The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

There were several other page one stories: the arrest of a couple of local moonshiners by the Revenuers; the monthly meeting of the American Legion; an article on a better way of feeding chickens that resulted in higher egg production, written by County Ag Agent Grady Alexander. Page four featured Elizabeth Lacy’s regular Garden Gate column and the article Ophelia Snow had written about the cooking auditions being held at the Darling Diner, although Charlie was pretty sure they were going to hire that woman who had just popped up—Raylene, her name was. He hoped so, anyway. He’d love to see pulled pork added to the diner’s regular menu. By golly, he’d eat every meal there, if that happened.

Charlie locked the type into the form, picked up the heavy forms, and carried them one at a time to the old Babcock flatbed cylinder press in the back of the room, where he set them in place. Then he inked the rollers, loaded the paper, and began running the home print pages—two and seven, four and five—on the backs of the ready print pages: one and eight, three and six. These came in on Thursdays on the Greyhound bus from a print shop in Mobile, already made up with the latest national and world news, a sports page, the comics, and the women’s page.

While the pages came off the press and went into the folding machine, Charlie took a short break to read the front page. One of the lead articles was about Roosevelt’s “new deal,” although the writer seemed to be as much in the dark about what that meant as everyone else was.

The other article was headed by a photo of men waiting in line for a bowl of soup in New York, where more than 750,000 unemployed men, women, and children were dependent upon city relief, with an additional 160,000 on a waiting list. For each person on relief, the city spent about $8.20 a month.

Below the fold, there was a follow-up story on the suicide of Violet Sharpe, one of the servants in the rural New Jersey home of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. The woman had killed herself after being repeatedly questioned by the police about the kidnapping and murder of little Charles Jr., whose body had been discovered in May, some two and a half months after the crime. According to the article, she had nothing to do with it; she was the victim of police bullying. The cops had no other suspects, and while some of the ransom money had turned up, they hadn’t been able to track down the rest.

From that depressing news, Charlie turned to page six and the lighter side: “Out Our Way” and “Our Boarding House,” with the comically big-headed Major Amos Hoople, two comic strips that always gave him a chuckle. But even though things weren’t as bad in Darling as they were on the east coast, there wasn’t a whole lot to smile about. Charlie was practically giving the newspaper away (twelve cents a week, including two cents for postage), but the circulation kept on going down as people cut back on their expenses—only 427 subscribers as of this month. Ophelia was working hard to bring in more advertising and print jobs, but both the ad revenue and the printing business were declining as well. The local merchants couldn’t afford to put money into advertising when they could barely pay their other bills.

Charlie didn’t like to think about what was likely to happen when the cost of the paper and ink and ready print and Ophelia Snow’s twelve bucks a week amounted to more than the little bit he took in every week. Maybe he’d just lock the door and hang a big CLOSED sign on it. If people wanted newspapers, they could subscribe to the Monroe Journal, over in Monroeville. Yes, he had lied to Fannie Champaign when he told her that the newspaper was in debt. (Why had he done that? He couldn’t remember.) But there wasn’t any money, either. Not one extra red cent, and Charlie was still fighting his way up a steep mountain of personal resentment for having been saddled with his father’s business in the first place. It wasn’t what he had expected or wanted and he still hadn’t reconciled himself to it.

His father, Randolph Dickens, had been owner, publisher, and editor of the Darling Dispatch for four decades, along with running a small job printing business on the side. Charlie had taken the newspaper over when the old man died of lung cancer several years before—not so much because he wanted to, but because he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to do instead.