Vince Staten

Kingsport's Longest Running Newspaper Columnist

(Hint: it wasn't me.)

A year ago this week I published my 2,405th and last column in the Kingsport Times News.

You may be thinking I wrote more columns for the Times News than any other columnist.

Not even close.

That honor goes to William Jeremiah McAuliffe, W.J. McAuliffe, Mac, as he was known.

His column, “Mac’s Window,” ran for 34 years, beginning in 1941. (By contrast my column ran for only 16 years.)

Many of those years he wrote a daily column.

I tip my hat. I can’t imagine. For the last fifty years or so writing three columns a week has been considered a full load.

Modern columnists marvel at the Jimmy Breslin’s and Grantland Rice’s who published a column every single day the paper was printed.

I don’t know how they did it.

Some of those old timers, like the acerbic sports columnist Dick Young of the New York Daily News turned out a daily column, plus a weekly column for The Sporting News.

At a mere three a week I feel like I was a piker.

When Mac’s column started in 1941, before the war, the Times (it wasn’t yet the Times News) held a contest to name the column.

Mrs. W.R. Gilmer suggested The Corner Window and won $5.

The Corner Window has a real small town feel to it. I asked Margy Clark about that name since she worked at the Times News in the early 60s, when the newspaper was still located on Market Street. She said if there was a Corner Window it looked out on the alley.

The column became Mac’s Window on Sunday Feb. 17, 1946 and stayed that way for over 7,000 columns, until ill health forced Mac to retire in January 1975.

He moved to live with family in Richmond, Virginia and died in 1982 at age 89.

In the 1940 census he had reported he was working 88 hours a week at the Kingsport Times and making $3,120 a year. That’s a lot of hours but in 1940 that was a good salary ($56,508 in today’s dollars).

Here are a few Mac’s Window columns from over the years:

(Click on images to enlarge)