First some sad news. A member of The Reporter Gang, Linda Whorton, died this past Tuesday. She worked here for 36 years. Naturally, her son Shannon was out on Wednesday being with his family which is exactly where he should have been.
Shannon is our production guru and he’s the reason the paper looks so good each week. He also does a million other things around here all by himself.
Our newspaper is printed at The Bryan Eagle, and we normally upload all the pages except the front page on Tuesday evenings. We save the front page in case something happens on Tuesday night that we need to report which requires us to come in early and make changes to the front page to get the news out before we send it to Bryan electronically.
Remember the shootout between the Rockdale Police Officers and some person who lived near the elementary school? That happened on a Tuesday night.
On last Wednesday morning I couldn’t even figure out how to turn Shannon’s computer on until Mary Lou remembered he always unplugs it at night.
Then the date was all screwed up and I couldn’t do what I needed to do, but the people at The Eagle were kind after I told them what happened and allowed me to send the front page by email instead of uploading it to their system.
Once the papers were delivered it came time to label the newspapers, put them in the correct boxes and get them to the post office. This is also Shannon’s job, but Mary Lou had done it a couple of times when he was on vacation so we figured it would be a piece of cake.
We couldn’t have been more wrong. The problem started—we think—when the labels were inserted into the machine in the wrong order. It was a madhouse. All hands on deck. Suzy, Mary Lou and I were trying to figure out which papers went into which pre-labeled box. Even Gene Stork came back and helped us try to figure out what we were doing. Angela Sanders-Hadd from the post office even came over to help and made the job seem a little less daunting.
So, if you got your paper in the mail last week, you should buy a lotto ticket. Gene and I took all the papers to the post office and we both agreed on the way back that the newspapers were in God’s hands now.
I believe some brushing up on cross training is in order in case there is another time one of us can’t be here.
(By the way, that was a two-margarita evening instead of my usual one.)
And now back to Linda. Pastor Stephen Ammons of Meadowbrook Baptist Church gave her a wonderful celebration of life on Saturday afternoon, and as a tribute to Linda and all who knew her, so many people showed up that there was no more room in the fellowship hall, so the service had to be relocated at the last minute to the sanctuary.
The Whorton family has been so good to the Cooke family over the years. All six immediate family members have worked for The Reporter in one capacity or another. I believe the oldest, Derric, and the youngest, Justin, were both gophers which is the same job I had in high school. Linda started out in production and then moved to the front office and helped customers and ran the classifieds. Shellie at one time also worked up front, and of course Shannon, as I’ve already mentioned, has been here since 1984 or so. So even longer than his mother. I thought Warren Whorton, the father, hadn’t worked here but I got corrected by him on Saturday. He has worked here. So the entire family.
My heartfelt condolences to all of you.
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