By Garrett Ray
Grassroots Editor
Fall 1986

Hal DeCell died August 14, 1988, at the age of 63, having edited and published the Deer Creek Pilot for 39 years.

Twenty five years ago this summer, Hal DeCell’s telephone rang in Rolling Fork, Miss. DeCell’s aunt was calling from her home in Akron, Ohio. “Congratulations on your award!” she said.

The co owner of the weekly Deer Creek Pilot was mystified. What was she talking about? DeCell’s aunt had read in the Akron newspaper that he had received the first Golden Quill for editorial writing, awarded at something called the International Conference of Weekly Newspaper Editors.

“I called Howard Long and said, ‘What’s this about me winning something? He said, ‘Didn’t somebody call you?’ So he sent me the plaque,” recalls DeCell, who still has never attended a meeting of the group that made the award.

There's some mystery about exactly what DeCell wrote to win the first Golden Quill. Long, who co founded the ICWNE (now the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors), began the annual tradition of printing a booklet that included the Golden Dozen - the winner and 11 runners up. But Long does not have a copy of that first booklet.

DeCell recalls receiving a copy, but he can’t find it. “My files are like any other editor’s, with stuff on top of' this file cabinet, and on top of that one,” he says. Still busy getting out his paper each week, he did not have time to dig out the original column from his newspaper files.

The ISWNE office at Northern Illinois University does not have a copy of either the 1961 Golden Dozen book or the Golden Quill editorial. Long suspects that Southern Illinois University, former home of the ISWNE, might have a copy.

Each year’s Golden Quill editorial is now reprinted in Grassroots Editor. The summer 1961 issue of the magazine included a powerful DeCell editorial. But the editor insists, “That one wasn’t the winner.”

The editorial reprinted in Grassroots Editor is courageous and eloquent, a vigorous attack on Governor Ross Barnett and the tactics of the White Citizens Councils.

“We never thought to see the day when Mississippians - a breed of people almost to ourselves, prizing individual freedom of action above all else - would silently condone through lack of vigorous protest those appalling practices currently painting a police state portrait of our beloved state,” DeCell wrote in part.

The editor recalls now, “That isn’t the editorial that won the award. The one they gave me the award for was - well, I think my friend Bill Rotch would have called it Afghanistanism then. The Third World nations were raising hell in the U.N., demanding this and that. I just got fed up with tinpot dictators, demanding help that never got down to the people.

“That’s what brought it on. I’m sort of surprised that one won. It was a good piece of wordsmithing, but it was not much in content.”

Howard R. Long, now retired and living in Columbia, Mo., remembers the first winner as “a good one.”

“From the beginning, we never said, ‘This is the best editorial written this year,’” Long says. “But we claimed - and it was true that we went through 100,000 editorials to pick the winners each year. I had lots of student help in those days, so we could go through a lot of editorial pages.

“We were receiving tremendous numbers of weekly papers, and we read them all. It was partly because we wanted material for Grassroots Editor.”

C.A. Burley was president of the editors’ group. At each year’s conference, Southern Illinois University presented the Lovejoy Award for courage in journalism. Burley suggested that there should be an award to be presented by the ICWNE president. So, Long says, “We simply began to accumulate the good editorials there in the shop.”

From thousands of potential winners, Long selected several hundred to send to an outside judge, who picked the Golden Dozen.

Burley, then editor of the Menlo Park (Calif.) Recorder, defined the original standard: “…not to select the best editorial of the year, but simply to recognize a good piece of writing…something turned out under the pressure of a deadline…in the heat of indignation, or inspiration…or simply an idea the writer has to get off his chest.”

DeCell’s editorials, in 1986 as in 1961, more than meet that standard. Still, he claims that he is no longer a wordsmith but an editor, mostly editing others’ words. His “Out On A Limb” column filling the right hand column of the editorial page on the back page of his paper now quotes other writers as frequently as it features his own opinions.

His wife and partner, Carolyn, also writes a regular opinion column that is headed, “Trimmed In Lace - Dedicated to Feminine Thoughts, if any.” The title, he admits, might be “sort of chauvinistic.”

DeCell will be 62 in November. He says that after a lifetime of writing, “I have written everything I can think of. After awhile you just get tired; you’ve used all the cuss words you can think of to use politely.”

