Somerset man cherishes a lifetime of writing for newspapers

What started out as a simple neighborhood column in May 1973 ended up becoming over 49 years of life's work for a Somerset man who has been a well-known columnist and writer for both the former The New Republic and Daily American newspapers.

On May 17, David R. Hay, 75, would have celebrated his 50th anniversary as a writer of The New Republic, but fell short by six months of that momentous occasion because the newspaper in Meyersdale closed its doors last November after serving the southern Somerset County community for 122 years. Hay's last column for the newspaper appeared Nov. 10.

"In some ways, I've been grieving the ending of my long-time column and of course, the newspaper itself. While I'm sad that this special time is over, I'm extremely thankful that it happened," Hay said. "I learned so much through writing these stories and feel I have accomplished the recording of so much valuable information that otherwise would have been lost with the passage of time and personalities. I have been blessed with so many extra friendships that I wouldn't have had it not been for writing these columns through two-thirds of my lifetime.

"It's only natural that I sometimes feel tinges of sadness since writing columns was part of my weekly activities for such a long time," he added.

Hay has saved all of his approximately 2,470 columns in nine scrapbooks and 33 three-ring notebooks. The columns featured many unique people as well as personal events. Many stories and interviews have been recorded that no longer would be available to write about because the featured personalities are no longer living. Hay said he enjoyed writing about "ordinary people" who many times wouldn't have made newsprint in order to show the local area how extraordinary they really were.

"I wrote about whatever inspired me each time a new story was needed on a weekly basis. Having a creative mind, I always had another story on the back burner ready to be written. God blessed me richly with ideas and provided the inspiration and time for writing," he said.

After his high school graduation from Berlin Brothersvalley High School in 1966, Hay went to Cambria Rowe Business College and then started working in the Daily American newsroom as a photojournalist for $63 a week for 14 months before being drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He went to basic training at Fort Gordon in Georgia and had additional training to be a radio operator and also clerk schooling at Fort Ord in California. While his whole company went to Vietnam, Hay was assigned to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., for the Army Operations Center with a top-secret clearance as a clerk. He stayed in that position for 17 months before finishing up in June 1970.

When Hay came home from the Service, he went back to work at the Daily American newsroom, but later took a civil service test and found a position at the Somerset Post Office on Oct. 30, 1970. He remained there until his retirement on Feb. 1, 2003, with 32 years of service as a city letter carrier. He was credited with 35 years of federal service – two in the Army (1968-70) and one extra year of unused sick time.

Earlier in life, Hay met the former Virginia Long and wrote letters to her during his service. Afterward, the two started dating and were married on June 10, 1973. They just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. They rented a little house in Virginia's home neighborhood of Woodlawn in Summit Township near Meyersdale.

One sleepless night in early May 1973 when "hay fever" kept him from sleeping at his parents' farmhouse in Brothersvalley Township and he was looking forward to his wedding in June of that year, he got out of bed inspired with the idea of writing weekly stories for the newspaper.

"I sat at my manual typewriter that night on a slide pulled out from a roll-top desk and conceived the idea of writing a column for the weekly newspaper," he remembered. "I was eager to settle into my wife's neighborhood where Martha Wahl rented us her Cape Cod house for $50 a month. It was a closely-knit neighborhood with so many special folks. I had some yellowed clippings from as far back as 1914 of Woodlawn news columns that appeared periodically in the same weekly newspaper. As a newcomer, I thought it would be nice to learn and share about that special neighborhood as well as about the good folks living in such outlying places as Keystone, Romania, Vim, Shaw Mines and across the Casselman River toward Doneytown, Boynton and the Coal Run area."

For five years the columns appeared regularly under the heading of "It Happened in Woodlawn." In 1978, when the Hays bought their home in Somerset, the column heading changed to "My Somerset County" because his stories were covering a much broader slice of the county than the Woodlawn neighborhood.

In addition to his weekly column for The New Republic, Hay wrote hundreds of stories for the Daily American throughout the decades on grange news, historical topics and most recently for the former Farm, Field and Garden publication by the Daily American and also for the Somerset Magazine.

"I began writing columns with a manual typewriter and submitted the columns through the mail or sliding them under the door at the newspaper," he said with a laugh. "I advanced to using a word processor and eventually to the amazing capabilities of a computer. The last decades, I had the capabilities of submitting my stories to the newspaper by email without getting off my chair. I worked with numerous newspaper personnel and five different owners of the newspaper, who became special friends."

Hay said those columns became a therapy of sorts for him and allowed him to "escape" from the concerns and worries of life sometimes. He said many people he met along the way in his many interviews became special friends he would have never had the pleasure of knowing otherwise without the outlet of the newspapers.

His personal library is filled with numerous photo albums and notebooks highlighting the people he "had the honor of writing about." Now, when an inspirational story crosses his mind, Hay is sad it can't be recorded. When he learned The New Republic was putting out its last edition with the Nov. 10, 2022, issue – just two days before it happened, he had two additional columns written and submitted to the editor.

"While I was extremely saddened that the newspaper was closing after more than 122 years as a community service for southern Somerset County, I've been accepting the fact as part of our changing times, following a motto: feeling greatly saddened but thrilled that so many years of writing happened. I'm sorry it's over but grateful it happened," he concluded. "I have all my stories and I can sit and reflect on all the places my camera has been. It's definitely been a special and most memorable highlight of my lifetime. Although I'm sad that the end has arrived, I'm happy and thankful that it happened over almost a half-century of my lifetime."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: David Hay cherishes a lifetime of writing for Somerset area newspapers