Volume 9 , Issue 5

Alva Newspaper Info

"You asked for the early history of newspapers in Alva. That information may be obtained from: Alva, Oklahoma, The First 100 Years 1886 - 1986, By: Seekers of Oklahoma Heritage Association, pp. 44-49, Copyright: Seekers of Oklahoma Heritage Association and Curtis Media Corporation 1987. ISBN 0-88108-075-0. Printed and published in the United States by Curtis Media Corporation, Dallas, Texas.

I can, however, give you some information that goes back 60 or more years and which comes from my own memory or things that my father told me. My father was E. M. Barker, a job printer, columnist and sportswriter, who worked for the Alva Review Courier most of the years between 1924 and 1960.

When I was in high school, the Courier purchased what was supposed to be a large, automatic-feed job press. It was built on the same order of the hand-fed job presses that had been in use for over 60 years at the time, but with one difference: It used a system of vacuum hoses to place the unprinted copy and then remove and stack the printed copy. It never worked very well, and was soon abandoned in favor of the hand-fed press.

To move that press from the loading dock in the alley to the job printing area in the Courier required a system of roller pipes and the muscle work of four men, including me. The pipes were laid onto the floor, the press was worked onto the pipes, and the press was slowly rolled on the pipes through the building by retrieving the trailing pipe and placing it at the front. The process took over an hour.

During the process, my father mentioned that one of his first jobs (which must have been in the mid 1920's) was to help move the job presses from the basement of the Monfort building, up the stairs to the sidewalk level, and then 'walk' them to the then Courier site near the middle of the 600 block of Flynn St., just west of where the Central National Bank is now located. Those presses had belonged to the Alva Pioneer, which, I believe, was the oldest newspaper in town at the time.

Later, when I was in college, I worked for three years as the janitor and circulation manager (I'm still not sure which job was more important.) at the Courier. At that time the Courier also published a weekly newspaper called the Alva Weekly News. It was really nothing more than the Thursday edition of the Courier with a modified front page. It was important, however, because the Thursday edition listed all of the grocery and retail store specials that were to be offered on the weekend, when the rural folk would come to town to do their weekly shopping. Woods County had a large rural population at the time. Many rural customers chose to subscribe to the Alva Weekly rather than the Courier as a matter of economics.

Another newspaper that was in operation in town during my memory was the Woods County News. It was operated by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Estle and was a weekly publication. In the late forties and up through the sixties and part of the 70's, it was located two doors south of the alley north of the Central National Bank.

I can't remember the exact year that the Courier moved to its present location on Choctaw Street, but when it did the Estles purchased all of the Courier's hand-fed presses, paper cutter, linotypes, make-up equipment and the duplex, flat-bed press that had been used to print the Courier. Some years after Mr. Estle died, that building burned down and the Woods County News died with it.

The presses were retrieved and I understood they were to be restored and placed in a newspaper publishing museum somewhere and I certainly wish I knew where. I would like to see those presses and the remaining equipment, for they put a lot of beans on the Barker table when I was growing up.

The Courier, meanwhile, continues to operate in its building on Choctaw, and though I am currently retired I still write a column and sometimes cover athletic events for them. The press used today is a rotary press which is much faster than the old flat-bed press and uses electronically-produced plates that are prepared much faster than the old linotype-and hand-set method. In addition to the Courier, the office also produces a weekly trade paper called the Newsgram. The Newsgram is so successful that it accounts for virtually all of the profit. The Courier is published five days per week and is the smallest daily newspaper in Oklahoma. It is also the fourth (I think) smallest in the nation. They introduced color photographs a few years ago, which is something many larger dailies still haven't done.

When I first began working as a newsboy in the late forties, the Courier published every day except Saturday. The Sunday edition came off in four runs: Front page section, society section, sports section, and advertising and classified section. A comic section was also inserted. It was in color and was shipped in from somewhere. It was the job of the newsboys to insert all of these sections before going out on his route. The paper did not finish running on that slow, old press until 2 or 3 o'clock Sunday morning, which gave the newsboys times to run all over the square until the wee small hours of the morning beginning on Saturday night. That's a whole 'nuther story. Suffice it to say that the police regularly patrolled the alley behind the Courier on Saturday nights." -- Jim Barker
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