That whirring sound

When I was on the editorial board of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, every now and then a reader who was unhappy about some aspect of the paper’s performance would remark that Amon Carter must be rolling over in his grave.

Amon G. Carter Sr. was the North Texas businessman/publisher who put together the newspaper about a century ago. He was also a notorious community booster, and the story goes that when events required him to go to Dallas, he would take a sack lunch so as to avoid purchasing anything in Big D. Given that he has been dead for more than five decades, I found it rather amusing that letter-writers would still invoke him as the guiding spirit of the paper.

 (The curious can read about Carter in Amon, a 1978 book by longtime Star-Telegram scribe Jerry Flemmons.)

However, I am fairly certain that I recently heard the old boy doing a few rpm’s in his final resting place, given that (insert pregnant pause here) the Star-Telegram and The Dallas Morning News have agreed to a joint distribution agreement in parts of their circulation areas.

Given the economic crunch in the industry — the cumulative total in recent years of employee buyouts and layoffs at the two papers is in the multiple hundreds — the venture does make a certain amount of economic sense. But if the soil over a certain Cowtown publisher’s casket looks unusually disturbed, you now know the reason.