By: Forrest R. Church, Publisher
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
I will be honest: rest and I are not well acquainted. Long time readers of this column know my personal and professional life has never been “the norm” — the newspaper life starts very early in the morning and ends very late at night, and most weeks my free time adds up to a small handful of hours. That is not a complaint. It is the hand we have been dealt in this industry, and we play it gladly.
Want to know how crazy it gets around here? I start fighting my inbox and voice mail messages early in the morning, and some nights when I finally lay my head down, there is more sitting in that inbox than when I started the day. I respond to one email, give it a couple of minutes, and boom — ten more arrive. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It just never ends.
I have been told more than once that I need a personal assistant. That does sound nice. But small community newspaper publishers do not get personal assistants — the closest thing I have is a thermos of coffee, and it has yet to answer a single email for me.
The good news is I am making progress. I believe I have finally worked my way through my voice mail messages — from Christmas. (If I have not responded to your messages, trust me, I try.)
One of my favorite jokes on the subject came from a podcast I was listening to. A guy was going back and forth, complaining about having to work forty hours a week just to survive (I think he was arguing we needed three-day work weeks of twenty-five hours, and that a person should be able to raise a family on that effort). To each their own. The Bible tells me, more or less, that you are supposed to work from sunup till sundown, six days a week.
Anyway, the host laughed and said, yeah, I remember a part-time job like that — I hit forty hours by Wednesday night, with my busiest Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday still ahead. I bet every small business owner reading this just nodded. Due to my schedule I found that podcast debate interesting.
This is why The Village Reporter is successful (in part). It is certainly not that we are more profitable than other businesses. We simply bust our butts for this product. (And trust me, it is not just my effort — our entire team, top to bottom, is incredible.)
When you love what you do, you do not focus on complaining about having to work — and I love what I do.
I believe life lessons can be learned from watching how successful people operate. Now, I cannot beat my eleven-year-old in a game of HORSE (basketball), so a Michael Jordan reference coming from me is not exactly apples to apples. But I remember hearing Jordan say, back when I was a kid, that success is simple — you just work two to three times harder than your opponent (at the gym two hours before practice / staying after practice to shoot hundreds of practice free throws).
That mindset is not reserved for superstars. Some of the most effective world leaders — and even the local average Joes who coach, raise kids, work at being a good spouse, and give back to their communities — do not waste their lives in front of a TV screen. They are active. But even a guy who loves his work needs to catch his breath once in a while.
The only reason I mention the workload at all is that as I write this column, I am — for a change — not running on caffeinated fumes. I feel rested. It took me a minute to figure out what that feeling even was. I even caught myself whistling around the home office. Who is this guy?
Which brings me to why I love the week of the Fourth of July.
Here’s the reality: a huge portion of what we cover at The Village Reporter revolves around our school activities and sports. When school lets out for summer, the news cycle takes a breather right along with the students. And for a stretch around the Fourth, my work schedule shrinks down to a “traditional” eight-to-ten-hour shift. I had to look up how those work.
I am half-kidding when I say an eight-to-ten-hour workday feels like a vacation. Sort of. When you are used to sunup to well past sundown, a workday that ends with daylight left over feels like somebody handed you a cruise ticket. You can actually sit and watch a sunset instead of hearing somebody else describe one. Turns out they are pretty good.
Every year family comes over for the Fourth, and we keep it simple — camping, fishing, swimming, too much food, and long evenings with nobody watching the clock. Nothing fancy. That is exactly the point.
Do not get me wrong, I still had to go to the computer every hour or so to “check in” on the local news flow. A newspaper guy can only unplug so far. Baby steps. I am counting it as personal growth.
This year our get-together carried more weight than normal. It turned into a three-in-one celebration, and I am not sure my heart was built to hold all three at once.
First, we celebrated one of our children’s birthdays — one more excuse to light up the sky and go back for seconds on dessert (well, at least for those who can have them).
Second, and this is the one that had me swallowing hard: one of our oldest children has signed up to serve in the United States Army, and this year’s gathering doubled as a send-off party. I do not have the words fully sorted out on that one yet. I suspect any parent who has stood where we stood understands. Pride does not quite cover it. Neither does worry. It is both, at full volume, at the same time — wrapped in a lot of prayer.
Think about the timing. The very week America marked 250 years of freedom, our family celebrated a child willing to raise a hand and defend it. I have written plenty over the years about what this country means to me. I am not sure I have ever felt it in my chest like I did this past celebratory week.
And then there was the national celebration itself — and it did not even wait for the Fourth. On July 3rd, fireworks returned to Mount Rushmore for the first time since 2020, as South Dakota and the National Park Service teamed up for a 250th anniversary celebration complete with a military tribute. Fireworks bursting over those four granite faces carved into the Black Hills was simply amazing.
Then came the main event. If you caught any of the 250th festivities out of Washington, D.C., you know exactly what I mean — and if you missed them, go find the footage. The fireworks display over our nation’s capital was being called possibly the largest the world has ever seen. I believe it. Hair-raising is the only word I have. I sat there with goosebumps watching the sky over Washington announce to the whole planet that this American experiment is alive and well at 250.
In my last column I shared what the fireworks sellers and campground owners had been telling me all season — that interest ahead of this Fourth was a flood like nothing they had ever seen. Folks, they were not wrong. People showed up. They gathered, they grilled, they packed the campgrounds and lined up the lawn chairs — including plenty of neighbors who do not agree on much of anything politically, celebrating the same flag side by side. As I wrote then, and will keep writing: we are stronger united than divided. For one shining week, an awful lot of America looked like it.
Let me be perfectly clear, in case there was ever any doubt: my patriotism is not lukewarm. I love this country — warts and all. She is not perfect, and I have never claimed she was. But I do not need her to be perfect to be grateful I get to live here, raise a family here, run a small-town newspaper here, and speak my mind without fear. That is rarer on this planet than we like to admit.
Somewhere between the campfire and the fireworks, a thought snuck up on me: the Fourth of July might be working its way toward becoming my favorite holiday. I did not see that one coming. Thanksgiving and Christmas have held the top two spots my whole life. But hear me out.
The beauty of the Fourth is its simplicity. Nobody is racing an itinerary or stressing over a fancy dinner. It comes down to family, food, water, fire, and freedom — and this year, ours came with a birthday cake and a send-off hug stacked on top. Show me a better combination. I will wait.
Maybe that is the Fourth’s greatest gift: it gives us permission to stop, look around, and actually count the blessings we are usually too busy to notice the other fifty-one weeks of the year.
I do not know what the next 250 years hold for this country, and I will not pretend to. But I know what I saw this month — in Washington, in our small towns, and around my own family’s celebration — and it left me more hopeful, not less. I remain optimistic that great days are ahead for our community newspaper, our small Northwest Ohio towns, and this remarkable country we are blessed to call home.
That is it for this week. I’d love to hear from you. As always, feel free to reach out to me at publisher@thevillagereporter.com or via mail at 115 Broad Street, Montpelier, Ohio 43543.