Plains-speaking paper: quick wit at a snail’s pace.

The land is tabletop flat between the Big Blue and Platte rivers, a good place to get a clear view of the world: the bright red and orange sunsets of summer and fall, the harsh winter winds that whip through small towns like freight trains, and, come springtime, the return of migrating birds and the lush prairie plant life.

“To stand centered in a 360-degree horizon,” Norris W. Alfred once wrote, “is to experience a natural worldliness, colorful and complete.”

Alfred, editor and publisher of the Polk Progress, not only mirrored the richness of the Nebraska horizon, but also used it as a place from which he could comment on the world. The demise of the 82-year-old weekly newspaper, which published its final issue last week, is being mourned by 900 avid subscribers in 45 states.

The breadth of the subscription list--including 75 from California--is more of a tribute to Alfred than to Polk, which he described as a town of “384 friendly citizens and one grouch.”

Alfred, 76, is a left-wing populist in a solidly Republican state who likes to rail against government secrecy, big businesses, big machines that destroy family farms, chemicals that deplete precious topsoil, and any Republican within striking distance.

Many newspapers have creeds and slogans, but Alfred has a mantra, “Slower Is Better,” which appears, along with a snail, on the masthead of the eight-page newspaper. Type for the Progress was set on a hot-metal Linotype and the paper was printed on a 100-year-old big cylinder Babcock printing press in a cramped Main Street office.

The Progress could be anyone’s hometown paper, featuring such pictures as Wilma Flick with her large turnip. But it’s the features, mostly written by Alfred, that set the paper apart: the folksy Polking Around, the weather, an impassioned editorial and a bird-watching column; Alfred, who once supported himself as a water colorist, does pen-and-ink drawings for the paper.

The birding column is an opportunity not only to count birds, but, Alfred said, “to point out the necessity for leaving trees, bushes and water in the land as part of the birds’ livable environment. It’s an extension of what students learn in kindergarten and maybe preschool--sharing.”

The weather column is unusual because it is never wrong--it eschews forecasts--but it can make a political point: “This week’s weather had Siberian temperature readings in the deep-freeze range accompanied by a secretive military mission of the space shuttle” (Feb. 7, 1985).

Away from a typewriter, the soft-spoken bachelor observes that “loco” residents sometimes bristle at his politics, but they seem to have provided him with an endless source of good copy. None is more quotable than Alvena Lind, who is in her 80s and the leader of a three-woman team of paper folders, whose job is to crease and fold the sheets of the paper into a manageable whole when it comes off the press. A daughter once criticized Alvena for talking too much. “If you don’t talk,” replied Alvena, “you never say anything.” She also campaigns regularly against sloth: “If you don’t do anything, you get out of practice.”

Alfred, of Swedish ancestry, never had to worry about a work ethic. He writes most of his columns before the farmers get up. A Polk native, he worked briefly for the Progress after graduating from high school in 1931, and became an itinerant pressman and printer (he has a degree in chemistry from Doane College in Crete, Neb.).

In the early 1950s, he came back to Polk to help his ailing parents who owned a clothing store and several farms. In 1955, he bought the Progress with a small loan and monthly payments of $100. Alfred soon realized he had acquired a suspect printing business with old machines, a leaky roof and a precarious future. Then a farmer named John Hultman came in and renewed his subscription, telling Alfred: “I better pay for two years, then I don’t have to come to town so often.”

With two years to prove himself, Alfred knew then his wandering days were over, except for a yearlong absence in the early 1960s. The Progress, by Alfred’s own account, was not anything remarkable until the Vietnam War, when he decided it was pointless fighting the Vietnamese when the United States really wanted to fight Russians--and said so.

His national following started to build in the late 1970s when some San Francisco State University journalism teachers discovered Alfred (they nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize in 1980).

Alfred announced his retirement last September and tried to sell the paper for $25,000, but couldn’t find any takers. He may start a newsletter, but the Progress is gone.