Editor, 82, Takes Life a Week at a Time

Marie Vivienne Coombs hasn’t missed a deadline in 61 years--not even when her father died in 1935 and when her husband died in 1978.

“I’m surprised I’ve survived 61 years of this and people are still speaking to me,” says the 82-year-old editor of the weekly Saguache Crescent. Saguache, about 90 miles west of Pueblo, is the service center for the farms and ranches in the San Luis Valley.

One reason is that she has steered away from controversy. “It divides the town. I’m one of those who try not to get too involved,” she says.

The only politics found in the weekly are in the letters to the editor, and then “only if they are not too vicious. We try to keep it small-town, small-family.”

Museum news, church news, births, deaths and recollections, thank-you notes and other personal items are the Crescent’s bread and butter. It sells for a quarter a copy.

The 117-year-old paper does not cover town meetings. “We’d have to hire a reporter,” says Dean Coombs, her 44-year-old son, the publisher and only other employee.

Keeping costs down is the other key to the paper’s survival.

There are no computers here. If dictation needs to be taken, Marie Coombs does it longhand.

Some visitors walk in and think they are in a museum. Old calendars and photos hang on the walls; the office is packed with aging machines. “Everything in here basically works whether we use it or not,” said Dean Coombs.

Each edition of the Crescent, usually four pages, is composed on a Lee Challenge Linotype. Dean and his mother type the paper on the machine’s keyboard, and it is set into type on hot metal slugs. It sounds a bit like a slot machine that isn’t paying off.

It’s a method abandoned decades ago by the newspaper industry, but it works for the Crescent’s run of 650 copies, roughly the size of the town’s population. Printing takes about an hour.

“It costs $1.86 a day to run two Linotypes,” says Dean Combs. “Our electrical bill is never over $100 a month.”

When her father died, he left Marie Coombs and her sister, Irene, who still lives in Saguache, the paper and $100 and said they should be able to get by on that.

Here’s another example of the editor’s frugality. When Marie Coombs visited China with a group of editors, she returned without cashing her traveler’s checks.

Most papers live or die on ads. The Crescent doesn’t aggressively seek them. More than 75% of its revenue comes from publishing legal notices. When a land developer’s scheme went bankrupt at nearby Crestone, it earned the paper $24,000.

Marie Coombs, who has been honored at the Smithsonian Institution and declared a national resource, says: “People ask what’s the most spectacular story you can remember. You live a day at a time. There’s always something to do.”

But there are murders and killings even in a small town. “I have this thing about tragedy. I dismiss it from my mind.

The paper covers such events because “a newspaper is a historical source,” Marie Coombs said. “You have to put something in.”