TAMPA, Fla. – Dick Lee, 77, said it’s been at least 18 years since he’s visited his hometown, Bowling Green.
He moved to Tampa, Fla., with his family in 1948 at age 18, and lives there today, in a house by a lake with banana trees and lizards.
Dick worked for the circuit court for five years, just like his father did when Dick grew up in Bowling Green. Then Dick “went out on his own” and into freelance court reporting. His son now owns his company, Richard Lee Reporting in Tampa, the city’s oldest court reporting company, started in 1964.
Life in Bowling Green seemed simpler, Dick said, and his thoughts turned to his childhood buddy, Mottley Adams.
Adams, 79, now lives in Albertville, Ala., in a small house filled with photos. The piano that accompanied all his moves – out of tune for years – serves as a reminder of days past.
He left Bowling Green during high school, a couple years before Dick. The two enjoyed great times growing up, Adams said. He remembers some, but time steals others.
Adams operated a linotype until The Albertville Herald moved to “cold type,” the name given to computer-generated typesetting. Now, he works at Creative Printers in Albertville, where the company uses six typesetters and four computers.
Dick’s brother, Mack, 83, lives in Tampa, too, in a retirement home.
He worked at several radio stations and became the chief engineer of WDAE in Tampa, licensed in 1922 and now a Clear Channel Communications Inc. sports radio station.
Before that, he wrote news.
While the jobs changed, a singular characteristic of Mack’s did not. He’s always been a man of ideas, which leads this story back to Bowling Green.
In 1939, a 10-cent publication, “Big Little Book” No. 717 featured an episode in which Mickey Mouse started a newspaper, The War Drum.
Mack Lee, 13, 1149 State St., created a paper of his own, The Tom-Tom.
“I just wanted to do something different,” Mack said. “Some kids in Louisville started a paper, so I wanted to do it in Bowling Green.”
Like Mickey Mouse, Mack would assume the role of editor-in-chief and also write news. His plan included his little brother, called Dickie in the old days, 9, and their friend Mottley, 10, working as reporters. They would become the circulation department, too.
But turning the idea into reality took the help of Mack and Dickie’s mother. During a trip to Mr. Wright’s food store, a scorpion bit her, Mack said.
“This is what brought (The Tom-Tom) into existence,” Dick said.
In the inaugural Sept. 24 edition, the first headline stated: “R.H. Lee is Bit!”
The paper started out handwritten with a hectograph pencil. To copy it, the boys used a homemade gelatin pad.
The first edition, a single sheet folded, cost 2 cents, and they distributed 50 copies.
The second edition grew to 60 copies.
They switched to a typewriter, produced 100 copies for the third. It included an account of the disappearance of Tony, Adams’ pet turtle.
The follow-up issue – circulation 200 – reported that Tony was found, but very hungry.
“We thought we were making a fortune,” said Adam about the $4 in revenue.
The “competition” took notice.
Five days later, Oct. 19, the Herald ran the article, “New Paper Threatening Herald Among Others; Is the Beat of The Tom-Tom Death Knell of Rival Publications.”
The Herald reported that by the fifth edition, The Tom-Tom had reached a circulation of 250.
“A visit to The Tom-Tom Publishing Company revealed not exactly a roar of presses, but a steady, distinct sound of paper being pulled off a hectograph … The paper has shown a miraculous increase since its first edition,” Herald reporter Dorothy Johnson wrote.
In the sixth edition, Mack responded to the Herald: “The editor and his staff of The Tom-Tom was very much pleased to read in a copy of the College Heights Herald the column about our paper. We thank Mrs. Johnson for wasting her time interviewing us, but thanks and we do mean you.”
Dick said even though he and Mottley delivered and sold the Tom-Tom, they didn’t feel the pressure to keep readership up. Besides, Dickie also delivered The Courier-Journal and Mottley, the Park City Daily News.
Mottley said he could stand in the middle of Center Street and toss a real newspaper on a porch. A lot of the people got picky about where their paper landed, he said.
“They got their next few on the roof,” he said.
He said it took him five years before he got the best paper route in town. He said it was so short, he walked it. The eight-block route ran from Kenton Street to Broadway Avenue. It usually took him 90 minutes.
His previous routes covered five miles at least, he said. Those took him four to five hours on bike.
“I made good money,” he said.
When he wasn’t working, Mottley played football, baseball and basketball. He said the man in charge of the old basketball gym, now Helm Library, let him play whenever he wanted.
“We came up with our own teams,” Mottley said. “I got pretty good.”
He and Dickie learned they could get into the basketball games sneaking through the basement of the old gym. Dick said they never got caught.
“I was not always as pure as I looked,” Dick said.
Nor was his fellow reporter.
On March 2, 1940, Mack wrote in the Tom-Tom: “We are very sorry that some of our subscribers haven’t been getting their papers, instead of cold weather, it’s our reporters, they won’t work. If you get your paper late, why bawl ‘em out for it. The strange part about it is that they’re always sick or have something else to do, but when the time comes to pay them off, they are always there, they are never sick or got something else to do. Well, I reckon everybody likes money.”
“I got mad at them,” Mack said.
The staffers acknowledged their guilt.
“We were pretty unreliable,” Dick said. “Mack had the ideas.”
But Mack said Dickie always told the truth. Dickie became a columnist and wrote, “Good Jokes and Laffs.”
