Great Bend High School has persisted throughout a lot of important moments of history. From the tail end of WWII, to the entire Cold War, our aged school has seen and been through a lot, and during most of that the newspaper has been reporting on those very same world-shaking events. The newspaper itself has over eighty years of history, in which it used to be published by the Tribune and sold for ten cents. 

For a dollar a month you would get each issue of the bi-weekly school newspaper, meanwhile now you can simply go to the site and read as many news-stories as you like. From what little I can glean of past newspaper articles that lay in-waiting inside of the Panther Tale’s archive, the newspaper used to be a lot more, and you can see that from the type of stories it used to put out. 

“The President is dead, 

And silence follows. 

The place is quiet but 

Faces register 

A crashing disbelief. 

The voice of history 

Halts a loud routine 

With the sad news of a 

Nation’s fallen chief.”

This is an excerpt written by one Bob Kroeker from December 2nd, 1963’s edition of the Panther Tales, a few weeks after Kennedy was assassinated. Another anecdote continues. 

“The death of President Kennedy is not only mourned by Americans, but also of people in foreign countries. This is shown by a letter that Rosemary Grubb received from her ‘second’ family in Denmark. 

Rosemary’s sister, Grethe, wrote, ‘I feel so very sad because of President Kennedy’s death. At first I simply could not imagine him to be dead but it is a reality and a hard and terrible reality. We all mourn in Denmark, even if it is not our president. But we feel as if we knew[sic] him very well and we love and admire him as you do… I know you will be mourning tomorrow and that you will spend much of your time in church.’” 

A lot of the older stories didn’t list who wrote them, especially on the shorter end. This brief snippet comes from a section in the December 20th edition from the same year as the previous called ‘Sentiments from Denmark.’ 

Most of the discussion around the Kennedy assassination is around the assassination itself, and not the effects it had on people. This is much different coverage than you’d expect, though that might just be because the more questionable aspects didn’t come out until much later. This is all mere weeks after his death, and the people were still reeling. 

There’s plenty more stories like this, especially about the more sensational events happening around the world at the time. Though again, we don’t have everything, the stories we do have show that the stories were always more in response to these events than a… continuation. Modern media coverage is an overview with opinions and thoughts thrown in to add spice to the concoction made by journalists and writers alike, but older media, at least the older stories of GBHS, are more intimate than that. 

Granted, they might fail to actually cover the event they’re talking about, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

But what events would people look back on in another fifty years? When the current newspaper team is long gone, and all of our digital stories are printed and stored in the same musty cabinet as the rest of the archive; what will the students of the future Great Bend read to see our thoughts?

Andrea Sayler-Siefkes said, “it would be an event that they were involved in. If you played basketball you would be interested in the articles about the basketball games you were in.” She continued, “Political elections, violent conflicts, societal alterations due to illness, and things like that.”

“2020 is probably the biggest event. We will see that in history books as we go forward, and I think that’s something that has changed the way we look at interacting with others,” said Wendy Popp, the librarian at GBHS. “The shutdown was the biggest thing. Making sure that we could still communicate with each other and that businesses could still work… that we could still function. It’s changed how people are interacting in engineering to education, and it’s created a system where we are a lot more internet dependent.”