Remembering Dorothy Parks

When I became sports editor of the Lamar Daily Democrat in May 1978, I had a lot to learn about working on a newspaper.

My only previous experience had been nine months as editor of the Newton County News and I was terrible.

I didn't know how to write newspaper articles and there was no one there to teach me. I was also supposed to sell advertising and I was even worse at that part of the job.

So my firing came as a blessing, both to me and to Newton County News readers.

How I convinced Democrat Editor Lou Nell Clark to hire me, I will never know, but I am grateful she did. I was determined to learn to be the best reporter I could possibly be.

Thankfully, there were people there who were willing to help me. Lou Nell taught me how to cover meetings, how to find out what really went on during closed sessions and she never complained about the times when I would return from fire calls and sheepishly tell her and the others I had been unable to find the fire.

Russell Pierson helped me learn to work with the AP wire and offered tips on which sports articles would interest Democrat readers and page layout.

And then there was Dorothy Parks.

Dorothy was one of the last Democrat employees who had worked for the newspaper while the legendary Madeleine Aull Van Hafften was editor. She probably grew tired of me asking question after question, but I valued her institutional knowledge, plus even though her job description was typesetter, she was the best copy editor I ever worked with.

Dorothy could spot a grammatical error from a mile away (such as ending that last sentence with a preposition, even though I have been breaking that rule forever) and she knew everything about the out-of-the-way Barton County locations that popped up in my stories from time to time. Many was the time Dorothy saved me from making a mistake.

Unfortunately, only a few months into my time at the Democrat, the new owners, Boone Publishing, began cutting jobs right and left, and Dorothy was one of the first to be let go, despite more than two decades on the job.

In most cases, that would have been the end of the story as far as I was concerned, but it wasn't. During the remainder of the eight months I served as sports editor and then through the nearly eight years I served as the Democrat's managing editor from 1982 to 1990, Dorothy occasionally called with a news tip, a correction that needed to be made or some background information about a story I had written.

I did not hear much from Dorothy during my time at the Carthage Press, but when I started the Turner Report in October 2003, Dorothy was one of my first readers and she was still my best editor, often steering me away from mistakes, both grammatical and geographical.

When I wrote my book The Buck Starts Here: Harry S. Truman and the City of Lamar, Dorothy was one of the first people I called. A good part of that book centered on the history of the Lamar Democrat and no one knew the history of Arthur Aull and Madeleine Aull Van Hafften's stewardship of the newspaper better than she did.

The last time I saw Dorothy was at the signing for that book in late 2019. After that, her health took a turn for the worse and Dorothy died Friday at age 90.

I will miss the occasional messages I received from Dorothy, but I still know better than to be careless with the editing on this post.

I am guessing her view is much better from up there.