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When I was in junior high school, I would frequently try to take the shortest route home. The shortest route involved cutting across the football field on Glendale Road and then slipping around the fence at the end of the parking lot at The Marietta Times. I never went into the building though until I joined my parents on a tour conducted by publisher Bill McKinney. This was my introduction to newspapering and to the building I would start to go to work at in 1977.
For the past several years though the building has been largely unused because the industry has changed so much since it opened in 1969 that we no longer needed the space. We have slowly been working to get the building ready for a new use for several years. I have helped with those efforts.
I must admit, it has felt odd at times. I have at times worked in several different areas of the building. Removing old photographic negatives for instance, I could not help but think about the fact that a lot of the film in those boxes had been put there by me. We shot hundreds of rolls per month for years. They are a record of about 20 years of Marietta history. 100 boxes of clipped articles were too. They were both donated to the special collections department of Marietta College where future generations can research how great the eighties and nineties were.
Newspaper people hate to throw anything out. I have known this for a long time. I threw a lot of stuff away for them. By a lot, I mean nine dumpsters full.
We also did a lot of recycling. A box truck full of worn-out computers for instance, and newspapers, A LOT OF NEWSPAPERS -- My rough estimate was that about a ton of newspapers were on different shelves -- It all got recycled.
Throughout the exercise I would always imagine the co-workers that I once shared the space with.
The most important former co-worker being my wife Lori - I met her in the building on my last day of college in 1983 when co-worker Wanda Miller introduced me to her.
There have been hundreds of other co-workers that have gone on to bigger and better things. Bill McKinney, the publisher that gave me a tour in 1974, would retire a short time after I started working there.
To distinguish him from the next publisher, we called him Old Bill, and his son, Young Bill, who took his place. I have worked with 10 publishers at the Times, including the current one, Jim Spanner.
The building was built before the computer age made it to newspapers. Nearly everything was done by hand, and "by hand" requires a lot of people. It took a lot of big clunky machines to get things accomplished, those big machines took up a lot of space. The Times building on Channel Lane is 22,000 square feet and was built to accommodate all those machines and the people to use them.
It is time though for The Times building to go on and do bigger and better things itself and that is exactly what it is doing. Mark Hall, a Marietta native and business owner, has purchased the building. He has owned businesses in the area in the past, such as Leasco Equipment Services and Power Maintenance. He plans on upgrading the building somewhat and converting it into offices. I have known Mark for a long time, we attended Marietta High School together a lifetime ago. "It's very nice for me to be active in Marietta again," said Hall after purchasing the building. It is the perfect next step for the building that no longer fits the needs of the newspaper.
We have established a much smaller office in Marietta to accommodate our current needs and those of SWC Real Estate, which has had an office in our building for several years. We look forward to continuing to serve Marietta with a comprehensive community newspaper, just as we have been doing since first printing a newspaper in Marietta on Sept. 24, 1864.
Art Smith is online manager of The Times, he can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com