The Town Crier: 800

Published 8:15 am Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Unless my math is a bit off (and if you’ve seen my hi skool math grades, or my check book totals, it can be way off) this is the 800th Town Crier for the Dalton Daily Citizen! Looking back over my files, I believe my first Town Crier was submitted on July 15, 2009. That’s 16 years come this July of this iteration of the Town Crier. That first article was on Finley’s Photo Studio downtown that was closing that summer after being around Dalton since the early 1900’s. When I was asked about doing a column for the paper, I was downtown and saw Finley’s was closing shop and that they were remodeling for the new folks moving in. Finley’s is where I would buy my home movie film when I was a kid and starting to make “epic” films in the backyard. I’m especially grateful for old Mr. Finley who came into town one Sunday afternoon when I was at the Creative Arts Guild showing one of my movies and the bulb burned out on the projector mid-film. My mom called him up, and while the audience waited patiently, Mr. Finley came in, opened the store and got us a replacement bulb. He’s one of my heroes! Such is the life in a small town.

The editor of the paper at that time, Jimmy Espy, was looking to make the paper more locally focused, much as our newest general manager is working on. Knowing I was a native of Dalton and an avid history buff, he asked if I’d do a short, weekly column for the paper’s Sunday edition. Nothing national, nothing political, just local and entertaining. Something to read while you had a cup of coffee, or sat on the porch on a Sunday. I took up the offer as something that would be both fun and a bit of a challenge, as I had to turn an article in each week on a deadline. How hard could that be? I thought it would be easy to knock out the articles and would probably get far enough ahead that I would have plenty of columns in reserve if I got busy. But, that has almost never been the case. The only time I get a little ahead is when a subject turns into a multi-partner, where I’ve done enough research or dredged up enough memories of the old days to spread over a couple of weeks.

When asked what I would call the column, I wanted to revive the name of a short, fun column I remember reading when I was a kid, and in whose brief, pithy bits I even appeared a couple of times. The original Dalton Town Crier was a collection of one to three sentences that relayed some community news or, frequently, a funny quip heard around town. It might be from a little kid or it might be from a judge, you never knew. The Town Crier ran at least from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, maybe earlier and maybe longer. It was fun enough I could enjoy some of the entries as a kid and grown-ups got something out of each one as well. I believe it came out daily. Atop it there was a picture of a Town Crier ringing a bell and shouting out to the town. I originally wanted this same piece of artwork for my version, but the quality of printing had improved so much, the old artwork wouldn’t cut it, so we came up with something pleasingly similar. And whereas the original was just a few sentences down in the bottom left hand corner of the front page, the current Town Crier is a once a week story that runs anywhere from 1000 to 1600 words, depending on the subject.

And the subjects, while almost always dealing with something in the Dalton, Whitfield, Murray County area, have been as varied as I could make them. In some way almost every one is historical in nature, one exception being when the local National Guard shipped out to the Middle East in March of 2010. There was a big send off parade for them and our “90 Spartans” marched off to do their duty. Other articles deal with history and then bring the story up to date, such as the Town Crier that covered Dalton’s local airports. That series stands as the most articles I’ve written on one subject, with it turning into a four-parter. As I was writing it and the paper was publishing them, many folks sent me info, and so the article grew even as I was composing it. Most articles are one-offs, with many being two-parters and occasionally a three-part story, such as a 3-parter on the changes of Dalton’s City Limits and a 3-parter on Dalton celebrating the bicentennial back in 1976.

One of my favorite subjects, but one of the most time-consuming and difficult, is interviews with local folks. I’ve interviewed several folks about their service in the military or about their lives during times of war. In one article, I interviewed a WWII vet that went ashore on D-Day +4, and another one, with a lady in our community who was a teenager on a farm in Germany during that same war!  Another favorite topic with readers is for local places that are now gone. Restaurants seem especially full of good memories, places like the Chat ’N Chew, The Chow Time, the US Cafe and the Burger Chef. And of course, I try and write about the simple pleasures of the south, pleasures like wading in streams, fishing, catching lightning bugs and visiting roadside vegetable stands.  As the Town Crier keeps going with story 801, I hope you’ll keep taking the trip with me!

Mark Hannah is a Dalton native who works in the film and video industry. 

Editor’s note: This column was submitted by Mark Hannah on April 16, but did not run at that time.