By Megan McAdams
As the ink flows across the pages of the last ever Tarkio Avalanche, printing the pages and imprinting our minds with 2016’s last hoorah, we say a fond farewell to a newspaper that has kept us abreast of the goings-on for 132 years.
It’s been one heck of a ride, Tarkio. Year after year, our readers have opened these pages to see the town coming to life with its stories of prosperity blossoming across the fabric of the press in black inked words and pictures. We’ve wetted the pages with our tears of sorrow upon reading about tragedies striking our brethren, and with tears of joy at the telling of real life, hometown miracles that remind us that we are not alone in our trials of life. We’ve laughed in the face of terrible typos and advertising faux pas. We’ve celebrated bus­inesses opening their doors for the first time and sighed in disappointment when they closed them for the last. We’ve shared in the excitement of achievement by our young athletes on the fields of glory and of our young future leaders on the stages of academic success. We’ve read about buildings falling to ruin and the revitalization of others. We’ve shaken our heads in disgust while reading the telling of certain dubious exploits and guffawed the next week in the telling of the captures.We’ve read about the needs of townsfolk and then of the success in everyone coming together to help. Newspapers are the heartbeat and lifeblood of the town’s citizens and we are blessed to still have that going for us.
Working for the Avalanche has been a family tradition of mine that has accumulated over 70 years of service, though not all together. My grandfather, the late Charles “Chub” McAdams, worked for the Avalanche for 50 years and my father, the late Mick McAdams, worked for the Avalanche for around 10 years. This past January marked 10 years of service to the Avalanche for me. It has been the most fun-filled years of my life, spent capturing the news and relaying it through words and pictures and learning more about the town that I’ve grown up in and grown to love. Though I’m sad to see a time-honored name end, I’m excited to see where this next adventure takes us, as a business and as a county of readers coming together as a community. I’m excited to witness the dawning of a new era that is the Atchison County Mail, a combined Tarkio, Fairfax, and Rock Port newspaper.
Our fingers will still be ink stained, our appetites for the news filled, and our happiness continued with the sight of our friends’, children’s, and grandchildren’s smiling faces looking back at us on the pages. We can become even closer as we learn more about each town and its people with the flip of a page. We will see more advertisements from not only local stores, but also area merchants, as a combined paper allows them to save money on their advertising budgets and hopefully, they will be able to advertise more. This is an exciting time and we appreciate our readers taking that leap of faith with us and seeing this through.