Back in 1961, he had not run out of' words. The South was in turmoil; the racial crisis was at its peak. Governor Barnett, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Citizens’ Councils were riding high. DeCell describes that time as “the hell years.” “We were going through the throes of school integration,” he says. “I was trying to keep the public schools open; it split families right down the middle.”

Surprisingly, that tense period did not make for his most eloquent writing, the editor believes. “You’re trying to feel your way, trying to accomplish an end rather than put it in pretty words. You needed to try to reason with them. You don’t reason in literature; you stick more or less to 10 cent words.”

The community, the schools, and the newspaper survived. A white private academy, started then, is still operating; but the integrated public schools are highly rated.

“Apparently we weren’t the only ones with problems. Back in the bad old days every little thing that happened was picked up by the wire services and went across the nation. But they’re having more trouble in Boston today than we ever had, as far as real day to day violence goes.”

Some other courageous Deep South editors, victims of ostracism, boycotts, and firebombings, did not survive the ’60s. How did the Pilot manage to continue while keeping its voice?

“I’m a sonofabitch, but I’m their sonof¬abitch,” DeCell explains. He was born in nearby Vicksburg, and his wife’s parents were also Mississippi newspaper owners. He and Carolyn have owned the Pilot since 1949.

“We’ve been fortunate,” he adds. “The social structure on the white side here has always been tolerant. That’s what kept me going. A handful of rich planters stood behind me. The extremists have mellowed - mellowed or faced reality, I can’t tell you which. They finally realized that it didn’t do any good.”

DeCell has mellowed too. “There was a day, years and years ago when I was positive I had an answer to everything,” he says. “There are a helluva lot of things that there are no answers to. I resent these people who have pat answers for everything that comes down the pike, from Northern Ireland to abortion.

“I couldn’t tell you to save my soul whether abortion is right or wrong. But you’ve got these people blowing up clinics, and people just as violent on the other end, and they all make these profound statements.

“Maybe I’ve found it easier to live without finding an answer to everything. I guess you call that creeping old age; I sort of oozed into it.”

Don’t get the idea that DeCell is oozing away from strong opinions. He is distressed by the sale of independent newspapers to chains. He is also troubled by the state of journalism education.

“They’re no longer journalism schools, but communication schools,” he complains. “I have a soapbox I mount periodically about how journalists are being taught and how they are not being taught. They all seem to aim at television rather than honest to God writing. I think we’ve had a decline in writing, and it’s distressing to me.

“It has become un chic to say that Miss So and So broke her leg. Young journalists want to expose someone for crookedness in public office; that’s almost totally their concept of what people want to read. That’s driven a lot of' papers out of business.”

The DeCells’ paper, with a riverboat chugging across the nameplate, is decidedly local. The eight column pages have an old fashioned, comfortably cluttered look. Headlines, a seemingly haphazard mixture of' type styles, tell of 4 H trips, farm support programs, burglaries and neighborhood suppers.

Like many rural county seat towns, Rolling Fork is hurting. The two small factories - textiles and automobile parts - are struggling to meet foreign competition.

“We just keep on keeping on, but I don’t know how long we can keep doing it if the president doesn’t do something about the farm situation,” DeCell says. “We scrap to get eight journal size pages.”

According to the Mississippi Press Association, the DeCells’ paper was the last weekly in America to switch to cold type. Though DeCell isn’t sure the claim is true, he knows that the Pilot was one of the last hot metal newspapers in the nation, “and I didn’t want to change when we did.”

The Pilot was dragged “kicking and screaming” into offset printing only two years ago. Parts supply was becoming a problem. When the DeCells’ Linotype operator retired, they reluctantly bought a Compugraphic and retired the Goss press.

Though DeCell talks about retirement, none of the couple’s children appears interested in taking over the paper. One son is Congressman Jamie Whitten’s administrative assistant; another is a senior editor at the Washingtonian magazine. Their daughter teaches in Arkansas, where her husband operates a farm.

“I don’t think we’ll ever give this thing up,” DeCell confirms. “It’s a way of life, and we’ve been happy with it.”

The editor is grateful to be in a community that he says has grown in tolerance through the years. “There are no more answers than there ever were, but there’s a lot more tolerance.”

“We do away legally with all the discrimination we possibly can. But when we get down to everyday life, living with each other, we’re going to butt heads someplace along the line. It’s just as true in international relationships.

“We’re going to have conflict, and we’re going to have to work around conflict. That’s good for the newspaper business, it’s good for television, and it’s good for schools of communication.”