Rural California weekly owner Newt Wallace, dubbed 'World's Oldest Paperboy' at 94, dies at 98 in Winters - Entrepreneur Generations

Newt Wallace (Sacramento Bee photo by Emily Zentner)

Newt Wallace, recognized as the world's oldest paperboy by Ripley's Believe It or Not, died on April 1 at the age of 98. He bought the Winters Express in Northern California in 1947 and ran a hands-on operation, reporting stories, writing columns, setting type, selling ads and delivering the paper with his wife and childrens' help. Winters, a town of 7,000 in Yolo County, enjoyed a circulation of 2,000. After he was done delivering the papers, he liked to walk to the Buckhorn Steakhouse and trade three newspapers for a beer.

"Charley Wallace succeeded his father as Express publisher in 1983. Newt Wallace remained the paper’s 'publisher emeritus' and worked full-time until officially retiring in 2015, but he never really stopped," Hudson Sangree reports for the Sacramento Bee. "Months shy of his 99th birthday, Wallace still arrived at the office for a few hours daily to organize advertising inserts and put together the paper’s history page."

Wallace was no Winters native: he went to high school in Muskogee, Okla, and graduated from Iowa State University. Heart problems kept him out of the military in World War II, but he helped build the Alaska Highway, worked in a shipyard in Long Beach, and worked as a reporter at a local daily. He decided he wanted to buy a weekly and heard the Winters Express was for sale. He had to find Winters on a map, he told the Bee in a 2008 interview, since he had no idea where it was. "Once he saw Winters, a little farm town nestled against the Vaca Mountains, he fell in love. It reminded him of small towns in Iowa," Sangree reports. "Wallace plunked down $8,500 for the paper, which began publishing in 1884 and had 700 subscribers in the late 1940s."

Though Winters is a small town, Wallace had some red-letter days. While recovering from a herniated disk in August 1953, he covered two big stories in one day: after covering the nearby groundbreaking on the Monticello Dam, he learned about a woodmill fire and drove out to cover it. He made it back to the office at 4 a.m. and was able to print the paper by 9 a.m.--then delivered it, Sangree reports.

In 1967 the U.S. Information Agency shot a documentary about the Express to be sent all over the world as a representation of American small-town weeklies.

In 1962, as the vice president of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, he was invited by John F. Kennedy's press secretary to represent the state's weekly papers at a White House lunch. When he told Kennedy "I'm glad you have this job instead of me," Kennedy told Wallace, "This is the first I knew you were a candidate."

Wallace was the president of the CNPA in 1964. Wallace's generation of publiushers "really viewed themselves personally as a utility," the current  CNPA executive director, Tom Newton, told Sangree. "They provided an essential service to their towns, like water or electricity, while also being principal citizens, he said," Sangree reports.

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from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2uYuJ9D Rural California weekly owner Newt Wallace, dubbed 'World's Oldest Paperboy' at 94, dies at 98 in Winters - Entrepreneur Generations

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