Don’t lie down on your newspaper

By AUSTIN LEWTER, director Texas Center for Community Journalism

I have a friend in Muenster who is 96 years old.

Alvin Hartman has worked at the Muenster Enterprise since he graduated high school in 1948.

He has done just about every job in the building at one point or another.

He’s been a sportswriter, a composition man, a pressman, the editor and even sold ads quite successfully back in the 70s.

He still clocks in a few hours a month to sweep the floor and run a few print jobs on an old Heidelberg press.

He is the only person to ever run the Heidelberg.

He took it out of the crate when his boss, Mr. Fette, bought it back in the early 50s.

Alvin has kept it running smooth with the same tool kit the manufacturer provided with it back then.

I once asked Alvin how much that press originally cost.

“Well, Mr. Fette said he could have bought a new Heidelberg or a new Cadillac. He opted for the Heidelberg,” Alvin said.

Alvin has been a constant in the Muenster community.

He and his wife Joan raised a wonderful family there. The Hartman roots run deep in Western Cooke County.

Joan passed away a year ago. The couple had been married 70 years.

“I miss her terribly,” Alvin told me last summer. “But I’m still here and I’ve got to keep moving.”

That’s Alvin’s philosophy on life— you must keep moving.

And it seems to be working.

At 96, he still has coffee with friends every morning, attends every parish activity on the calendar, remains a constant at Sacred Heart athletic events, stops by the newspaper to check print jobs and makes it out to the farm every day to attend to things there.

You can’t seem to keep him down. There have been health scares and broken bones. He just seems to bounce back.

How does he do it? He keeps moving.

Newton’s First Law of Motion states that a body at rest will remain at rest and a body in motion will remain in motion.

Such is Alvin Hartman.

I remember a day five or six years ago when I was still working at the Enterprise.

It was just Alvin and me at the office on a Friday morning.

I was in the front office trudging through expense reports.

Alvin was in the back print shop running a shop vac.

Suddenly, I heard him cry out in what seemed to be great pain.

I wasn’t sure what happened or what I’d find when I walked back, there but I heard him through the thick concrete walls.

I rushed to the back and found him still upright operating the shop vac.

“Are you alright?” I yelled loud enough to be heard over the motor.

“Oh, you heard that?” he asked after turning off the machine.

“Yes, I heard that. Are you okay?” I asked again.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I’ve just been to physical therapy over at the hospital and they worked me out really good. I’m sore and I twisted the wrong way and it stung,” he said.

“Do I need to take you to the doctor?”

“No,” he said. “If I go to the doctor, he’ll tell to go home and lie down.”

“Do I need to take you home to lie down?”

“No. If I go home and lie down, I’ll lie down and die,” he said. “I’m not going to lie down.”

And with that, he turned the shop vac on and went back to work.

I did too.

His sentiment stuck with me. How does one remain active well into their 90’s?

They make the choice to remain active.

That’s what Alvin has done.

This is great sentiment for your personal life, but it also resounds in our professional lives.

We can’t lie down on our newspapers. We can’t check out.

Newspapers are dead— right? That’s all we hear in the media and pop culture.

They are not.

I am tired of being told how quickly our industry is dying.

Your newspaper is only as dead as you allow it to be.

Don’t lie down.

No, the ads aren’t walking in anymore.

No, we are not the only information source in town anymore.

No, we are not as well staffed as we once were.

But all this spells opportunities for innovation and re-invention.

Former TPA president Leonard Woolsey challenged us a few years ago to“get our swagger back.”

Editor & Publisher later named Woolsey the 2023 “Publisher of the Year.”

Now, that’s swagger.

Swagger equals activity.

Go knock on doors. Go sell an ad. Go prospect that next story.

Get to know your community again.

Find out what they want and find a way to give it to them.

Be innovative. Be useful. Be profitable.

Be like Alvin.

Be like Leonard.

Make the choice to remain active.

Community journalism is alive and vibrant.

It is up to us to keep it that way.