AT THE CROSSROADS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 April 1938, Page 6

AT THE CROSSROADS

AN OLD-TIMER’S GREETING.

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—The amalgamation of our town’s veteran publications, hitherto sharing a community patronage .extending over a long period of years, is more than a red-letter day in the annals of local journalism—it is an epoch in the history of our town. The ornate building in which its combined typographical and publishing .and literary staffs, and all its new and up-to-date machinery, is so princely housed, sets its seal upon the increasing architectural beauties in commercial spheres of recent years,, and is well worthy of general public acclaim. Those few surviving citizens of ours whose fast-fading memories still delight to hark back to the “good old days” when the rapier thrusts of rival editors were calculated to win or lose any cause for which they strove, have seen many changes in journalism since then; and, let us hope, have been gradually converted to its modern trend. To-day, no need exists for helping an old-time flat-bed press along, by calling upon some popular contributor to correspondence columns —awaiting his free copy—to roll up his shirt sleeves

and take a turn at the handle when the gas engine went wrong. The hour of publication, in these days, can always be depended upon, and not even the keenest of contributors need be kept pacing the outside footpath of a Masterton printery—as in days lang syne, when the facile pens of editors and contributors alike were wont to attract the multitude when any unusual delay in the regular newspaper delivery occurred. Would, alas, that these old-time editors, and their gallant retinue of correspondence column contributors, had had the mechanical aids of modern times at their then command; their political feuds and civic controversies had been as well ac-

ceptable, to many a sleepy hamlet still further afield. As it is, the best archives of early local history can still be found in the back-file columns of the new journal’s predecessors—the old “Wairarapa Daily,” and its later contemporary the old “Wairarapa Star,” so ably edited in those days by . the late Mr Joseph Payton and the late Mr Alexander Wilson Hogg —whose combined public memorial, as it were, today stands at the corner of Cole and

Chapel Street, erected by their younger generation successors to their journalistic patrimony after many strenuous years.—l am, etc., N.J.B.