Some things worth keeping

• Some things worth keeping

Call me old fashioned, but there are some things from the last century that are worth keeping. Newspapers with actual news being a great start, followed closely by actual reading.

In his message for our upcoming Down Home South Texas magazine, Cuero’s Mayor Emil Garza was urging people to seek out the different events on various social media pages. Well, it so happens we have a vehicle that can list all the events in one place: your Cuero Record - or Yorktown News-View Briefs.

They have a fancy word for that these days - curating - as in bringing the important bits together in one place. But here’s the thing. The instant communication of the internet has so eclipsed old-school news gathering that the business of the later is disappearing. For various reasons, the news part of community newspapers are shadows of their former existence. But the purpose they served of sharing community news - not just one organization’s but everyone’s - has not. So we need your help.

We need EVERYONE to be a little old school with your events. When you post your regular way, add one more step: E-mail us (cuerorecord@cuerorecord. com) the information with News Brief in the subject line. (Of course you can go really old school and bring us an actual piece of paper with the information on it.) Try to keep it less than 100 words, so there’s room for all. And if you don’t receive acknowledgement that we received it, check back with us. We may have missed it and we don’t want to. But we are human.

Lovely things like Farm-to-Table Tuesdays at the Library Pavilion, have been overlooked because we have one, aging, part-time news person. Yours truly! As a recent transplant from Victoria, I am learning the ropes of the important yearly events to feature, like Cowboy Camp, going on this week at the Chisholm Trail Museum. An actual longhorn cow kicks off the week! And museum volunteer Candy, who is 80 years old, can’t resist climbing on for a ride. We definitely should have had this in our Kids’ Calendar. Another note for next year. Sigh.

Speaking of next year, it will be the 70th anniversary of Ken Towery, a reporter for The Cuero Record, receiving a 1955 Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting of fraud with the Texas Veterans Land Bureau. Towery’s extended family came by The Record a few months back for a chat, and we have been learning about our old-school reporter, who sniffed out greed on the backs of veterans all the way to Austin.

Towery was a WWII veteran himself and a prisoner of war in China. The title of his memoir is “Chow Dipper,” which refers to his being chosen by his fellow POWs to ladle out rations. His daughter, Alice, who e-mailed us after the family visit, said several people in DeWitt County have copies of the book. I look forward to reading the memoir along with the series of articles which won him the Pulitzer. As I do so, I’ll share discoveries in this column.

So congratulations! If you’ve gotten this far, you actually read an article all the way through. Good on you. Now tell someone what they’re missing! But not the whole thing. Tell them just enough to peak curiosity, then “you’ve got to read it for yourself.”

Always leave them wanting more, eh? It’s good for business. We need a new crop of customers to sign on, and we hope to make the reading worth it.