“The annual dinner for Daily Republican employees which marked the 50^th year of the newspaper’s ownership by the Paisley family this week highlighted recollections of a half century of history for a newspaper and the community it serves.When Oldham Paisley, president of Republican-Leader, Inc., which publishes the Daily Republican and the Weekly Leader, joined his father, the late W.O. Paisley, in buying the two year old newspaper in 1915, the First World War seemed a long way off in Europe.Here in Marion the American Civil War was still remembered by many who had lived through it. Sons of veterans were prominent in business and politics. Spanish American War veterans were “young soldiers.”

Marion was a country county seat town touched by industrialization because of the opening of coal mines to the west, north and east. Farmers brought their livestock, produce and grain here to market. Two flour mills turned wheat into breadstuff. There were few automobiles, but horse drawn vehicles predominated.

There were no chain stores and no paved highways. Merchandise to stock the home owned stores arrived by railroad freight. Drummers who came to take the orders from the stores were met at one or the other of two railroad stations by horse drawn busses which took them to the West Side Hotel on West Main Street where the Bank of Egypt is now located or to the Goodall Hotel which occupied a three story building on the present site of the Grant Store (now City Hall) on the Public Square. Their trunks followed by one horse, two wheeled dray (carts).

Interurban cars on the Coal Belt Electric Line carried miners to the pits northwest of Marion each morning, and operated hourly during the day between Marion, Herrin, and Carterville. As mines were opened in the Pittsburg-Paulton area east of town, hundreds of miners daily rode Missouri Pacific and the Marion and Eastern steam trains to their employment.

Marion was a Saturday night town. Stores were open late. Downtown streets were crowded. Families went to the theaters. Stage entertainment at the Old Opera House and the New Roland Theater was to lose out to the motion picture houses, the Family Theater on North Market and the Isis Theater on West Main Street.

The big entertainment event of the year was the Williamson County Fair. Fair week traffic on East Main Street was unbelievable. To handle the swarm of people who were taking their only automobile ride of the year, auto owners took the doors off their touring cars and put them into taxi service between the Public Square and the Fair Ground. As the number of automobiles increased over the years, traffic regulations were  put into effect, requiring Fair bound cars to travel one way East on Main Street and return over East Boulevard.

In 1915, Marion suffered the pains of public utility systems already out of date. The municipal water system which was supplied from more or less unreliable deep wells served only the central section of the city. Most of the community had no plumbing.

The telephone service was almost “unspeakable”. Electric service was supplied from the Marion Electric Plant which occupied the site of the present Marion Water Plant. It operated the Marion Electric Park which included a swimming pool and boat riding at night on the reservoir, but it couldn’t supply enough electricity to supply a growing city. The power supply was such during times of peak load that often the Daily Republican was stalled during printing of the evening edition.

The new owners of the Daily Republican which then occupied the south half of the building now occupied by the American Legion Home joined Marion citizens in the campaign for local improvements. For half a century the newspaper has been at the forefront of movements for community betterment.

These have ranged from efforts to obtain a new court hose as early as 1920 to movements for the U.S. Veterans Hospital, Marion Memorial Hospital, park development, school improvements, the U.S. Prison, water system expansion and new business and industrial enterprises.

What has been one of the longest spans of continuous ownership among local business enterprises has covered a period packed with history. It included two World Wars during which the younger of the father and son partnership was called to service overseas. It has included business boom and depression, labor strife, a reign by the Ku Klux Klan and war between gangsters.

Publishing a newspaper during this half century has meant coping with circumstances that seem fantastic in retrospect; such as having to accept as common place the appearance of men on the street carrying submachine guns, an economic depression when the newspaper’s own presses were used to print script used in place of money to pay part of employee’s wages, the spectacle of 400 empty Marion houses being torn down and moved to more prosperous communities, and the sight of Marion coming back and building 500 modern homes in a single year, and continuing to grow and prosper.

Fifty years ago somebody in the Marion business community coined a slogan and had it painted on billboards leading into Marion. It said, “Marion, the Opportunity City.” The new owners of the Daily Republican read it and conducted their newspaper like they believed it.”

(Glances at life, by Homer Butler, 1963)

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Sam’s Notes: The Family Theater was in play for a short period of time after the Marion Opera House at 400 N. Market St. burned. This location later became the Plaza Theater which operated into the late 1950’s, then became the Economy Store around 1960.

The Isis Theater was located in the 700 block of West Main and ran from 1917 till the year after the opening of the Orpheum in 1921 when it was purchased as the first location of E. Blankenship and Co. at the southeast corner of Main and Court Streets. This corner lot was occupied by a Texaco station for decades and now Family Video uses the whole corner east to the RR tracks.

The water system became problematic enough for the installation of a well on the north side of the court house to help fight fires around 1915. There used to be hand pumps on the court house lot corners to water horses and later automobile radiators. These are visible in the occasional court house photos. In later years, the Marion State and Savings bank building (Hotel State) had to sink their own well under the sidewalk on the West Main Street side of the building to obtain enough water for their needs.

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