with her from Atlanta, where they married, to help run the family business. Orren wasn’t a newspaperman, but he was a quick study, and the Advertiser benefited from his business acumen. A few years later, after Dianne’s father was sidelined by a stroke, Orren took over as editor and publisher.

Orren had spotted my interest in newspapers and taken me under his wing when I was in high school. After my first year at Florida State and a stint on its daily Flambeau, he invited me home for a summer job at the Advertiser.

We quickly ran into trouble. Orren was already becoming outspoken in his weekly “Now Hear This” column on the Advertiser’s front page. He was a former white-shirt IBM man, always ready to offer suggestions on how Holmes County’s backwater could be better run. I chimed in on the editorial page with a column full of the wisdom that came from an entire year away at college in Tallahassee.

“You’ll make some friends with that one,” he warned me when I wrote about the poor public speaking skills and bad grammar I’d heard from candidates at a political rally. But when the chairman of the Democratic Party called to complain, he stood up for me.

By the summer of 1978, I was completing my second year of law school. Orren called to say he wanted me to come home for another summer at the Advertiser. I explained that I had left newspapers behind and was becoming a lawyer. He explained that he was not asking, he was telling me — that I was to come home for the summer and run the paper while he ran for the Legislature.

This was a surprise. Orren didn’t seem like a politician. But the bug had bitten, and even though he didn’t win that campaign, he was itching for a new challenge.

A few years later, as he turned 50, he decided to sell the Advertiser, go to law school, and begin a new career.

♦

Our friendship endured. During occasional visits home and through a steady stream of letters, he offered perspective on his life and mine.

“You have to improve your view of the past by applying a liberal dose of imagination,” he wrote in 2001, after I must have confessed some doubts. “I view myself as coming from a near-aristocratic family in Greenwood, when in fact my alcoholic Daddy barely made us a living.”

He added: “Don’t waste much of your time thinking about where you have been. Instead, consider where you are and where you are going.”

In January 2004, after he retired, he wrote: “We are so lucky to live in a small town where we have an opportunity to serve in many different ways. And it is amazing how busy you can be when you don’t work. Currently I am deeply committed to our library cooperative, the Kiwanis Club and the Methodist Church. In addition, I am mentoring a seventh grade boy and doing a bit of yard work.”

In November 2004 he wrote: “It’s funny that you suggested that I write something about my days at the Advertiser since I recently started writing a short story of my life (or at least the parts that I want people to know about).”

But it was clear he had something more in mind.

“I would like to make my book as accurate as possible,” he wrote, “although you and I both know that you sometimes have to embellish things just a little in order to keep them interesting. Dianne will keep me honest, I suppose.”

A year later, he sent a copy of his memoir, and I must have offered some comments. “I see that you are filled with questions about my memoir,” he wrote, expanding on the stories about his family — his sainted mother, who encouraged him; his unambitious father, who worked in the peanut mill and drank; and his “very bright” brother with a business degree from Harvard, who worked as a custodian.

“I’m not sure how to analyze his life,” he wrote of his brother, “except to say that we were two peas in the same pod, but we obviously heard a different drummer. Perhaps his vision was of a life like Daddy’s, whereas I heard Mama’s call to ‘do something to lift men up.’ I haven’t done that yet, but I’m still trying.”

It was clear he had found a home in his adopted town, and some satisfaction from writing his memoirs.

“When I finished I realized just how blessed my life has been,” he wrote. “I have had an opportunity to have several careers that offered challenging work, I have had a meaningful voice in my community, my church is a blessing to me, my extended Smith family is an inspiration, my core family is loving and stable, and I have basically enjoyed good health.”

We corresponded about our gardens, and about politics.

“Keep gardening and opposing those right-wingers who think they have a monopoly on Christianity,” he wrote. “It is hard for me to see how making war is a Christian virtue.”

♦

When my wife and I bought our local newspaper and started shaping it in the image of other publications we had known and loved and learned from, he offered encouragement — and advice.

“I sense that you are pleased to be back in the newspaper business,” he wrote. “Maybe you should put a ‘Now Hear This’ column on the front page so you could stir up trouble. Readers like controversy.”

Our final visits were in the nursing home, where he lived the last years of his life. I would stop by when I came home and usually find him with a book in his hands.

“How’s your marriage?” he would invariably ask. And he would tell me about his own — to “the most beautiful woman in Holmes County,” he always said. She brought him home, to his, and my, everlasting good fortune.