by Gabe Donio

Some time ago, my wife Gina bought me an edition of The Hammonton Hornet, the local newspaper of Hammonton. This particular edition was from August 17, 1882.
This past week I looked through it again, as a reminder.
A quick glance at the Illustrated History of the Town of Hammonton, published in 1889, gives a brief history of The Hornet. It was, according to the book, a newspaper that “grew with its growth and strengthened with its strength, contending with opposition and prejudice.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
A look through an actual copy of the paper, which has held up remarkably well physically in the intervening 130 years, gives a view into the Hammonton of the summer of 1882.
It’s all there: the news of the people of the day, with their various troubles and accomplishments. Political debates from the era, advertisements for local businesses and notices of social importance are also printed in the newspaper’s neatly-arranged columns.
I’m sure it meant a lot to the Hammontonians who read The Hornet, 130 years ago.
Baseball scores are listed on the front page, top left-hand corner. It’s a pretty important spot in a newspaper. The games and news of teams like the Blue Stockings of Mays Landing, the Elm Club and the Athletics of Gibbsboro are all printed. They must have had quite a following.
For some reason, reading that newspaper from 130 years ago made me think of one of my favorite plays, Our Town by Thornton Wilder. The play was written in 1938 and is set in a small town called Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire from the years 1901 to 1913.
It was a strange connection, writing a column for the newspaper you are reading right now about a newspaper from the same town in 1882, and then thinking about a play from 1938 set more than 30 years earlier. Maybe it’s not strange. It’s something to do with time, and people, and what we think is important, and what is actually important.
We must always remember the human element in everything we do.
The last words in Our Town belong to the Stage Manager, who sees all and knows all, or at least appears to, in the play.
Those words seem to be the best way to end this column.
“There are the stars—doing their old, old criss-cross in the skies. Scholars haven’t settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk—or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain’s so great that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest. Hm – eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners. Everybody’s resting in Grover’s Corners. You get a good rest too. Good night.”
Gabe Donio is the publisher of The Gazette.