Another Great Loss

When I was growing up and learned how to read, I always looked forward to Thursdays. The Ritzville Journal Times (JT) was delivered to our mailbox and we looked forward to reading our paper. It got passed around at our house and if there was a picture or a story about one of the Anderson kids, you could bet that my mom would cut it out once everyone had their chance to go through the paper two or three more times.

We knew who the publisher/owner was since we saw him in church every Sunday. For some reason John Pavlik was bigger than life to us because he was the newspaperman. We didn’t want to show our bad side when he was around because we didn’t want him to think bad things about us. What did we know about his thoughts? He only wanted to put out a top-notch paper and he did.

It’s funny, we could go to a basketball or a football game and could talk about every big play and who did what and how they beat the bad guys from Odessa or Davenport or Reardan. Reading about it just verified what we already knew.

I do know it was always tough to read about those games that were lost, but a story is a story no matter how painful the outcome may be. It didn’t mean were happy about the loss, that’s for sure.

When we did finish reading the story, win or lose, there always seemed to be a good reason to go to the next game. Optimism was a big part of the text. That is a very smart way to sell newspapers and John was a very smart newspaperman.

Looking back to my senior year, every week was filled with stories that were cut out of the JT. There were times that we bought a second issue just in case there was something important on the other side of the article in question. I still have those articles around someplace.

Every Thursday in the fall of 1969 when the paper arrived at school, three or four of us would turn to the sports page to see what Coach Agee said about the game we played on the previous Friday night. We were excited to see the pictures and the story was often more exciting than the actual game may have been.

The Saturday edition of the Spokesman-Review would have a synopsis of Friday night’s game and our names showed up in the game review, but it was our paper that had the real story and was a whole lot more personal.

When we had our basketball playoff run in February and March of 1970, the JT was filled with pictures and stories and we thought we were rock stars with all the publicity, which was pretty cool. We certainly didn’t want it to end I know that.

In 1973, the JT became the Ritzville Adams County Journal in order to cover Lind and Washtucna, as well as Ritzville. The Lind Leader went out of business and John knew the importance of news coverage in eastern Adams County. It was about this time that Lind and Washtucna had their great basketball runs at state and The Journal was there to cover it all.

John Pavlik was a smart businessman, as well as a huge asset to the Ritzville community with the Jaycees, Lions, Chamber of Commerce and the Ritzville School Board. Once he lost his eyesight, he still stayed up on the news and went to coffee with the “boys” once a week. Once he knew who he was talking with he would chat about what was going on in that person’s life. He also saved a good jab at Dr. Kragt when he would show up. He was good at those little digs and they were all funny.

This community has lost a lot of those great business and community minded leaders of the past. We’ve just lost another great one in John Pavlik. Rest in peace John, you will be missed.