Marlinton, Pocahontas County, West Virginia

SPECIAL EDITION                                           OCTOBER, 13, 2002

“ 30 ”

a man...       a newspaper...      and now, a film...

“Cal Price was the living embodiment of a man with plenty of simple dignity and honest pride.  He didn’t have to pretend to be better...it was a great privilege and heritage to be what he was.”

Brooks Cottle - “Cal Price...and Thirty” - June 19, 1957

The Morgantown Post

            CAL PRICE AND “THIRTY.”   The headline said it all.  Editors across America wrote their final personal thoughts about one of West Virginia’s most loved and admired - “the old master of mountain journalism.” They put their papers to bed that June of 1957, knowing that the news would shake the hills.  Calvin Wells Price was dead.

                Or so they all thought.  The memory of Cal Price lives on in the pages of The Pocahontas Times, the county’s first and only remaining newspaper. The Times was America’s last handset newspaper and is one of the oldest existing weeklies in the country, and, it was one of the first enter the age of the computer.                But...it was still “Cal’s Paper.”  The Price Family is still “at the press”, the workers are still women, obituaries are still on the front page, and, like always, readers around the world still expect their paper on time.

The Typical Country Editor

“I take exception to the word ‘typical.’  I have the paper I started working on back in schoolboy days;

  I attend prayer meetings regularly;  I sent my children to college;  I pay my debts, and have embarrassing good credit with the wholesalers, the banks and the local grocery stores.

Nothing typical in such a record -

I calls it onusual.”