Maggie Sheppard and Susie Kimberlin consulted their doctors in Vandalia on Friday.
Mary Pruett and Maggie Sheppard were in Vandalia shopping on Saturday. They dined at Hardee`s before returning home.
Joyce Szoke of Riverton, visited by phone Sunday with her parents Mr. and Mrs. Gene Claycomb.
Sunday dinner guests of Jennie Black were Shirley Mattes, Dennie Black and friend, Charlotte of Shobonier.
Mary Peyton Meyer`s news from Frogtown arrives at the Vandalia Leader-Union newspaper each Tuesday in the careful handwriting of a lifelong schoolteacher and veteran correspondent.
Mrs. Meyer began writing her column in 1921, while still a freshman in high school in this southern Illinois community. She is now 84, widowed and semi-retired, but still a columnist once a week in the twice-weekly newspaper, circulation 6,500.
”I ought to quit, but I love to find out other people`s business,” she said.
When she began writing for the Vandalia paper, Mrs. Meyer was but one of about 25 ”rural writers” chronicling the births, weddings, deaths, church meetings, social calls and even telephone conversations of the residents in
”every principal village and nearly every crossroad settlement” in Fayette County, according to the newspaper`s editor emeritus, Charles W. Mills.
Each correspondent represented an area that was ”a community in itself,” said Mills. ”Often these columns are the only means the residents had of knowing what was going on in their area of the county. They served then, and today, as a binding thing for the people in those places.”
In earlier times, the far-flung correspondents for the Vandalia paper wrote under whimsical headings such as ”Bingham Briefs,” ”Vera Vapors,”
”Monford Musings,” and ”Shobonier Shots.”
News from the southeastern corner of the county, where Mary Peyton Meyer was born and has lived all her life, was once displayed under the title
”Frogtown Frantics.” The name of the column is now simply ”Frogtown,”
and the town is little more than a few frogs, an old schoolhouse and a couple of cows, but it is still the province of Mrs. Meyer, the newspaper`s senior correspondent (followed closely by Maxine Koonce, who began covering St. Elmo in 1928).
The proper name for the township in this corner of the county is Wilberton, but Frogtown has served as the common name for as long as anyone can remember. Mrs. Meyer attributes the name to the pond behind the Frogtown school, which was home to a bullfrog chorus that frequently drowned out the recitations of the schoolchildren.
Though she writes from a place that now exists only in memory, Mrs. Meyer generally files more news than the editor can fit into the Thursday paper.
”She always sends us a raft of stuff,” Mills said.
Mrs. Meyer`s news is often quite personal, he said. ”But the biggest complaints we`ll get are if it`s not in. People will call up and say, `Where`s Mary`s column?` ”
”People tell me if I didn`t write them items, they wouldn`t get the paper, but that`s braggin` on myself,” Mrs. Meyer said.
”I don`t know why people read it. I have people who live away from here tell me they get the paper and read my news because they like to hear from home. I think most people just like to know what`s going on at home. They like to know what Tom, Dick and Harry are doing.”
Frogtown, which was first organized in 1825, had a population of 100 or more, three stores, a school, blacksmith shop, taverns, two churches and ”all the elements and industries of a flourishing town” by the time Mary Peyton Meyer came into the world. Despite her best efforts, however, it has all but disappeared.
The only remaining building, her Frogtown school, now serves as a shelter to a small herd of cattle that leans against it when the wind comes up, as if to keep it standing.
”You`re gonna be surprised to see Frogtown, `cause it`s gone,” Mrs. Meyer said bluntly before leading a tour of her territory, which, as other correspondents have dropped out, has grown to include the villages and ghost villages of Gatch, St. Paul, St. Peter, Loogotee, St. James and others.
”I run my news from here to there, whoever tells me news I put it in,”
she said.
