Otterblog

Birthdays come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s one that most people don’t know about. The Journal begins its 110th year today. If you don’t believe me, check out the Inside Box on the front page. It says 110th year,  No. 1.

Not bad. The birthday is relevant at this time because there’s a little-known fact about the Journal’s early days and its ownership. The person who started the Journal was Charles Knight. He came to what was then the town of Winston and the neighboring town of Salem in 1897, started the Journal, then left in July (I’m getting this info from Frank Tursi’s history of the Journal.) After Knight left, he kicked around and eventually settled in Akron, bought that city’s Beacon Journal and built a publishing empire that eventually became Knight Ridder. That company was sold last month to McClatchy in a deal that will define the newspaper industry for many years. Goes to show you how much of life is interconnected.

Interesting issues raised in our Sunday stories about

immigration in the mountains and the politics of immigration in local legislative races

. Two points here. One, for many people immigration is deeply personal. It’s easier to talk about immigration in the abstract than it is in the personal. I was eating breakfast Saturday at a restaurant in W-S, and the waitresses, all Anglos, went into the kitchen and presented a birthday cake and sang for one of the cooks, who was Hispanic. Relationships change how we look at issues. Two, Immigration is federal, but that doesn’t mean the states won’t try to get into the act, particularly if Washington stalls on this.

Good read elsewhere. Big profile of Josh Howard in

ESPN magazine. Story talks about how he returned to W-S last summer to get his head screwed back on by his grandmother. What I also learned from the article was that the slang for Winston-Salem is Tre-4. Hipper friends of mine just smiled, but it’s short for 34, which is Forsyth County’s alphabetical place in the state’s 100 counties. Now you know.