Opinion

KEP: A Second Look

Saturday, August 14, 2010

When we Nashes first came down here in 1973 from New York City, by way of Minneapolis, I no sooner took a gander at the Nevada Daily Mail than I wrote a letter to the editor (which appeared, as I recall, as an editorial) hooting at the predictably small-town features of its skimpy rag. Here, for instance, written by the "correspondent" from the outlying district of Horton, in headline-sized print, was the story of an 8-year-old who brought his new puppy to the Sunday family reunion. End of news-flash! What in the name of heaven, I hollered, was the point of that drivel? -- and of a matching story of the Moundville correspondent's recent pleasure trip to Joplin?

The local newspaper sounded like part of a discarded chapter from Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street.

Well, in the following day's Daily Mail, there appeared an editorial that countered the ignorant and arrogant writer of the day-before's editorial. In sentences calm, cool, and collected, it pointed out that, like all smalltown newspapers, the Daily Mail was written for the folks who lived in this particular town and wanted mainly the news of what went on there. If the reader wanted national or world news, he'd be advised to watch the network TV news or subscribe to the New York Times. The crisp piece was signed KEP, which I took to be the actual writer's sly effort to remain anonymous.

But in those days, I'd guess, the initials KEP were as familiar to most Nevadans as FDR, GBS, HLM, GAR, and NRA. They belonged to Kenneth Eugene Postlethwaite. On May 24, 1948, Postlethwaite (or, as he soon became, "KEP") came to Nevada to edit our newspaper, and didn't stop writing for it until 1991. His almost daily columns during that time, edited by Pat Brophy, another ardent historian of Nevada, who artfully organized them according to topic, and published them 7 years later, as "K.E.P.: Of Goshen and Paradise" -- those columns form as reliable and maybe more impartial and reader-friendly history of Nevada than Brophy's own Three Hundred Years.

As an historian, Brophy sometimes seems stuck in the Confederacy. (One of his color photographic self-portraits, with the unfurled CSA flag as background, attests to that.) KEP, on the other hand, while born in Kansas, adopted the small southward-leaning town of Nevada whole-heartedly, and yet he never discarded his humane principles, which inform all of his writing and his utterly impartial fascination with the past.

The first editorial in Mr. Brophy's collection, dated June 8, 1949, recalls a Sunday afternoon visit to Deepwood Cemetery, during which he saw the numerous graves of "pioneers, doctors, their wives, sons and daughters (spelled 'dau.' on many monuments)" Those last five words -- no earth-shattering news, but enough to alert the reader to a man who notices the details. Here, as in a later column on the passing vogue in proper names, he notices the once-popular names: Dogia, Permelia, Mida.

He closes this piece with a paragraph, the tone of which will become familiar to those who will read subsequent KEP editorials: "Visiting a cemetery is a peaceful sort of an experience. The presence of so many dead -- whom all of us some day will join -- is humbling and deflationary. All are at peace. Feuds and fights, politics and religion, no longer matter. They are one."

Characteristic of Ken's editorials is that they stirred memories in some of their far-off readers. This, for example, was from a letter written by Clark Griffith, in KEP's editorial of Nov. 14, 1949, "president of the Washington ball club" [would that have been the now-defunct Washington Senators?]: "Yes, I was born on Clear Creek near the now forgotten town of Bellamy. I have many fond memories of my boyhood days there. In fact, that is where I picked up ideas to be a ball player as I used to be a mascot for the old Stringtown team. Each school house had a ball team and there was a lot of rivalry. It might be interesting for you to know that the names of those school houses were as follows: the Dog Walk, the Possum Trot, the Buzzard's Glory, Greasy Nation, and Stringtown. . . I remember very well driving 14 miles to Nevada for the Centennial Celebration in 1876 in an old broken down wagon hauled by a one-eye mare and an old mule."

Ken closes his editorial with this: "Mr. Griffith adds a post-script which is an editorial in itself: 'The tragedy of life is that we get old too soon and wise too late.'"

In an editorial dated Feb. 8, 1981, Ken reported visiting the library of the State Historical Society in Columbia, and "stumbling across" a 1911 directory of all the license plates issued in Missouri for that year -- their numbers, owners, and make of car. That kind of thing fascinated Ken. "In all of Missouri, there were fewer than 25,000 licensed automobiles in 1911... only 62 in Vernon County. And those 62 represented 37 different makes, only two of which -- Ford and Buick -- have survived as full-fledged passenger cars. Thirty-eight cars were owned by the following Nevadans: I. F. Romaine drove a Betsy Ross; W. B. Shatterly, who ran a repair shop at 213 North Cedar, drove an Enoch Arden; R. S. Vedder drove a Bullet; W. L. Earp, "The Daily Mail," drove a Sterling; J. P. Schnorf, co-owner of the Oak Saloon, at 106 East Cherry, drove a Buick; Mrs. I. H. Turpin, wife of the owner of a furniture, carpet, and undertaking store, at 125 West Cherry, drove a Buick; and James Denman, grandfather of Citizen's Bank's James Denman and proprietor of a feed store at 121 West Walnut, drove a Hudson. . . The names of all those old cars that have gone to that Great Garage in the sky -- Bullet, Vale, Skipper, Maxwell, Hudson, Brush, and so on -- will stir poignant memories among many of the older generation." Well, yes, at age 70, I guess I qualify as a member of the older generation. However, I'd say you don't have to be up there among the fuddy-duddies to appreciate and grow fond of a fellow who can reach back in time and bring back to life the stuff of the past. And that was one of KEP's gifts, may he rest in peace.