slideshow

A nice lady who knew I worked for The Times came up to me last week and told me that there was an article in “American Profile,” the mini-magazine that is inserted into our Tuesday newspapers, that mentioned Thomaston and the mills. I went back to the office and looked, and sure enough, in the February 17-23, 2013 issue of American Profile, there is a story called “Made in U. S. A., From red wine to blue jeans”, by Nancy Henderson.

The story talks about the decline of American manufacturing and how hard it is to find “Made in the U.S.A.” labels, but how some companies are continuing to produce everything from red wine to white goods to blue jeans. In the section dealing with white goods is a paragraph about Thomaston Mills closing in the 1970’s, but how Robert Zaslow and his family acquired the institutional division of the company in 2001 and now have the only domestic sheet mill dedicated to the hospitality and healthcare industries. It mentions that 100 employees weave tens of millions of yards of fabric each year, and sew and package the bedding.

I thought it was interesting to read, and ironic to see the article running in a weekly mini-magazine that happens to run in a newspaper in Thomaston itself. You never know where you’ll find something.

Another occurrence that happened along the same lines last week was we had several people come in and call about buying tickets to the Thomaston-Upson Hall of Fame dinner, which was held last Saturday. They all said they had seen an article on lagrangenews.com, which is the website for our sister paper in LaGrange, that said that The Thomaston Times was selling tickets to the dinner. We did not sell tickets this year.

I Googled “Thomaston-Upson Hall of Fame” and sure enough, about the seventh item down on the page was a link to the LaGrange News. When I clicked on it, the story came up, and it was pretty much identical to the one that ran in The Times last week, except it had the part about tickets being sold at The Times’ office. When I looked to see the date of the article, it said “Five Years Ago.”

That explained it. Five years ago, the LaGrange paper ran the article about the 2008 Hall of Fame dinner. Ironically, due to February having fewer days than the rest of the months, the dinner happened on the exact same date – Feb. 23 – five years ago and last Saturday. The folks wanting tickets had pulled up an article that was five years old! Luckily, before too many more people came in wanting tickets, we were able to get the notice pulled off of the LaGrange website. But again, it just goes to show that you never know where you’ll find something.

That is something that we all need to be aware of, especially in this computer and internet age. If you put something online and hit “Send,” it can go out in split seconds to millions of people around the world, and, it will stay on the internet until someone removes it. So just beware. You don’t want something you put on the internet as a lark or joke to turn up years later and prove to be embarrassing or worse. You never know where you’ll find something.