Taken from “Goldenseal” Magazine, Summer 1990
Interview by Gibbs Kinderman

The Pocahontas Times was the first paper in the county, and the only one today.  There were others, but they were short-lived.  The Marlinton Journal  [a Republican paper, 1915-1974] lasted longer than any of the others.

Well, Grandpa Price was a prolific writer.  He had his own magazine in Virginia for a while, and he always submitted all kinds of writings to the church papers.  He just wrote and wrote and wrote.  He was interested in family history, and such like that.  So anyhow, he and the boys bought the paper because he liked to write, and he had all the children to educate.  There were six, and he didn’t make much as a preacher, you know, a couple of hundred dollars a year.

Dr. Jim and Andrew [the sons] put the paper together.  Other than write, I don’t think Grandpa Price had much to do with the actual putting out of the paper.  If he buried people he always wrote a long obituary!  He started publishing the histories of the families.  That was part of the writing that he did.   Historical Sketches of Pocahontas County was published there in nineteen-and-one, I believe.

He preached at Green Bank, all over the county.  He was a native of the county and had grown up here, and he knew everybody.  But if he buried them, they always got a longer obituary in the paper!  And it wasn’t just obituaries, it was things that he knew and that he thought were important to get written down while the Civil War people were still living, and all like that.

Now, my father [Calvin Price] was the youngest boy, and he started working when he was 16.  He was supposed to work until the others got through school, and then he was supposed to go to college.  But by the time Dr. Norman had finished medical school and Dr. Susie had finished medical school, and Aunt Anna had gone to art school and it was Daddy’s turn - he was ready to get married.  So he took over the paper in nineteen-and-five, became editor.

Daddy always said that he grew up in the shadow of other people.  Uncle Andy was called the Sage of Pocahontas, and then Daddy was called the Sage of Pocahontas, too, after Uncle Andy died in 1930.  Uncle Andy got credit for all of Daddy’s writing for a long time.  Uncle Andy was a better speaker than Daddy was, but Daddy was a better writer - at least more widely read.   Daddy always told the joke that he was know as Dr. and Mrs. William Price’s son, Calvin, you know and the he was Andy and James and Norman’s brother.  So he thought he was finally going to be on his own, going to get married and be editor of the paper.  And he said, lo and behold, he walked down the aisle and since then he’d been known as Miss Mabel’s husband!

Back in the early part of the 1900’s legal advertising was a fairly large portion of a newspaper’s income.  The law said they had to publish legals in papers [of both parties], so that assured the Marlinton Journal of a basic income.  And the tax delinquent lists, and all the things like that.  It was a pretty steady source of income, but it doesn’t amount to much today.  A few thousand dollars ran a paper for a year then, so if you had couple of thousand of that in legals you were pretty well set.  Nobody ever made a whole lot of money, but it was a steady living.   A subscription was a dollar for years. That was Grandpa Price - he said everybody ought to be able to afford something to read, so it was dollar.