She was freshly graduated from the Frogtown school and just established as a freshman at Vandalia High School, living in a dormitory for country girls, when her friend Ruby Hammell began writing news for her own area of the county, and ”I decided I was gonna write some news up there, too,” Mrs. Meyer said. ”Ruby got married before she graduated and stopped writing, but I been writing ever since, lawdy.”
Only a handful of the newspaper`s earliest correspondents still write for the paper, according to Mills, a gentlemanly past president of the Illinois Press Association who inherited the editorship from his father and operated the paper until it was sold in 1979 to a chain based in Shelbyville, Ky.
The columnists` efforts are subsidized with a free subscription, a steady supply of scrap writing paper and postage-paid envelopes, and 25 to 35 cents for each column inch, which for the prolific Mary Peyton Meyer amounts to as much as $70 a month.
Nothing scandalous
The columns are edited, though the subject matter has hardly ever ranged into anything approaching scandal. ”We have had to watch out for the correspondents giving free advertising,” Mills said. ”They`ll take a bus tour and then, if they write about it, maybe get a free trip. We discourage that. After all, we make our money off advertising.”
That policy has cost Mrs. Meyer more than a few free tickets to the Okaw Opera, she said, and she wishes they`d leave her news alone in that regard.
”I told them I need those free tickets, but they wouldn`t put it in,” she said.
Even without the paycheck, Mrs. Meyer said she wouldn`t desert her beat.
”I didn`t get paid for a long time, and finally they started paying me, but I`d do it anyway,” she said. ”I like it. Writing for the paper is good to pass the time away.”
If readers want to know smutty gossip or nasty news, they`ll have to get it somewhere else. Mary Peyton Meyer does not trade in yellow journalism. ”I wouldn`t print anything if I thought it was going to hurt somebody`s feelings,” she said.
A correspondent whose principal sources are her lifelong friends and neighbors could not work any other way, Mrs. Meyer said. In the early days of her news-gathering career, she picked up most of her items by picking up the seven-member party line. ”I`d call on the party line and listen, and if somebody said something I`d put it down,” she said. ”Oh, sure, they could tell I was there by the click.”
With the installation of private lines, she found that she had to take a more aggressive approach. For a while she tried to rely on folks calling her, but the average Frogtown resident has no feeling for deadline pressure, Mrs. Meyer said.
”They never seemed to call until I`d get my news out there in the mailbox (to send to the newspaper), and then I`d have to go out and get it, open the envelope, put it in and then staple or tape the envelope shut again.”
Eventually she compiled a list of 35 or so highly reliable sources, and now, each Sunday and Monday, she collects her column material over the telephone while sitting in a chair cloaked in a floral print in the living room of her one-story, white frame house.
The Holy Bible Reference Edition and her daily Portals of Prayer sit on the arm of Mrs. Meyer`s corresponding chair. As a thoroughly modern correspondent, she uses a portable telephone so she is never out of reach of her news.
”One ring and I`m ready to answer it,” she declared of the phone`s efficiency. ”If somebody else wants me, I get a beep on the line.”
Mrs. Meyer`s news tipsters are almost all elderly, but she has trained them to keep up with the news. Maggie Sheppard, for example, often has more news than the Vandalia Leader-Union`s Frogtown correspondent can write up.
”Sometimes I can`t get her off the phone,” Mrs. Meyer said.
The Claycombs also are a must-call every week because of their far-flung offspring, ”here, there and yonder”; and Jennie Black, ”who didn`t go past high school but is really well-educated,” is another terrific source. ”She gives me what I call news,” Mrs. Meyer said. ”She just knows it. Whatever she says, I write, or try to.”
For their part, Mrs. Meyer`s sources said, it`s a pleasure being Frogtown`s newshawks. Often, they`ll call her, or slip items in her mailbox or under her door.
