Above are the two biggest headlines that I can recall in The Reporter’s history. One tells the good news of an approaching boom for our town. The other, of course, bears the worst economic announcement Rockdale could possibly hear.
Everyone knows about the latter, last week’s news development about Alcoa’s demise here. It wasn’t totally unexpected, with the company having a state-of-the-art new smelter in Iceland and another planned. Alcoa is just another American industry finding that the bottom line gets better the more jobs are shipped overseas.
But not everyone around here knows the story about how that first big headline got into The Reporter that went to press on Sept. 7, 1951.
Rockdale was a serene little town of 2,300 or so back then, and agriculture was the chief industry, even in this poor sugar sand. There were a couple of cotton gins here, and before that there had been three.
I’ve told this story before, but it’s been many years so forgive me if you happen to remember it.
My father, W.H. Cooke, was the paper’s editor and publisher. He was at home taking a Sunday afternoon nap when the doorbell rang.
When he opened the door, there was a short man in a black suit and tie wearing high-button shoes of a previous generation.
He introduced himself as J.G. Puterbaugh of Oklahoma, president of McAlister Fuel Company headquartered in that state. McAlister held all the lignite leases at Sandow near Rockdale.
They sat down in the living room and Mr. Puterbaugh told Dad that he wanted to give him the biggest story ever to hit Rockdale. Mr. Puterbaugh had researched a lot of industries trying to find one that could utilize lignite in a manufacturing process. He had found that producing aluminum required vast amounts of electricity.
So he had gone to Pittsburgh, Pa. to Alcoa headquarters and painstakingly sold that company on building an aluminum smelter near Rockdale to utilize the enormous deposits of lignite in South Milam County.
Now I cannot imagine being awakened from a nap to hear that story from a little man wearing high-button shoes.
I once had a man come into my office and tell me there was a massive fortune in gold bars buried on the old Dr. Billie Newton ranch off SH 36 south of Milano (now owned by Drayton McLane). These bars, this man maintained, had been retrieved by divers from the Atocha, a Spanish galleon that sank off the Florida Keys on Sept. 6, 1622.
The guy kept throwing in the name of Mel Fisher whose diving company had found the Titantic, and had also brought up gold bars and other treasures from the Atocha.
Checked it out. Wasn’t true.
But the story that Mr. Puterbaugh brought Dad that Sunday afternoon did check out, through reliable sources.
The Reporter broke the Alcoa story. Dad broke out the “second coming” type, as it was called back then—big wooden hand-set type.
Two headlines: boom and bomb, involving the same company.
