Greetings from New Albany, Indiana, just north of Louisville, Ky. I’m about a third of the way through Indiana. Easy-walking terrain and some creative modification of the American Discovery Trail route has contributed to solid progress this week.
Went to a foot doctor the day before I got back on the trail to figure out why I keep getting blisters in the same spot on both feet, whether I’m wearing new or old walking shoes. He explained that the problem is the shape of my feet, but that strategic application of moleskin and frequent sock changes could prevent the blisters from coming back. Bless his podiatric heart, his advice was perfect and my feet were happy and productive again!
Indiana has been so far characterized by good eating and particularly nice people. My route has taken me through lots of little towns, so I have been able to find enough to eat without ever reverting to my own inadequate cooking. Now that I’m getting enough to eat I have more energy, walk faster, cover more territory, and am generally jollier that I was when trudging through West Virginia and some of Ohio.
Most of these little towns (eg. Freedom, Cross Plaines, Canaan, Lexington) don’t offer a variety of dining options. I usually eat at the one gas station-restaurant-general store-video rental these little burgs can support. And often I’ll pass through a town so small that it won’t have anyplace to eat. But every town, without exception, offers someplace to get cars fixed. If you wonder where old cars go to die, it’s in rural West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana. I’ve never seen so many junkers on the roads, all shedding rust and spewing black exhaust on me as I walk along. Sitting on the front stoops of these little stores while I eat my lunch I’m able to observe commerce at a detailed level. And the single most purchased item is motor oil. It’s really amazing. People buy bread and milk and beer (lots of beer), gasoline, baby diapers — the usual assortment — but almost without exception when they buy anything they’ll also get some oil to replenish the crankcase that’s leaking it out the bottom almost as fast as the motorists can pour it in the top.
But I’ll not make fun of the people driving old cars. Lots of people have helped me on this trip, offering directions, water, sometimes even rides to the next town, but never have I been helped by somebody in a new car. In fact there seems to be an inverse correlation between the condition of one’s vehicle and their owner’s generosity toward a skinny old vagrant.
My best Good Samaritan story of this week involves a guy named Patrick Davies. As I was walking in a gloomy valley near Milton, Indiana, a big storm brewed up. The sky was black and the wind was blowing hard, and I was looking for a place to hide out when Patrick pulled alongside in his pickup. He motioned me into his truck, and I slung my pack into the truckbed and pulled the door shut just as the rain started pouring down. Patrick said he owned a fishing cabin just down the road where I could stay the night out of the weather. The cabin was pretty primitive, but was watertight, and I was dry and happy as he wished me well and headed home. A couple of hours later he and his son brought me a plate of supper. He said he brought his son along to witness the old fool who was walking across the US.
Just before I left Ohio I talked with Lee colleague Bob Hendrickson, who is the longtime publisher of the Maysville, Ky., Ledger Independent, a 9,500-circulation daily on the Ohio River.
Despite the loss of much of the business from his car dealers, Bob continues to grow ad revenues. The core of his business remains the small retailers and service providers that still flourish in Maysville. Because the market is small and isolated (about 60 miles from both Cincinnati and Lexington) the big boxes have not wiped out his retail base (“If you look at my top 25 advertisers you’d laugh your ass off,'” Bob said.) and neither has the market attracted much competition for readers or advertisers. “We get our business from advertisers the big papers wouldn’t even bother with,” he said.
Circulation has remained amazingly steady, fluctuating little during the whole 30-plus years Bob has been with the paper. And he said that 90 percent of his readers have subscribed for more than a year. Unlike many of the West Virginia and Ohio towns I’ve visited, Maysville’s employment base has remained solid, and that has contributed to a stable workforce and population. Young families are not fleeing the market in search of better jobs in the big city.
So Bob’s story gives us another example of a little daily bucking the declining revenue and circulation trends of the big dailies. And it looks increasingly like the success variables include isolation from big markets and the absence of the big national retailers. Might be too soon to generalize, but it appears that publishing a newspaper in a town too small to have a mall may be the key to success these days. We’ll keep talking to publishers to learn more.
Moving fast through Indiana. Expect to be in Illinois in less than two weeks.
