The Howard Courant Is Sold to the Citizen

[T. Sackett]

     

From Last Week's Courant

     With today's issue, our long connection with The Howard Courant comes to an end.  We have sold our newspaper to The Citizen.  For the past six years we have been sole editor and publisher.  We have enjoyed the work.  Except for advancing years and changing conditions of the unsettled times we should not be ready to retire from the work and associations of almost a lifetime.
     We desire to thank all friends and supporters of the Courant.  Especially have we been proud of the faithfulness with which the former friends and subscribers of the late editor, Thos. E. Thompson, editor of The Courant for 54 years, have stood by us throughout the years from 1935 to 1942.  The subscription list is practically the same; only the normal changes that come by death and adverse circumstances, are present.  A surprising number have been on our list for more than fifty years. Yearly, a few go, and a few come to take their places.  The present editor has not been aggressive, or the good list would still be larger.
     Among our acknowledgements, we desire to mention our exchanges.  The very best of the Kansas press, weekly and daily, they seem like living, breathing friends to the writer.  More time than we could well afford has been spent in their company.  Generously, the dailies have disregarded the difference in prices and exchanged with us on even terms.  We deeply appreciate this, we shall miss them keenly in the days to come.
     We have made new friends; we have become better acquainted with old ones.  We shall be happy to have them hold us in remembrance when we no longer speak to them through the columns of our beloved newspaper, the Howard Courant.
     On retiring, we desire also to say a few words on the unusual business arrangement between the competing papers, the Courant and the Citizen.  Arranged in the interest of economy in operating expenses, the mechanical and press work has throughout been performed for the Courant by the Citizen plant.  And we do not mind saying that in the long run we perhaps could not have continued to publish our paper as long as we have under other arrangements.  The Citizen firm has been uniformly courteous and considerate.  Also, our homes are near to each other and it is a satifaction, that we sever our business connection, as good friends and neighbors.

                                                             MAUDE C. THOMPSON, Editor and Publisher

This appeared in the Howard Courant-Citizen on Thursday, January 29, 1942

[W. Gray]

Thanks for including this item.

Thomas E. Thompson was a quite famous editor in Kansas but his competitor at the Citizen may have been more prosperous.

Tom told the Kansas City Star in the 1930s that sometime previous he had to modernize his Courant printing operation and did not know where he was going to get the resources to do so.

Fred C. Flory and Thompson were best of friends and Flory knew of Thompson's predicament. He offered him the use of his larger Citizen plant and Tom accepted the business deal. Flory remodeled his plant with two front offices. One office window said Howard Courant and the next office window said Howard Citizen.

Tom's son, Clad, was so successful at the Kansas City Star that he had probably declined to take over the Courant when Tom died in 1935. Maude ran the operation from then until merging with the Citizen.

It does not sound like the Courant was doing that well, probably because Maude Thompson was tired. They married in Elk Falls in November 1882. When she sold out to the Citizen, Fred's son Floyd ran it at the time, if I can recall correctly.

Fred C. Flory ran a Democrat newspaper and Thompson ran a Republican newspaper. Not sure what that made the Courant-Citizen.

Both Tom and Maude Thompson experienced the Boston War. She as a citizen of Elk Falls and he as a citizen of Boston. Maude's father guarded Tom's father at his incarceration in Elk Falls when he was a "POW." I have always wondered how the fathers-in-law got along.

Maude was famous for saying the people in Elk Falls were more afraid of the men in Boston than of the Indians.

She also believed during the Boston War that no man of even tolerable respectability lived in the town of Boston. When she met Tom, she apparently could not resist.