The Front Page Was Margaret Kearney’s Vacation

Cedar Valley News
July 20, 2026
The Front Page Was Margaret Kearney’s Vacation
By Teresa Nikas

I have been reading a newspaper from the third of August, nineteen hundred, and I would like to tell you what its editors thought was the most important news in the world.

Miss Margaret Kearney had gone to Old Orchard on her vacation.

A square piano, in perfect tune, was for sale.

And a party of young ladies had spent the day out at Wallum Lake.

This was the front page. Not a corner, not the back. The front. And be careful here, because the easy thing is to smile at how small it sounds, and the easy thing is wrong.

The year nineteen hundred was not sleepy. There was a presidential campaign on. There was a war in China filling the wires. The editors knew all of it, and printed all of it, and set it back on page two. Page two. Then they took the front page, the most valuable space they owned, and gave it to a woman who caught a train to the shore.

Sit with what they believed, to do such a thing.

They believed an ordinary life was worth the best place in the paper. They believed you did not need a disaster to be news. A vacation was enough. A piano changing hands was enough, because a piano is a family’s evenings, and its sale is a story, somebody’s circumstances quietly turning. A good day at the lake was, to them, plainly worth writing down and keeping forever.

I do not think we believe it anymore.

Somewhere in the last hundred years we changed our minds about what deserves to be recorded. We decided news is the terrible thing, the famous thing, the loud thing. We decided the ordinary is the opposite of important, the filler between real events, not worth anyone’s ink. And so, without ever quite meaning to, we stopped keeping the small record. Ask yourself the last time your own good ordinary Tuesday struck you as worth marking down. We have trained ourselves out of it.

And here is what the training costs, and it is not small.

Margaret Kearney has been gone a long time. Whatever her life became, it ended. And yet on a summer morning in this century, a woman in Alaska she never imagined knows she went to Old Orchard and had, one hopes, a lovely time. She was held onto. Somebody a hundred and twenty-six years ago thought her plain day mattered enough to save, and so it was saved, and so she is not entirely gone.

The campaign of the year is in the history books, where anyone can find it. Margaret Kearney is not in the history books. She is only there because someone once decided an ordinary person was worth the front page. Nothing grand kept her. Only attention. Only somebody choosing to call an ordinary life important, and writing it down.

I can read all of this because the Library of Congress has been quietly scanning old small-town papers and putting them online, free, for anyone. They added a batch this month. And I have spent more of my week than I should admit inside those pages, and I have come out of them changed, because they are full of people whose whole claim on being remembered is one editor thinking an ordinary life was worth the honor.

Now here is the good news, the part I actually want to leave you with.

We have not lost the ability to see this way. We have only fallen out of the habit, and a habit can be taken back up any morning you choose. The old editor’s eye is still available to every one of us. You can still decide, today, the ordinary around you is worth the notice, and the saying so, and the keeping.

Tell someone their good ordinary day was good. Write the small thing down before it goes. Take the picture of nothing happening at all. Put your own people on your own front page.

Margaret Kearney went to the shore, and somebody thought it was worth remembering, and so it was. The old eye is not gone. It is only waiting for us to open it again.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. What is the oldest ordinary thing your town ever bothered to write down? Come and tell us. And if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

Cedar Valley News is free, and it comes to your inbox every morning, six days a week. If this morning’s editorial was worth your time, please forward it to someone who would value it. And if someone forwarded it to you and you’d like your own each morning, just reply with the word “subscribe.”

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the newspaper described here is real: the front page of the Pascoag Herald of Pascoag, Rhode Island, for August 3, 1900, led its Home News with Miss Margaret Kearney’s vacation to Old Orchard, a square piano “in perfect tune” for sale, and a party of young ladies at Wallum Lake. The paper was added this month to the Library of Congress’s free Chronicling America archive through the National Digital Newspaper Program.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.