“My dad made them up,” he said about the jokes he used. “People would volunteer stuff to me. They were all stolen from somewhere.”
Mack wrote “News and Things Unusual,” later known as “Peoples and Their Ways.” It encouraged subscribers to “keep up with where your friends are going and what they are doing.”
“Everybody knew everybody so most people knew the stories already,” Dick said. “Mack’s take on it tickled their funny bone.”
Mack didn’t have to go far to get the news.
“Our mother knew everything and our father was an attorney, so they knew everything that went on,” Mack said.
The summer of 1940, Mack took a trip to New England and the World’s Fair in New York.
“I got my brand new mimeograph,” Mack said.
The mimeograph would replace the hectograph in producing The Tom-Tom. Dick said colleges and newspapers used mimeographs years before.
“I graduated to the mimeograph,” Mack said.
He published his travel story in October, Vol. 2 of The Tom-Tom. Mack also thanked new subscribers from New York to California.
Dick said they had quite a few out-of-town subscribers, but they were just family members of Bowling Green residents. Bowling Green’s population was 14,000 then, Dick said.
“A lot of the houses aren’t there anymore,” he said. “It was residential. Now it’s commercial.”
Dick said despite the hard times encountered by his parents, he and his pals lived a good life.
“They were all survivors,” he said about friends and family. “Survivors of the Depression.”
Nothing seemed to come easily.
“People had their problems,” Mottley said. “Our parents had their problems getting food and fuel stamps.”
Regular items became precious.
“We couldn’t waste anything – liver, brains, eggs, tongue,” Dick said. “My mother made me one pair of Long Johns to wear for the winter.”
But Dick’s memories turn to the positive.
“They had a great sense of humor,” he said about the parents.
The elders sat around and told stories all night in the days before television, he said.
“It feels like a dream now,” Dick said.
Those days, he and Mottley walked to Mr. Lee’s office at the courthouse to try and con a nickel from him.
“He didn’t fall for it much,” Mottley said.
But Dick said the parents helped a lot with The Tom-Tom.
“They were reading about people they knew,” Dick said. “They got a kick out of it.”
The paper even sponsored community events. Mack organized a Tinkertoy display and a Soapbox Derby to help publicize the paper.
In 1940, Bowling Green’s first commercial radio station, WLBJ, brought The Tom-Tom staff on air.
“Mack did most of the talking,” Dick said. “We just sat there.”
In 1941, the staff was invited to “the journalism class at the Western Kentucky State Teacher’s College at the Cherry Hall.”
Mack wrote in the following issue: “We thought that the class was about the closest listening people that we had ever seen.”
“They were asking us questions like we were experts,” Dick said.
And that year, they received a letter from Fred Sweet of the New York Daily News asking them to submit poems to an anthology of poems by journalists.
They also received a letter from the governor commending their work.
“We just happened to hit a time when it worked for some little kids,” Dick said.
The paper received advertising from O.V. Clark, who lived on the 1300 block of State Street and owned the local Coca-Cola Bottling Co., a franchise which dates back to 1905. Other businesses on State and Main streets also advertised. By 1942, The Tom-Tom printed full-page ads from businesses throughout Bowling Green.
With the progress came a price increase to four cents in 1942.
Mack wrote: “We are very sorry to have to go up on the price, but the war is making the price of paper go up a lot.”
As World War II escalated, the paper ended. The last issue went out on Sept. 12, 1942.
“I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did,” Mack said. “I was getting the money, the graham crackers and the Milky Way bars.”
Mack still loves graham crackers and Milky Way bars, he said.
He used some of the money from the Tom-Tom to buy a receiver and transmitter at an appliance store in Nashville.
“Mack would sit and listen to the radio,” Dick said. “He brags about listening to Hitler.”
Mack became fascinated with languages and world leaders.
“My mother would always ask me, ‘When do you get tired of listening to that bull?’” Mack said.
And he continued to come up with business ideas, Dick said.
“My father told me, ‘You do have all four brain cells operating,’” Mack said.
Beginning in 1946, Mack showed movies in different locations and auditoriums. He’d rent black and white films, pop popcorn beforehand, set up a screen and a projector and sell tickets.
“The people loved it,” Dick said.
Mack called it the traveling movie. From this plan, Dick said Mack came up with the idea of the drive-in theater. But it didn’t go anywhere.
“Mack always took the lead,” Dick said. “He could have been a multimillionaire.”
But it wasn’t the money that drove Mack.
“My father told me, ‘You gotta work for your money,’ and I said, ‘How?’ He said, ‘Whatever you want,’” Mack said.
Mack had the ideas, Dick said.
Dick visits him once every two weeks.
Last year, Dick visited Mottley in Albertville and stayed a couple of nights.
“We reminisced, we ate,” Dick said. “They made a reservation at a motel for me, but when I got there, I found out they had already paid for it, too. We went out to eat the next night and I told the waiter, ‘Bring me the bill.’ It turned out (Mottley’s son) Joe had already paid for it in advance.”
Their friendship has endured, as does their fondness for the simple things in life.
“And as I was leaving Albertville, Mottley gave me some tomatoes that he had picked himself the day before,” Dick said. “And he apologized because some of them might not be as good as when they were picked. But some of them were still good.”
Reach Ryan W. Hunton at news@chherald.com.
.