Descendant of frontier marshal dies, a few thoughts

The Saturday Lamar Democrat also features the obituary of Chester Earp, 87, who died last Wednesday at his home.
Earp was a descendant of the city of Lamar's first law enforcement officer, a guy by the name of Wyatt Earp, whose Barton County career was undistinguished, but who went on to do a few other things.
I never knew Mr. Earp, but I was proud to know his older sister, the late Reba Young, who did more to bring history to life than anyone I know. She began writing history in the early 1980s, when she was already in her 80s, as part of a rotating group of local writers who penned page one columns for the "Today in Barton County" segment of The Democrat, an idea of Democrat Publisher Doug Davis that may have been responsible for enabling the Democrat to survive.
She later published a book of those columns, a copy of which she gave to me a couple of years before her death. It is one of my most cherished possessions.
I can't imagine there being any Reba Youngs available, but the Today in Barton County idea is still a good one. I used a similar approach in August 1996 when I started The Lamar Press, which I still think is the best weekly newspaper I have ever seen in Southwest Missouri
Today in Barton County was a feature in the Democrat during its last year as a daily newspaper, so it ran every day with a different columnist, five days a week.
In The Press, I was able to line up an all-star group of columnists (I know I am going to leave out someone), including Nancy Hughes, Cait Purinton, Kim Earl, Marvin VanGilder, Katie Jeffries, Doug Oakes, Amy Lamb on occasion, and I even added a column each week myself. We always had a lot of news in that paper, but I have talked to many people who say what they remember most were those columns.
With the exception of the late Nic Frising's cartoons in the Webb City Sentinel, I have not seen any regular features in local weekly and daily newspapers that were as consistently good as those columns.
That assessment may change after I have seen Kay and Russell Hively's columns and some of the other columnists in the newly-renovated Post (formerly the Neosho Post).