Ink must be on Emma Crisler’s hands and in her veins after all the years she has spent as a member of the Fourth Estate.
Emma is the editor/publisher of The Port Gibson Reveille, the state’s third oldest newspaper. It’s a Claiborne County weekly that was started in 1850 and has never missed an issue. In 1898, H.H. Crisler bought it, and it’s been a Crisler publication now for 117 years. Emma “married into the Reveille” as a midnight proofreader in the early 1970s.
She grew up Emma Flautt in Tutwiler, “definitely Delta,” and went to a college in St. Louis for a year, “the year that the cotton crop literally rotted in the fields,” she said.
“My people were insurance people. We didn’t farm, but we insured ’em, and, if they didn’t make it, we didn’t make it.”
Reflecting on that catastrophic year, she said, “It was a very strange Christmas” and she would not go back to St. Louis, “which was fine with me.”
Instead, she entered Ole Miss, where generations of her family had gone. She graduated with a double major, English and journalism, with a minor in French. She went to work for the State Times in Jackson and, then, the McComb Enterprise-Journal.
She was also prepared to teach because “that was a time when you minded your parents, and Mother said, ‘You aren’t leaving school without a teacher’s certificate.’”
She taught English at McComb High School, loved it and, four years later, moved to Vicksburg to teach at H.V. Cooper High School.
Her sister in Tutwiler wanted her to come home to meet a man who had seen a picture of Emma while visiting in the Flautt home. He was interested in getting to know her. So, up Highway 61 she went to meet the man who would become her husband, Edgar Crisler Jr., who had grown up in Port Gibson.
Edgar had spent some time in journalism school in Chicago, then served in the Navy before going to work for Riverside Industries dealing in soybean futures and living in Los Angeles.
The instant attraction resulted in much of their courtship happening through the mail.
“You know how bad my handwriting is,” Emma said. “He came back for a translation.”
The two became engaged — Emma got her engagement ring in the mail — the families met and a home wedding was held in Tutwiler on Sept. 20, 1969.
It was the same day of an Ole Miss football game, and some wanted Emma to change the date, but she said no. So, though all her relatives came, her uncles were all on the back porch listening to the game.
Edgar, like most children of weekly editors, grew up in the Reveille office wrapping papers for mailing and also learning to operate the Linotype machine, a Rube Goldberg device that turned hot metal into lines of type.
He had planned to stay in California, but when a boycott of white-owned businesses in Claiborne County made things pretty tight, he decided to go home to help his parents.
“So, instead of shipping my trunks to California,” Emma said. “My things came south to Port Gibson.”
Her teaching career came to an end because a ruling had been made by school officials in Vicksburg that all teachers had to live in Warren County. To Emma, it was just as well, for she was expecting a baby.
The Reveille was published in a small, brick building on Main Street. Just when it was built Emma doesn’t know, “but it survived the fire of 1839. There was once a plaque out front that told the history, but it was knocked down by a car. It’s now in someone’s garage. I can’t remember what it said.”
The Reveille is still published in the same building, but all the old-time sounds and smells of a small-town print shop are gone. Now, there’s a paneled office and modern furniture and a typewriter on the editor’s desk — Emma doesn’t use a computer or a cell phone. On the wall are numerous plaques awarded to previous Reveille editors, many to Edgar for his investigative reporting when he exposed several illegal shenanigans by local officials.
In the basement is the “dinosaur,” a huge hand-fed press that is totally obsolete and useless and too big for a museum display. In the back rooms are other machines from the not-too-distant past, but there’s no use for them either.
In 1974, Edgar Sr., died, and Edgar Jr., took the reins. After a lot of study and contemplating, he made the transition from hot-type to more modern methods of printing. Emma was content to do some writing, editing and proofreading and being a mother to their daughter, Sarah Emma. But her world turned upside down on a Saturday night in 1997 when Edgar died of a massive heart attack.
Emma’s sister and her daughter, who worked for a newspaper on the Coast, stepped to the plate and published that week’s paper on time. Emma was advised, “You’ve got to sell it, hire somebody or you’re it.”
That ink on her hands and in her veins came to the fore, and Emma became editor and publisher, never missing a deadline and publishing a creditable 100th anniversary edition of The Reveille as a Crisler newspaper.
She’s quick to give praise and credit to members of the Bufkin family, who began working for The Reveille generations ago, saying, “They are very sincere, loyal people.” Today, Martha and Kathy Bufkin set the type, and Gerald Bufkin is about as much a part of the Reveille family as is Emma who said “I wouldn’t dare tell Jerry what to do.”
With the exception of a letter to the editor or a guest column, every word in The Reveille is Emma’s.
Emma’s roles are writing, editing and taking pictures, and you are likely to see her anywhere in Port Gibson or the remote regions of the county with her digital camera in hand.
The stories are local — perhaps sports, church events, social gatherings, agriculture — or she might take on those in the highway department who want to destroy the integrity and beauty of Church Street.
One of the plaques on her office wall is recognition of some photojournalism she did in 2001. It was given by the Mississippi Press Association, but to Emma, some awards are hardly worth it, because “I’ve got to put the paper out.”
What is the criteria for news that goes into The Reveille?
“It’s got to be worthwhile,” said Emma, who prefers not to tell her age. “There’s so much not worth reporting. I would like to have a positive front page, but you can’t make it up. You get what you get, and that’s the way it works.”
She tries to be fair, “but I cut the crap.”
An old-time expression when the paper went to press was, “We put it to bed.” Now, Emma said, “We just say we’re through.”
STORY Gordon Cotton
PHOTOGRAPHY Melanie Thortis
