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Back issue reveals footnote to First Lady’s visit
The Internet is a wonderful tool, but it will never take the place of the real thing for those of us who’ve spent our working lives around newspapers.
While there’s lots of information out there floating around in Cyberspace, it’s just not the same as actually holding a yellowed copy of The Sylva Herald – one that was printed almost four decades ago.
Harold Sims of Cullowhee located a few old issues recently and passed them along to Herald Publisher Steve Gray. One of those, Vol. 41, No. 45 (this issue is Vol. 81, No. 6), which is dated March 16, 1967, chronicles Lady Bird Johnson’s – the only First Lady known to have visited Jackson County – trip to Western Carolina University and the old Canada School, which was closed in 1982 and torn down in 2004.
We’ve all heard the main story: Lady Bird wanted a firsthand look at the Teacher Corps, one of President Johnson’s first weapons in the War on Poverty and one of the communities it was created to serve.
Former county Commissioner Franz Whitmire, also a past principal of both Jackson County’s high schools, was then a Teacher Corps intern and is in the newspaper’s front-page photo of the First Lady’s visit to Canada School.
Until this issue surfaced, I’d only seen the microfilmed record of her visit. Looking at the real thing, I noticed that Mrs. Johnson was not the only newsmaker that week. The flock of print and television journalists who traveled with her also merited a front-page headline. There’s even a photo of a gaggle of newspeople standing by the side of then-unpaved N.C. 281, waiting for the First Lady to emerge from the home of Eldon Mathis, where she had been invited inside for a visit.
Another photo shows the Reid Gymnasium newsroom that was set up at WCU – then Western Carolina College – to accommodate Mrs. Johnson’s press entourage.
“The largest corps of newsmen ever to be in Western North Carolina for a single occasion covered Mrs. Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Canada School and Western Carolina College Tuesday,” began The Herald’s story. “Some 140 newsmen, representing the nation’s largest daily newspapers, magazines, television and radio networks, wire services, trade and professional journals and non-daily newspapers were on hand. One large commercial bus was needed just to transport photographers. Two others were used for Mrs. Johnson’s party and ‘writing’ newsmen.”
That WCC press room, according to the story, “was set up with a number of telephones, installed especially for the occasion, and typewriters were there.”
Reading that, I was struck by the differences in the tools journalists use now. Modern-day reporters would be equipped with their own laptop computers and wouldn’t move without their cell phones. Once they got to Canada community, however, they’d be just as out of touch as their 1967 counterparts were – much of that area still lacks a good cell signal.
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