Back in the 1950s, this splendid little newspaper was frequently referred to — usually with a hint of derisiveness — as Scott’s Tissue.

The paper was small back then, rarely more than eight pages, and news was pretty much “catch as catch can” for the one-person news staff, Publisher Jesse J. Scott. Scott wrote news “items” as they were generally called, and his wife, Lillian, would set the stories in type on a Linotype machine. 

Front-page stories were most often club news, weddings, engagements and other community happenings submitted by readers. They ran under one-column headlines.

Compared with the Daily Press and Virginian-Pilot, both of which were widely circulated in Isle of Wight, our local paper seemed quite meager, and “Scott’s Tissue — thin and flimsy — seemed to fit.

What we didn’t know was that we had it all wrong. The name Scott’s Tissue was not coined as a nickname for The Smithfield Times but for a briefly published daily newspaper that carried the nameplate Smithfield Daily News.

Jesse Scott was a journalist, but he was also an innovative businessman whose creative mind produced any number of promotional ideas. He rarely had an idea he wouldn’t experiment with, and The Daily News appears to be one of them.

I’ve never seen a copy of the Daily News, but excerpts from it were published in the weekly Smithfield Times during the month of May 1934 — none before and none after. That leads me to believe that the experiment was short-lived. It quite probably overtaxed Jesse’s and Lillian’s abilities, and it quite likely didn’t generate the level of advertising revenue Scott had hoped to garner with a daily product. 

In the May 17 Smithfield Times, Scott bragged that the Daily News was generating a lot of interest. The Daily News published on May 2 contained 32 inches of news, compared with 84 inches two weeks later. 

A two-to-three column collection of items from the Daily News was published each week during May of that year in the Times, with the tongue-in-cheek description of his tiny daily product as “the smallest newspaper published in the world.” Scott rarely, if ever, fact-checked himself, so there the claim stood.

Based on the samples he published in the weekly Times, it can be assumed that the Daily News was reader-generated, much as the Times was in those days. It was a social and gossip column, heavy on the social and gentle on the gossip.

For example, items republished from the Daily News in the Times on May 10 included a report that Mrs. Jesse Fulgham of Newport News returned home yesterday after visiting her sister, Miss Lucy Thompson.

To promote his new product, he ran a contest allowing readers to offer nicknames for the tiny paper. Lo and behold, reader W.D. Stallings submitted the name “Scott’s Tissue” to describe the tiny daily publication. Stallings received free movie tickets to the Smithfield Theatre (owned by Scott) and compliments of the publisher for coming up with the “funniest Daily News nickname.”

The Daily News seems to have disappeared a few weeks later, probably after an objective look at the bottom line by Scott.

Not so, “Scott’s Tissue.” The name endured for decades. Long after Jesse Scott had sold the paper in 1962 to Tom and Betty Phillips, and even until Anne and I purchased it in 1986, occasionally an old Smithfield resident would recall that “we used to call it Scott’s Tissue.”

Now that I have learned the real story, I can’t help but wonder if Jesse Scott regretted inviting a nickname that would haunt him long after the paper for which it was intended had folded.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.