Celebrating Mary Shead's Contributions

With the passing of long-time correspondent Mary Virginia Corporon Shead, our paper has lost a valuable link to our communities.

Mrs. Shead, 95, died Sunday, Sept. 14.

Shead, like a number of community news correspondents over the years, came by her newspaper work naturally, following in the family tradition.

Her father, G.W. Corporon, did correspondence for the Pittsburg paper as early as World War II. He continued doing that, even after his time as publisher of the Arcadia Journal ended when he sold the paper.

Her brother Jack was a United Press International reporter.

Son Larry helped his mother with the columns as she got older.

Larry recalled that his mother took on the responsibility when his grandfather, G.W., passed away in 1969.

"He was living with us as his wife had passed about two years prior. Mom began writing the news in his stead and had done so ever since.

"So it has been 45 years give or take a few months. She used to make carbon copies on her typewriter. Eventually she moved to email."

Larry noted she wrote for the Fort Scott Tribune, the Nevada Daily Mail, the Morning Sun, the Liberal News, and the Girard Press, back when it was in operation.

Mary is a product of a generation that filled, and with our papers, still does fill, a long-standing interest in our communities, their people, and their doings.

While many papers over the years have ended their arrangements with their correspondents, believing such news is passé, they filled a need for what essentially today is now known as social media, followed breathlessly on the digital platforms of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.

We are pleased to have our correspondents grace our printed pages and we value the connection they provide us to the people in their communities they write about.

We are sad to see such community cornerstones like Mary leave us, even as we see many of our other correspondents also grow older with us.

We cherish those we still have.

And we join with our Arcadia community residents and our readers in saluting Mary for her work. She left us all with a smile and the knowledge that we always knew what was going on with her people and her community.