McCook Gazette

The McCook Daily Gazette is a newspaper published in the city of McCook, in the southwestern part of the state of Nebraska, in the Great Plains region of the United States. It serves southwestern Nebraska and northwestern Kansas. The newspaper is issued five days a week, Monday through Friday afternoons. As of 2011^[update], it had a circulation of 4,564.

The paper was founded in 1911 by Harry D. Strunk and Burris H. Stewart as the Red Willow Gazette. Thirteen years later, under Strunk's editorship, it became a daily and changed its name to the McCook Daily Gazette. In 1929, the newspaper became one of the first in the world to be delivered regularly by air: for several months its airplane, the Newsboy, flew a daily route, dropping bundles of newspapers to carriers in outlying towns. An image of the Newsboy still decorates the paper's nameplate.

Strunk published the Gazette until his death in 1960, when he was succeeded by his son Allen Strunk. In 1986, the paper was acquired by Gozia-Driver Media, which was later re-incorporated as US Media Group. In 1997, the Gazette was sold to Rust Communications.

The paper's founder, Harry D. Strunk, was born in 1892 in Pawnee City, Nebraska. In 1906, at the age of 14, he was forced by family circumstances to quit school and go to work as a printer's devil (an apprentice) for the Pawnee City Republican. A year later, he moved to Fairbury, Nebraska, but at the age of 16, when the editor of the Republican fell ill, he returned to Pawnee City and published the newspaper for three months until the editor's recovery. Strunk continued to move from newspaper to newspaper; in 1909, at the age of 17, he was shop foreman of the Norton, Kansas Daily Telegram, overseeing ten typesetters.

Later in 1909, Strunk set off for the West Coast. En route, he saw and responded to an advertisement seeking a printer for the weekly McCook Tribune. Nine months later, he and fellow Tribune employee Burris H. Stewart started their own job-printing shop, "with so few assets that they were forced to borrow money to buy ink". Six months later, in 1911, the two launched their own newspaper: the semi-weekly Red Willow Gazette, again with no assets and with heavy debts. Distressed by their financial situation, Stewart committed suicide on the day of the paper's second issue.

Strunk persevered, and the paper proved successful. In 1914, it acquired a Linotype, the first between Hastings, Nebraska and Denver, Colorado; McCook became the smallest city in Nebraska to possess one. In 1924, the paper changed its name to the present McCook Daily Gazette and began daily publication; again, McCook became the smallest city in Nebraska with a daily newspaper. In 1926, the operation moved to a new building on Main Street, its facade inscribed with the paper's motto: "Service is the rent we pay for the space we occupy in this world."

In the 1920s, the spread of the automobile and the improvement of roads in the United States made it easier for rural residents to do their shopping in larger towns farther from their homes. This gave merchants an incentive to advertise in newspapers that reached such residents. However, delivering the papers in a timely fashion became a problem for the publishers. The U.S. Mail was expensive, since postage rates for newspapers had been raised drastically by the War Revenue Act of 1917; it also took several days for the papers to reach some customers. In more developed parts of the country, publishers delivered papers by truck to local carriers in outlying towns. However, the improvement of roads in the McCook area was slower than in more densely populated areas. By 1929, U.S. Highway 38 (now U.S. Highway 6) had not yet been fully gravelled in southwestern Nebraska, and most roads off the main highways were impassable in bad weather.

Strunk's solution was to go by air. In 1929, he paid $8,000 for a Curtiss Robin C1 two-seater monoplane, christened the Newsboy. On September 13, 1929, air delivery began. The Newsboy flew a nonstop three-hour route covering 389 miles (626 km), passing over more than 40 communities in southwestern Nebraska and northwestern Kansas. At each town, a bundle of papers was dropped from a height of 500 feet (150 m) onto a prearranged field, where it was picked up by local carriers. Papers were delivered as far west as Benkelman, Nebraska, 54 miles (87 km) from McCook; east to Orleans, Nebraska, 73 miles (117 km) away; and south to Atwood, Kansas, 50 miles (80 km) distant.