Editor’s note: This week in May 2009 a major wind storm tore Jasper County and caused wide-spread damage, and The Carthage Press lost a good friend. Here’s a column by Editor John Hacker from that week.
We have these more frequently as we get older, but I’ve got to say, what a week.
It was a week of loss and tragedy and adventure.
First off, a valued link to this newspaper’s glory days passed away last week. I remember Jennifer Martin as the smiling face across the hall in our old office on Main Street.
She was a design genius who knew how to wield an Exacto-knife like a surgeon’s scalpel and line tape like precision stitching.
Martin worked in the design department at The Carthage Press during my first two stints in 1995 and 1998. She was a fixture there for more than 35 years, spanning the gulf from lead type to the computer age.
Today we assembled ads on a computer, allowing us to make corrections and change designs in a flash. We use spell checkers and grammar checkers to try to eliminate errors.
When Jennifer started in the 1960s, newspapers were still put together using hot lead.
Even in the mid-1990s when computers had started to take over, designers still had to have a deft hand to make a straight line using line tape and a sharp eye to determine which thickness of tape to use.
They also had to steady hands to use a sharp knife and cut precisely around complicated graphic elements.
Jennifer had all of those. She also had one of those golden personalities that made her a gem of the newspaper.
No matter how busy she was, she always had time to chat with a rookie reporter, just trying to make it in a complicated business and worried about whether he was good enough.
I only saw Jennifer once after I left The Carthage Press in 1999 to go to work at The Joplin Globe, but she left an indelible impression on my life. Thanks Jennifer and you will be missed.
The storm
Now we have a new weather phenomena to worry about — a “wake low.”
The National Weather Service in Springfield is now calling Friday’s storm a derecho, which is defined by the weather service as a widespread long-lived thunderstorm-induced wind.
In this case, however, the strong winds were not just at the leading edge; they were behind the leading edge as well.
Dwayne Beaver, a weather observer for the NWS in Carthage, recorded a 93-mile-per-hour wind gust at his home just off the Carthage Square at the height of Friday’s storm.
I was in my kitchen at my home watching as the wind ripped shingles from my neighbor’s house and wondering what it was doing to mine.
I ended up with little damage and some downed limbs in my yard. I was lucky. I also wussed out and spent two nights at the Best Western Precious Moments instead of living with two nights without power.
I’ve lived without power for extended periods of time twice in the last six years, for seven days after the 2003 tornado and eight days after the December 2007 ice storm. I just didn’t feel like doing it again.
Like I said, call me a wuss.
