Wednesday afternoons, we put the paper to bed. It was a family affair: My siblings and I, along with several other local teenagers, were drafted to insert the various inside sections — sports, advertising circulars — into the front section to create The Sampsonian, a weekly that my father co-owned in Clinton until he retired in 1986. We rolled and rubber-banded the “mixed state singles,” then stuffed them into large canvas bags that, around dusk, we’d deposit on the loading dock of the post office.

Then, attention turned to next week’s news.

Running a small-town newspaper was the only thing my father ever wanted to do. He was fortunate enough to study journalism at UNC Chapel Hill on the G.I. Bill. He took his first job out of college at The Chatham News in Siler City, where he spent 19 years as a reporter. “I was the news staff,” he said, years later, in an article commemorating his 37 years in the business. “I took all the pictures and wrote all the news and typed all the correspondence and the weddings. Everything had to be typed on yellow paper in those days and given to a linotype operator. He made a proof, and it had to be read for corrections. I tell you, it took all week to put out a paper.”

Starting in the mid-’60s, when he went to work for The Sampsonian, my father wrote editorials and a weekly column called “Making the Rounds.” It featured commentary on goings-on in the community as well as the antics of his, ahem, children.

It’s a cliché that everyone knows everyone’s business in a small town. But my father knew almost everyone, if not their business. He knew store owners from selling ads, and he knew the school board and city council from covering their meetings. He got to know a lot of people from spelling their names wrong, a grave mistake unless the name in question happened to appear in the police blotter.

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Newspapers in general serve a dual and somewhat contradictory purpose. On the one hand, they are a business — they make their money selling ads and subscriptions. On the other, their purpose is loftier: to set a kind of moral tone, to rise above commerce and opine on matters most pertinent to the community.

One of the things my father learned in college was that the purpose of journalism is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. He took these words to heart. He spoke his mind during the era of Jim Crow and stepped on every other toe with his left-leaning editorials in a small conservative town. (A particular target was Jesse Helms.) But he also made friends with most of the people he alienated politically.

Maybe this is because he was — or at least his job was — indispensable at the time. Everyone “took” the paper. (Once, when I asked someone if they took the paper, they said, “No, I paid for it.”) If they didn’t subscribe, they bought it from one of the dozens of paper boxes placed around the county. I don’t think my father knew everyone who took the paper, but he did know several who no longer did, as they had a habit of writing letters to the editor demanding that their subscription be canceled for some reason or the other.

There were dozens of reasons to take the paper, from the lurid to the athletic to the morbid.

There were dozens of reasons to take the paper, from the lurid (pictures of car wrecks and about-to-be-blown-up whiskey stills on the front page) to the athletic (complete coverage of local high school sports) to the morbid (one of my sisters still gets the paper just to read the obituaries). People took the paper to find out when the Jaycees would hold their womanless beauty pageant, the Rotary Club their pancake breakfast, local churches their fundraising fish fries. There was a religion column, a cooking column, and columns from correspondents who lived in what seemed to be “remote” parts of the county. My favorite was the “Seven Mile Hopewell” column, from somewhere up near Newton Grove. Written by someone named Big Sis, in a style that I later learned was called “stream of consciousness,” the news from “Seven Mile Hopewell” prepared me for the experiments of Faulkner and other modernists. I remember reading Gertrude Stein for the first time and thinking, Hell, she’s got nothing on Big Sis. And with Big Sis, I could figure out who motored up to Raleigh to visit their cousin recovering from gall bladder surgery at Rex Hospital.

Of course, there was some non-local news gathered from the AP wire, and “Ask Ann Landers,” and the comics. Occasionally, in order for all the ads to fit, a comic strip had to be omitted. Here came more irate phone calls, or sometimes visits to the office. There were people in and out of the office all day, to the extent that I don’t know how my father or his staff got anything done. Though it did occur to me that sometimes it wasn’t necessary to go out and find the news; it came walking through the door.

Although my father was on good terms with most everyone, he generally refused to do business with stores that didn’t advertise. His reasoning was simple — if they’re not putting a dime in my pocket, why should I put a dime in theirs? — but it alienated his children, who were forced to wear off-brand blue jeans and could only window shop at the local sporting goods store.

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I like to believe that, however ticked off I was at not getting first crack at a pair of Wranglers, my sacrifices were small in the service of what the newspaper did: bring us all together, provide a stronger sense of community. And there are the memories. The rhythm of putting out the paper, which was the rhythm of our family’s lives: the long and industrious hours of Monday and Tuesday, the intense push of Wednesday, the short but sweet relief of Thursday, when my father played golf and my mother did the week’s grocery shopping. How could I forget the poetry — Wilmington-Wade-Warsaw-Mount Olive — of the destination of the papers we stuffed into those canvas bags. The thrill of holding the finished paper in hand, knowing that people were waiting for it. And, of course, the smell, everywhere, in the car, on our clothes, even at home, of ink.

The love for publishing endures in the Parker family — check out the Our State Book Club where we feature Michael Parker and his new book, I Am the Light of This World.