Column of absolutely no interest outside Taranaki

Most weeks I write this column on the weekend, edit it on Monday night and send it on Tuesday morning. This weekend was no different, but it is now Monday going on Tuesday and I'm starting off completely afresh, fuelled by late night pizza and root beer.

I would rather I was fueled by fish and chips and a flagon, just like Keith Anderson and Laurence Bunyan back in 1962 as they "spent long hours and late nights" waiting for the Stratford Press to roll off the Hawera Star's printing press. The little weekly newspaper was generously being printed by the daily paper of our arch-rival-at-sports-and-everything-else town because the Stratford printing factory had burned to the ground.

The story about the late night hard yakker is from the obituary for Keith H Anderson printed in the February 12 edition of the Stratford Press, which I found in the mail when I got home from night class tonight. Keith died in a car accident on February 1, and his funeral was held the following Friday in the Stratford War Memorial Centre, attended by more than 900 people. I'm sure the Stratford Press has a website and I'm sure the obituary is there, and I recommend you read it, as it does far more justice to Mr Tourism, as he was known in later years, than I can.

For this is a personal remembrance. By someone who earlier this evening walked up and down both sides of Market St in San Francisco trying to find a newsrack that wasn't empty to get a souvenir copy of the first free urban daily in California - The Examiner. "We believe that the news should be free, as it is on the radio, television and the Internet," says the publisher, Florence Fang, on the front page, after restating her commitment to providing a forum for "the different, diverse and dynamic voices of our city." OK, so maybe The Examiner's got a financial problem and they're hoping this will get them out of it. Well, I hope so too.

My love of newspapers that have a sense of community stems from the Stratford Press, which Keith Anderson started in 1958 as the Mountain Town News. It was a marketplace for local businesses, a forum for local issues, and a place to look for photos of people who'd achieved something in the community - be it a sports success or winning a raffle or surviving 60 years of marriage. I used to write a column for the Stratford Press in the late 1960s. 'High School Corner' was a short miscellany of event notices and achievements, suggested and approved by the principal but written up by one proud little teenager in one proud little town.

We had our own newspaper! That was something, and it still is.

Thank you Keith for starting so many things that enabled so much growth - of individuals, of teams and community groups, of businesses and business associations, of towns and regions. Can there be a finer legacy than that? (Unless it's playing cornet in a New Plymouth band, which was REALLY something! I bet nobody in Hawera could claim to have done that. And prove it.)

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