A person can learn a lot about a community by reading the newspaper. A small-town paper tells the reader who got married, what’s happening at school and why the new minister bought a blue house and a pink Cadillac.

One can also learn from the larger newspapers, but you never get the details in the big papers. Without details, it’s hard to know what really happened.

The big papers say, “John Doe of Marysville was involved in a single-vehicle accident Tuesday morning, when his small station wagon failed to negotiate a curve on Route 29.”

They don’t tell you he was hauling four goats to the auction yard and became distracted when a hoof became lodged between his shirt collar and the back of his neck. You have to figure that out for yourself.

The small-town paper won’t tell us about the animals, either, but everyone knows who raises goats and drives that road to the auction. The whole town has most of the story before the newspaper is printed.

A recent incident in southern Michigan illustrates the deficiencies in national news reporting. A wire service story reports a 30-year-old man attempted suicide in Detroit by jumping from a fourth-story hotel window. The man’s fall was broken by an automobile parked below.

Bruised and bleeding from facial cuts, the man crawled off the car, took the elevator to the fourth floor and jumped from the same window again. He landed on the same car!

This fellow escaped with only a broken wrist and a fractured pelvis. The car, however, was demolished.

The news report doesn’t tell us why the man jumped from the same window a second time, or even why he jumped the first time. I’d like to know whose car he was landing on, too. This all seems preposterous on the surface, but it’s the kind of thing that makes news.

A similar thing happened in my hometown of St. Paris, Ohio, during the late 1800s. I wasn’t around at the time, but local history says a man from Zanesville committed suicide in St. Paris by jumping from the top floor of the Kline Hotel.

This fellow was new in town and apparently didn’t realize the Kline was only two stories tall. Unfortunately, there weren’t any cars in those days, and landing on a horse isn’t always a good thing.
The man from Zanesville walked back into the hotel lobby following his jump, but the doctors couldn’t save him. Like many buildings of that era, nobody could save the old hotel, either; the city declared it unsafe and tore it down in the 1960s.

My hometown got national news coverage for the suicide incident at the old hotel, but the local news hardly even mentioned it. The local paper decided it was bad for the city’s image to have folks jumping out of the only hotel in town.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.