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2007-04-01 09:49:00

As we begin our 7th year...

(We received this question several weeks ago, but decided to wait to answer it for this issue, as we begin our 7th year of publishing The Q & A Times) Question: We enjoy reading your publication and the way you have it where is no reason why one article is where it is. It makes you look at every page, which I’m sure is by plan. We particularly like the series you run where a writer writes on a topic for several issues. You should feature more of them. We’ve never seen a paper like yours. How did the idea come about?

Answer: Thank you for your comments. Hearing from readers who enjoy what we produce is one of the biggest highs we get. We do plan to feature more series in the future. How did we get the idea? Although we told the ‘story’ several years ago, since it has been some time, please allow us to tell it again. While it might be a bit difficult to believe, I think the ‘seed’ for the idea happened around 50 years ago. Here’s the story. I was born and raised on a farm south of Sharon, KS (Barber County). Every so often in the summer time, Mom would take us kids to town to visit our Grandma and Grandpa Duckworth. We actually just ran in the front door, said ‘Hi’, and ran out the back door. We had bicycles there that we would ride with some of the kids in town. Once off the farm, we didn’t want to lose a minute. A couple of blocks from our grandparents’ house (there weren’t too many blocks in the entire city of Sharon), was Shirley Hart’s Derby Filling Station (Shirley was a real nice man, the owner and always hummed while he worked). There each day, under the canopy, on two wooden benches, sat several of the older men in town. Among them was my Grandpa Duckworth. After I would ride for awhile, I would most always end up stopping by, sitting on my bike and listening to them. They talked about everything, from the price of wheat and livestock - to things confronting the little town of Sharon - to why someone got more flat tires (that Shirley had to fix) than anyone else in town. I thought they were the smartest people I knew. Over a period of a couple of years, two of them died. It seems as though I have always been preoccupied with death. I thought, as I continued to listen to the men who were left, the two that died were no longer here. They were no longer of this world. All of their experiences and all of their knowledge...gone. What a shame! Now keep in mind, I am listening to these older men, sitting on my bike, next to the old gasoline pumps. At different times, folks would pull up in their cars and trucks and Shirley would put in a dollar or two worth of gas. I thought, “You know, if those old pumps could be turned on in reverse, and the nozzle stuck in these men’s ears, all the knowledge they have could be sucked out, stored in a tank and the folks that come along after them wouldn’t have to re-learn these things. They would just ‘fill ‘er up from the tank’. Wow, I thought. How fast could we all move then!” In the late 90’s, I was writing articles on Senior Living (Assisted Living, Independent Living and Skilled Nursing Care) for several newspapers throughout the country. Among other clients in other industries, our advertising agency performed marketing services for several Senior Living firms throughout the country. This, together with being fully-licensed as a Life, Health, Property & Casualty agent, specializing in Senior products, made me rather qualified to write on not only the types of care folks could, would and did receive’, but also ways to pay for this care. My articles went from being a headline with supporting editorial, to using the questions I received as the headlines, and the answers as the editorial. This produced even more questions. I then began to think (which is sometimes dangerous), “Why couldn’t we produce an entire publication of questions and answers about every subject (like Ol’ Mike Oatman used to say) from ‘hair nets to hip boots’?” Who would answer the questions? The people who own and operate their own businesses, of course. After all, who knows more than they know about the topics? They have been schooled and trained on all aspects relating to everything to do with their products and services. They know which shortcuts one can take and which one cannot take. All I would have to do is to be sure the answers were credible and that they didn’t get commercial. So I set up the criteria that their answers could not use the pronouns of ‘I’, ‘We’, ‘Ours,’ or ‘Us’, and they couldn’t use the name of their business, products or services in their answers. Thus all we would have is information and education. Readers would be glad to get the information, especially in a non-commercial fashion. Good will would be induced by these businesses, owners and operators to the readers, which is the very definition of public relations. Then, a few pages away from their Q & A, they would have an ad that would tell the reader who they were, what they did and what they wanted the reader to do with the information. The businesses would get a two-pronged marketing approach, one of public relations for taking the time to answer a question from a non-commercial standpoint informing and/or educating the reader, and their ad. No other media offered this to an advertiser. That’s how we started and how we have kept things going today...as we begin our 7th year of publishing our paper. We have featured hundreds of answers, from hundreds of writers, to hundreds of questions. Every one of them can be found at our website, www.theqandatimes.com, categorized by both subject and writer. That’s our ‘tank’. Our writers are analogous to the older men in Sharon. These writers are some of the smartest people I know.