Joann Meyer, Longtime Editor of a Besieged Newspaper, Dies at 98

Joann Meyer, who spent practically 60 years as a reporter, columnist, editor and affiliate writer at The Marion County Record in Kansas, died on Saturday at her residence, a day after the police searched the newspaper’s workplaces. She was 98.

Her son, Eric Meyer, the newspaper’s writer, confirmed the demise. He mentioned that the trigger had not been decided, however that the coroner had concluded that the stress of the searches — at her residence, which she shared with him, in addition to on the paper’s workplaces — was a contributing issue.

The raids got here after a neighborhood businesswoman accused the newspaper of illegally buying a letter from the native authorities explaining how she may reinstate her driver’s license after it had been suspended following a quotation for drunken driving in 2008.

The newspaper, which mentioned it had obtained the doc from an nameless supply, verified the data, however Mr. Meyer determined to not publish an article about it. Nevertheless, on Friday morning a choose issued a warrant allowing the police to go looking the Meyer residence and the newspaper’s workplaces for proof of identification theft and the “illegal use of a computer.”

An hour later, members of the city’s police division confirmed up on the Meyers’ home, which Mrs. Meyer and her husband had moved into in 1953, the day earlier than Eric was born. They took computer systems, cellphones, paperwork and even Mrs. Meyer’s Alexa sensible speaker.

Mr. Meyer mentioned that his mom was in shock after the raid, and that she had hassle sleeping. On Saturday, he went to wake her after midday, and to carry her breakfast, which she refused to eat.

“She said over and over again, ‘Where are all the good people to put a stop to this?’” he mentioned. “She felt like, how can you go through your entire life and then have something that you spent 50 years of your life doing just kind of trampled on like it’s meaningless?”

She died in midsentence, he mentioned, at round 1:30 p.m.

Marion’s chief of police, Gideon Cody, has refused to enter element in regards to the case, however he has insisted that extra info will probably be forthcoming.

Marion is a city of about 2,000 folks, situated amid the huge flat cornfields of central Kansas, roughly 50 miles north of Wichita.

As at most small-town papers, job titles at The Record are nominal; everybody does all the things. Editors may write articles, reporters may sweep the flooring. Mrs. Meyer labored as a replica editor and the social news editor, and for many years she wrote a column about native historical past referred to as Memories.

“She was a walking encyclopedia of local history,” Rowena Plett, a options reporter for The Record, mentioned in a cellphone interview.

The Record is a Meyer household affair. Mrs. Meyer’s husband, Bill, started working there in 1948, and he or she joined him within the early Sixties, as soon as Eric was sufficiently old to stick with her dad and mom for a couple of hours.

“My father wrote and my mother read,” mentioned Eric Meyer, who additionally wrote for the newspaper in highschool. “They spent 24 hours a day together.”

The newspaper had a fame for aggressive reporting alongside the form of lighter fare typically present in small-town publications. Recent protection included an article a few thresher exhibition and an exposé of a rip-off involving supposedly free Covid exams.

In 1998, when the longtime homeowners of The Record, the Hoch household, determined to promote it, the Meyers stepped in as consumers to forestall it from going to a company chain. They additionally purchased two close by papers, The Hillsboro Star-Journal and The Peabody Gazette-Bulletin.

Joann Wight was born on May 23, 1925, in Marion and barely ventured past its limits. Her father, Ollie Wight, was a city marshal, and her mom, Mercil (Thompson) Wight, ran a funeral residence.

Before becoming a member of the employees of The Record, she labored in a grocery retailer, a hospital and an alfalfa mill.

She married William Meyer in 1949; he died in 2006. Along together with her son, she is survived by a grandson and three great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Meyer set the tone for the newspaper as a punctilious editor — although she refused to let anybody, even her husband or son, contact her copy.

After her husband’s demise, Mrs. Meyer stepped again from lots of her every day duties on the paper. Eric, who had spent his profession as a journalist in Milwaukee and later as a journalism professor on the University of Illinois, returned residence to assist. He ultimately took over as editor and writer.

She continued to jot down her column each week till final 12 months, when a medical process broken her imaginative and prescient. But she would nonetheless write an occasional article, with the assistance of her son.

Since the raids, the newspaper’s employees has struggled to place out the subsequent concern, due to each the dearth of apparatus — the police took many of the computer systems — and the sudden worldwide consideration being forged on their small city.

In addition to fixed calls from the news media, Mr. Meyer mentioned, they’ve been contacted by quite a few well-wishers and subscribers keen to assist out.

“She would feel very good about all this,” he mentioned.