Wally's Corner

De: Wally Hindman

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This is not a book in the normal sense of the word, but rather, a collection of short articles the author wrote from 2018 - 2025 for a local newspaper, The Polk County News, of Benton, TN.
The back story: this local newspaper, which has served the local community since the 1880s, briefly went out of print, but in the Spring of 2018, Walter and Candyce Bates purchased the paper and resumed the role of serving their community by printing “the paper”. Mrs Bates was teaching at the time at Chilhowee Middle School, and in a conversation one day with the humble author – the School Counselor – he thanked her for their efforts. She then asked if I would like to contribute a weekly article. I answered that I thought I might enjoy that, so she asked if I did, what would I write about? After thinking for a minute, I replied, “faith, family, men’s issues, or sometimes just whatever was on my mind that week”. The rest, as they say, is history, or more accurately, is what this “book” consists of. I attempted to divide the articles into categories or sections by topic, but full disclosure, I struggled to figure out where some of them should go. I ended up with 8 sections, the last of which contains articles I just couldn’t decide where they belonged. This process of dividing the articles, created a few instances of an article referencing something from the previous week, which is in another section.

The biggest reason I undertook this “book” project was to pass along to my children and grand-babies what Papa thinks about life, and what he believes is important. Also, I wanted to increase their level of connectedness to their past, which I believe is very important.

I appreciate you picking it up, and I hope you enjoy my meandering style of communicating. I was surprised as I went through this process to find how emotionally invested I was, especially when writing about memories and family history. I decided to leave in the closing line, “Have a great week”, at the end of most of the articles, as a reminder of where this originated.