Advertisement

This week's edition is Vol. 60, No. 47 - not so impressive, perhaps, compared to the Detroit Free Press that into its 176th year or the Hartford Courant that is 242 years old and still publishing.

Yet, for a village that was not incorporated until 1891, the Antrim County News, established 56 years on, is a venerable institution.

The newspaper would not have come to occupy the place it has today absent the journalistic genius of its founder Kenneth C. Parker, now some 90 years old and still writing.

Ken Parker stayed with the paper he birthed for 12 years - from 1947 to 1959 - and saw his adopted village mature in important ways, which it might not have done without his editorial coaxing.

About eight years ago Ken published Be Independent! Start Your Own Newspaper, a memoir in essay form that tells the story of how the Antrim County News came to be and made its way under his proprietorship.

It should be a primer in every college journalism class -not as a how-to book, but because the writing puts the emphasis on nouns and verbs and simple, declarative sentences.

Ken and his wife Betty came to Bellaire after an apprenticeship at the East Tawas News where, as Ken wrote, he "learned printing, everything, that is, but linotype."He already knew how to write as a journalism graduate of the University of Michigan and a sports reporter on the university's well-respected Daily.

Ken and Betty went into a kind of partnership with K.D. and Gwen Adams - K.D. being a whiz on the linotype machine and the flat-bed press. And out came Vol. 1, No.1 and so on to the end of the 1950s. And a great decade it was.

The Parkers became part of a group that included Fred and Millie Palling, Helmut and Clarabel (Toots) Trepte, Bob and Florence Culver, Chuck and Dorothy Staub, Jack and Kay Unger - all now deceased - plus several others. By virtue of their broader intellectual interests, that group of people (including an academician and an artist) would put a mark on Bellaire that it had not enjoyed before or, some would say, since.

That was the era in which new school buildings were erected, modern management came to village affairs, a movie theater was built, new and lasting industry came to town and, with it, an up-to-date electric power grid that made life easier for residents. Parker and the Antrim County News were either in the vanguard or editorially supportive of all that.

Yet, what made Ken Parker the success he became was his congeniality and openness to accept the environment he and Betty had chosen. He and the newspaper did not try to remake the town so much as they tried to convince its populace to capitalize on and enhance its obvious assets.

Ken's weekly column "Bell-Airings"celebrated Main Street (actually called "Bridge Street"in Bellaire) and its denizens. It encapsulated them, Sherwood Anderson-like, as smalltown Americans anyone would want to know.

All the way from the village hermit, to a recluse poet, to the stone-deaf gardener, to a world-renowned junk collector, to a philosopher- barber, Ken, with never a patronizing word, lifted them up for all to see, enjoy and respect. That's more than talent; it's a gift.

While Ken had his share of detractors - every editor worthy of the title does - he was seldom perceived as a know-it-all. I think he probably never used the old line, "Don't pick a fight with a man who buys his ink by the barrel."Ken could sting when necessary, but mostly he found the good and decency in those about whom he wrote.

He was once burned in effigy for the crime of telling the truth about a matter. Upon hearing of it in a phone call from home, I, even then an aspiring journalist, sat down in my college dor- mitory room at my humble Smith-Corona portable typewriter and pounded out a polysyllabic tract defending my hometown hero.

Parker printed the piece in its entirety, not, as he told me when I was home the next summer, because he particularly needed my defense, but because he thought my prose was a good advertisement for the pedagogy of the man who taught me English at Bellaire High. That was Ken, always thinking about his adopted community and finding ways, short of booster-ism, to promote its worth.

Harry T. Cook lived in Bellaire in his youth and is a 1957 graduate of its high school. He was a reporter, editor and columnist for the Detroit Free Press from 1979 to 1993.You can read his work at www.harrytcook.com