Pine Bluff Commercial and 2 trains passing in the daytime

I worked for the Pine Bluff Commercial newspaper twice, once after graduation from high school in 1972 as a summer job before going to college, and then again when I moved back to Pine Bluff  in the late summer of 2005, after being away for 33 years. Both times I started as a copy editor, then became a reporter, and both times the job only lasted a little over two months. This was what was expected of me in '72, since it was just a summer job. I actually liked the job then, EXCEPT for having to be there at 7:30 a.m. since it was an afternoon paper. Even though it was a morning paper in 2005, and work hours were flexible and started around 11 a.m., I struggled with the work of being a modern copy editor,  using InDesign to edit and lay out stories and photos.. Then I struggled just as much with being the Business and Farm reporter when that job came open, because I'm no good at writing copy quickly.  I wrote some stories about Hurricane Katrina based on interviews with evacuees from New Orleans who were staying in Pine Bluff, but I really wasn't suited to the job, so I up and quit the first week of October.

The Commercial is still being published, barely, having been bought in 2020 by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette . It's published as a 6-page part of that newspaper's Arkansas section. It wouldn't have survived on its own, so it's good the ADG bought it. The building the Commercial was in from 1963 until the paper was purchased by the ADG--the building I worked in both times I was there--is still standing but is in pretty shabby shape, basically abandoned, although it was bought two years ago with the idea that it could be used to house a cryptocurrency mining operation. Here are two photos I took of it recently, the first before the shrubs were trimmed. The state of the building is an indication of what has happened to newspapers as well as what is happening to Pine Bluff.

The cryptocurrency operation plan isn't happening yet and I hope it doesn't. The parking lot beyond the chain link fence was the employee parking lot both times I worked there. (I don't recall if the fence was there in 2005--probably not--and it definitely wasn't there in '72.) 

In 1972, the glass door going into the newsroom from the parking lot had the words "Employe Entrance" stenciled on it.  That spelling of "Employe," I learned later, was an older spelling of the word that the Commercial (the owners, Ed and Armistead Freeman) still insisted on using in 1972. 

I took the above photos at Beech Street and 4th Avenue, while I was parked on the railroad tracks on 4th Avenue. Beech Street is one of the few streets that has a RR crossing now (Cherry, Walnut, Pine, Main, State and Alabama are others). Overpasses were built in the late 1980s on University Avenue, Convention Center Drive, and 5th, 6th and 28th Avenues.  Poplar Street, a block east of Cherry, doesn't have a RR crossing, but I pulled up there a few weeks ago when I was leaving my house to drive to Little Rock because I noticed there were two trains passing on the two tracks--a rare site. It was something I thought other former or current Pine Bluff residents might like to see. I was playing the title track of Joy of Cooking's 1971 album Closer to the Ground while shooting the video. The temperature setting in my recently purchased 2008 Camry Hybrid happened to be 71 also. I think my late friend Pat Calkins would have liked this video, although there's not much to it. He made a video about ten years ago that I have somewhere (on a VHS tape) of the harbor and the Pioneer Inn area of Lahaina, Maui, while walking around and narrating it. I sure hope I can find that tape, now that the old Lahaina area he filmed is gone.

The Martha Beall Mitchell house at 4th and Elm (a block away) is barely visible (behind a tree) at the 48 second point in the video.