Communing Everywhere
Welcome to yet another thrilling edition of your Parkville Luminary, folks.
We’ve got a lot of information in this week’s episode and we hope it serves you well.
On page one, you’ll notice that we opted to put a picture of a place that is not in our locale. What’s interesting is that boat does have sort of a roundabout Parkville tie in that it is a gambling boat. I shudder to think of what would have happened had we had a gambling boat in town and a tornado or raging flood struck. We could literally be looking at something like that photo in English Landing Park. Luckily, all we’ve ever gotten in Parkville are angry mobs and train disasters.
Discounting the times we’ve used artistic renderings, the last time we did that was when we published photos of St. Peter’s Square in Moscow. They say local community papers aren’t supposed to do things like that, but we never had a chance to read the manual.
We were given all sorts of advice, one of them being to start a “reader advisory panel.” It’s a popular idea with one of the largest newspaper chains in America. A panel would be formed and meetings without pay would be attended and lots of feedback and advice would occur at them.
Since we don’t have that type of meeting space, we rely on other, apparently non-traditional methods of ascertaining feedback from our readers. Things like, oh, going out into public places and actually meeting them, taking their phone calls and answering their mail. Our advisors are our subscribers and readers.
As The Luminary grows and word of our….om….luminescence spreads throughout the land, you can rest assured that we’ll never forget to give back to our community at the same time we’re listening. Our relationship with our readers must be a symbiotic one. A newspaper can’t just survive in their own little world, they need to be a piece of a community. So it doesn’t matter if we have the smallest staff in the newspaper business, to paraphrase Tom Joad, in a community arrangement, we’re everywhere.
These days, Parkville is, indeed, everywhere. Contingents of business men still continue to head down to Ocean Springs each week, including Tom Hutsler, Mike Horine, and Anna Jaffe (the folks who do the programming at Channel 2). Last week, Mayor Dusenbery also visited the town and had the opportunity to attend a planning session that, in effect, has mapped out the future direction of the Gulf Coast for the next several decades. The devastation and concern for the folks down there aside, Dusenbery reported that what she heard from the architects, engineers and city planners actually cheered her. Not only does the future seem bright for our adopted city in Mississippi, what she heard led her to believe that Parkville was pursuing a smart path in terms of future growth as well.
Another group of Parkvillians are in Argentina this week, touring the South American country as part of a joint program between Park University and Piropos. Christina Worden is the hostess for the trip, so I’m sure they’re having no fun at all. I mean, Mrs. Worden really has nooooo idea on how to live life to the fullest.
Most important however is one person who has come back to our city in recent days. Aggressively fighting multiple myeloma in Arkansas the past few weeks, alderman and downtown resident Jack Friedman is back in town and just in time to carve pumpkins. Welcome back home Jack, from everyone.