Ink in My Veins

Gil Stephenson


Gil Stephenson was my great-grandfather.  According to the book, Hello Towns, by Sherwood Anderson, Gil was a child factory worker in the era shortly after the civil war, and he continued to work hard all his life.  Eventually Gil founded a newspaper, the Marion Democrat, in his and my hometown of Marion, Virginia.   Gil set the type and ran the newspaper with the help of his wife and children.    He eventually sold the paper to Sherwood Anderson, the well-known 20th century American author, who had married a woman from Marion, moved to the Virginia mountains and was looking for something to do.

After he sold the paper, Gil stayed on as a typesetter, working first with Sherwood Anderson, then Sherwood's son.  Gil had ink in his veins and typesetting was his trade. 


My great-uncle Joe helped his dad set type and then continued to work at the newspaper in some capacityfor decades, through numerous owners and newspaper name changes. 



Joe Stephenson

My great-aunt Cleo was one of the older women who served as neighborhood correspondents and turned in copy each week about the social happenings in town. Her typewriter is now in my library.

Working at this newspaper was my first job when I finished high school.  I was the Features Editor of our high school paper, and my mother encouraged me to apply for a job as a summer intern at this "real" newspaper.  It was a small town weekly then, and I covered the meetings of the town council, the county board of supervisors, and the school board unless it was an important meeting, then my editor would go. I also got to write feature articles, which were my favorites. However, I didn't like the tragedies and begged off covering a drowning at the near-by lake. I probably wasn't really a good reporter back then, lacking a certain aggressiveness in going after a story, but all my life I have loved newspapers, reporters and writing.

I didn't want to read local author and former newspaperwoman Judy Christie's Green series books for a long time.  I knew they were set in a fictitious town of Green in northwest Louisiana and were part of the religious fiction genre, but that's all I knew about them.  Despite these doubts, I downloaded Gone to Green on my Kindle just for the "cultural capital."  Locally everyone was talking about the books, yet I knew next to nothing about them.  Well, Christie had me at the milieu.  Once I discovered the book was about a young woman, Lois Barker, who inherited a small town newspaper, I was hooked.  So far I've only read the first book in the series but I plan to continue.  I can't help myself--I have ink in my veins!