”There`s no bugs on her when it comes to doing things properly,” Jennie Black said. ”She is a good ol` girl and was awful pretty when she was young and not a bad-looking lady now. Why, she still flies around like a teenager.” Married on Valentine`s Day
An embroidered plaque proclaiming Mrs. Meyer ”Woman of the Year 1987”
by the Xi Iota Omega women`s group stands on a knickknacks shelf. A photograph of her and her husband, Clarence, who died 21 years ago, rests on the TV set. They met while skating on the pond behind the Frogtown country school, where she studied and later taught. They married on Valentine`s Day 1931. He was a farmer and later an oil field worker. ”He had cancer and died by degrees,” Mrs. Meyer said.
Pictures of more than 50 years of schoolchildren (she retired from full-time teaching in 1972 but still substitutes regularly) as well as those of her adopted son, Bob, relatives and friends adorn walls, shelves, table and piano tops.
A recent addition to her portrait gallery is a work of original art by a local grade school boy who tangled with Mrs. Meyer, his substitute teacher, and came away with a new respect for the physically aged but mentally tough.
His drawing offers a good likeness of the tiny, sharp-eyed teacher, and the embellishments do justice to her locally renowned spirit as well.
In the drawing, hanging over her piano, Mrs. Meyer wears a holster and brandishes a gun under the caption ”The Terminator.”
”He wouldn`t sit down,” she said. ”They don`t sit down like they used to. So I told him to do something for extra credit. He sat down and in a few minutes gave me this. I gave him the extra credit too.”
Signs posted on a tree out front of her house and on the front door warn of a vicious dog, though in fact the grown-up ”tomboy,” as she has described herself, keeps only a few sheep, chickens and cats in the old barn out back. For any who might challenge the veracity of the signs in the front yard, however, a loaded .22 pistol lies under Mrs. Meyer`s bed.
”I could reach it with my left hand without hardly a move,” she said. Though Mrs. Meyer generally keeps the drapes pulled to discourage salesmen and Jehovah`s Witnesses (”Everybody to his own religion, but I don`t want to mess with `em”), the view from the living room window of her isolated country home looks out upon the broad flat prairie of southeastern Fayette County in the lower belly of the state.
Vandalia, once briefly the state capital, once briefly the seat of an Illinois oil boom, is about 15 miles to the northwest, its population dwindling, its future uncertain. Behind Mrs. Meyer`s house at the edge of her family`s farmland is a wide stretch of thick and tumbling woods nuggeted with streams and ponds, hills and hollows.
Mrs. Meyer, who knows the names of crossings as well as bridges, has traipsed through these woods on foot and horseback, by buggy, by Model T and now, by Chrysler four-door. Almost always, she has been in a hurry. That is her manner, to be doing something all the time, teaching, raising a child, sitting on the county`s mental health board and, always, getting her news from Frogtown into the Vandalia paper:
Braille Workers of St. Peter Church were in Effingham on Tuesday of this week.
Mr. and Mrs. Delmar Maske and Haley Harpster of Farina called on Mr. and Mrs. Filbert Maske and Galen on Sunday.
Mr. and Mrs. Keith Howell are the parents of a daughter, born early Sunday A.M. in St. Anthony`s Hospital in Effingham. The baby weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces. She has a little sister, Janice and one brother, Ryan.
A weighty ethics question
Being a correspondent for 69 years has invested Mrs. Meyer with the confidence to reveal now, for the first time, that she has written about certain activities in Frogtown despite the fact that she is involved in them. What some self-serious newsmen call a ”conflict of interest.”
Along with reporting on occasional visitors and telephone calls to her home, Mrs. Meyer has frequently written about the doings of the local TOPS
(Take Off Pounds Sensibly) chapter.
She noted, however, that she feels any ethical violations in this coverage are slight, if any, since she has never in her life had a weight problem.
”I only go to the meetings because afterwards we go to McDonald`s,” she said. ”I love their snacks.”
Item:
Your correspondent received a phone call from an employee of the Chicago Tribune one day last week. He was anxious to know some of the history of Frogtown. I have lived in the Frogtown vicinity all my life. . . .”
