Reminiscing with Sidney Newlon about

 

Green Hollow

 

Taken from Country Editor
Published in Iowa in 1993

 
  The city brethren looked down their noses at the likes of us in the boondocks who had grown used to the helping hand from Western Newspaper Union. It was evident that the city newsmen took a dim view of grassroots people upon whom we depended as faithful subscribers. Believe it or not, The Beacon even had a few readers tucked away deeply into the hill country west of town and almost forsaken from civilization's beaten paths. There were subscribers whose only source of what was going on in the outside world was The Beacon.
 
  Who can ever forget the late Cartoonist Al Capp's drawings that were developed around Li'l Abner and Hillbilly Dogpatch . What Capp had in mind when he created the Dogpatch series we'll never know, but this thickly wooded hill area surely must have been a counterpart. It's community of natives comprised the tiny settlement that went under the tag name of Green Hollow. The only thing the people lacked was a southern drawl.
 
 
 
  The Green Hollow folks, in the days when we first knew them, lived mostly in shanties. A few even found satisfaction in living as actual cave dwellers in homes carved out of clay banks.
 
   Green Hollow was located amidst deep gullies, and it was served by a winding road barely passable for two cars in a touch and go situation for the best of drivers.
 
   Grading, leveling and home construction in late years left only memories of what once was the real Green Hollow.
 
  Westen Newspaper Union's readyprint service was beginning to lose many of its subscribers and chose to call it quits. No to function entirely on its own without the readyprint crutch. There came the satisfaction that our newspaper now could be proud to be recognized as 100 percent hometowner