Past is prologue: Newspapers connect us

“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare once wrote. 
As editors and publishers of community newspapers, we should understand this better than most. We are also historians whose collective knowledge of the people and places we cover enables us not only to report the news of the moment, but to offer context and perspective to the stories we write. 
I was reminded recently of the significance of that role when attending the Valentine’s Day opening of an unusual new exhibit at The Citadelle Museum in Canadian.
The show is what we in the news business refer to as hyper-local. It features the work of two artists — Michael Townsend and Leah Smith — who visited Canadian last fall to create a series of tape art murals on the exterior walls of local buildings. Each scene portrayed a significant moment in Hemphill County history — a moment given vivid life through the narrative accounts of residents and well documented over the decades in the pages of The Canadian Record.
The murals – constructed from premium-grade blue and green painter’s tape – are intended to be temporary, in keeping with the artists’ chosen medium and shared philosophy. As Michael explained, “For us, art is only happening when the maker, the thing that is being made, and the viewer are together in the same place.”
For this particular exhibit, though, Michael and Leah were somehow convinced to reinforce the main figure of each mural with “temporary permanence” in mind. And there they all were, meticulously framed in more tape art, covering the same museum walls which last were home to 36 rare Rembrandt etchings. 
The rather whimsical name of the show: “Tape Art: It Tapes a Village.”
“When you see this,” said Wendie Cook, The Citadelle director and exhibit curator, “you are seeing the thread of things that you don’t realize are chained. Everyone in this room has been affected in some way, shape or form by all the things around us.”
What struck me as I scanned each piece was that the newspaper pages provided the essential connective tissue to each story. 
Like the image of oilman, philanthropist and former mayor Oofie Abraham. 
In 1951, Santa Fe railway announced that it was moving 150 employees and their families from Canadian to Amarillo. For three years, The Record covered every town hall and railroad employees’ union meeting, challenging Santa Fe’s decision. In 1954, the families disappeared, virtually overnight.
The Amarillo Globe-News gleefully pronounced this community a soon-to-be ghost town. The Record published Mayor Abraham’s pitch-perfect response — “Then it will be the best-lit damn ghost town in the Texas Panhandle” – followed by the front-page report of a party on Main Street to celebrate our new gas vapor streetlights.
In 1958, a community-wide effort to host a family of refugees fleeing Soviet oppression in Hungary made headlines, as did the project to prepare their home and the middle-of-the-night welcome party at the Santa Fe Railway station. There was the very proper Violet Mathers, dressed in her Sunday best, her diamond rings sparkling, as she scrubbed the bathtub of their new home with Babo.
Decades later, as the debate over immigration issues flared around the country, Canadian was reminded of its kindness to those strangers — who arrived here speaking little English and quickly became hardworking and beloved citizens – in The Record’s editorial pages.
Story after story might easily have been dismissed as mere rural legend, were it not for the trusted documentation of the local newspaper. 
I have now reached that certain age. Far more than sight or hearing, I dread the loss of memory.
“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote. 
Knowing our past, understanding those who shaped it and knowing what guided the decisions they made — these are all essential to understanding who we are today, to achieving some clarity of vision as a community, and to avoiding the mistakes we have already made. 
Past is prologue, indeed. Each day of each week, newspapers around this state and nation record the history that connects us to what we once were, and to what — for better or worse — we are capable of becoming.