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By Theron Willis
HOMETOWN NEWS
Jessie Smith and her now deceased husband Charles Smith look over a Woodruff News in 1951
“Miss Jessie” holds a copy of the very first Woodruff News published in May, 1950.
This month The Woodruff News is celebrating its 60th birthday with its very first edition published on May 11, 1950. The founders of the newspaper were the now deceased Charles E. Smith and his wife, Jessie Smith, who still works at the newspaper.
Mrs. Smith and her son, Milton, who served as the newspaper’s editor-publisher for many years, recently got together to reminisce and share their reflections about the early days and the changes that technology and time has brought.
Milton said that the first issue took two weeks to produce, a lot longer than the three days that his father originally anticipated. “When Daddy went to Kings Mountain, NC to buy the printing press it was just a big pile,” Milton said. “Without a book or a picture or anything.”
After the press was finally assembled after much painstaking labor, the papers were finally printed, with a 10 - year - old Milton and his sister, Catherine helping fold the papers, and the several thousand copies hand - delivered by the entire family, Charles Smith came home as an exhausted and frustrated man and wept, thinking that the whole idea of publishing his own paper was a fool’s errand.
Nevertheless the Smith family persisted and The Woodruff News prospered, providing a locally - focused paper that the local merchants at the time desired. Before the Smiths, the Greer Citizen printed a Woodruff paper but it didn’t have the hometown feel that the citizens of Woodruff wanted, according to Milton.
The Smith family acquired the Inman Times in 1968 and Charles worked as editor and publisher of the two papers until his death in 1977.
Milton and his mother agree that technology used in producing a newspaper has dramatically changed since the days in 1950 when a newspaper was printed two pages at a time, one side at a time, and then hand folded and assembled.
“Things just keep getting better and better with making newspapers,” Jessie Smith said. “It’s hard to believe how much it’s changed.”
“Miss Jessie” is 97 years old and still works at the newspaper two days a week assembling the papers. “I still like to work,” she said. “It gives me something to do.”
Milton Smith served as editor and publisher of both The Woodruff News and The Inman Times during his career and when the two newspapers were bought by Hometown News in 1996, he served as production manager until his retirement in 2009.
For more local news and events, see the Woodruff News.
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