It didn’t take long for us to start getting phone calls last Thursday when, for the first time anyone could remember, The Hartwell Sun didn’t make it off the press as scheduled.
In fact, we started getting calls from the Hartwell Post Office and readers at 8 a.m. on the dot wondering where the paper was.
At that point it hadn’t even been printed yet.
Despite having it there on Wednesday afternoon by our regular deadline and everyone in Cornelia’s best efforts to keep us and the five other affected newspapers on track, the press just wouldn’t print right last week.
We were all yelling “START the press” versus the usual “Stop the press!”
We finally got word mid-Thursday morning that the press was back up and running and we were set to have ours done by early afternoon.
Our sister paper, the Franklin County Citizen Leader (headed up by Publisher Shane Scoggins – my dad) was right behind us in the printing schedule, so he and I loaded up in The Sun’s van and set off for Cornelia to pick up the papers.
After packing the van to the brim with fresh copies of The Sun and the Citizen Leader, we headed back down the mountain and began the route that spanned from Gumlog to Elberton, with stops in Lavonia, Hartwell, Canon, Royston, Bowman and everywhere in between.
I’d ran a delivery route before at The Elberton Star, but this was the first time I’d run the one here. I’ll be honest and say I had to do a lot of Googling to figure out what store was what as we’re often still labeling a location what it was known as 20 years ago.
It’s days like last week that give me a greater appreciation for our delivery drivers, especially our Randy Taylor.
Running the route takes time, requires hopping in and out of a van more times than you can count, toting up to 50 newspapers into one store, counting the ones that didn’t sell from the previous week and swapping them out for the new ones, doing the math to figure out how much to charge and working with our store partners to get everything settled.
It’s a lot to juggle, and while my dad and I got to do it together, Randy does our side of it all by himself each week.
It is an often unappreciated job that is just as important as what we do here in the office to get the paper together.
Arguably, after hearing from so many of you last week, it might honestly be number one on the list of importance.
The newspapers that make up Community Newspapers, Inc. have always told our subscribers that they keep our presses running, and that couldn’t be more true.
Because last week when the press wasn’t running, it wasn’t because folks didn’t want the newspaper. We learned that to be the exact opposite.
It’s times like these we learn to be thankful for people like Randy, everyone in the press room and especially for our subscribers and readers.
There wouldn’t have been a reason to get back up and running if it weren’t for you.
For that, we thank you.
We plan to do our best to keep you reading on schedule each week.