We wish everyone a happy new year. There seems to be more optimism at the beginning of this year as opposed to any since the Coronavirus came our way in the fall of 2019.

It’s now been over five years since COVID-19 reached our shores, but our two businesses, this newspaper and the office supply store a few doors south, are still feeling the negative effects created through shortages in supplies and inflation.

Every small business in America has seen the cost of keeping the doors open go up, up, up.

Unfortunately, many simply shut down.

COVID-19 FORCED CHANGES TO THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY We have kept our $48 annual subscription price the same over these past five years, even though we’ve absorbed multiple postal increases over that same period.

I’m not completely sure, but I’m fairly confident our 50-cent newstand-convenience store countertop sale price of our single issue is the lowest of any newspaper in the state.

We’ve gone from a staff of 11 to seven, and margins continue to shrink.

To cut our overhead we also implemented a four-day work week for all but Michael Swisher, our news editor and me. That will remain the same.

With the advent of e-mail and cell phones, the way we all do business has changed drastically. When I first started working here in 1983 the land line telephones rang non-stop and the front door opened and closed dozens, if not hundreds of times a day.

Now we do most of our business interactions via e-mails, cell phone texts and cell phone calls. I am guessing that’s the same for other businesses as well. Our land line telephones ring much less now.

Where it’s all going is anybody’s guess. Now we have hundreds of digital-only subscribers, and our presence on social media and the internet increases each year.

We were already trending that way, but in my opinion COVID-19 sped up the process by ten years or more.

Kingfisher is by far the smallest city in Oklahoma to have a newspaper that publishes twice a week.

El Reno’s population is four to five times more than ours, and its newspaper is a twice-a-week publication. Yukon is a much larger market and it’s the same there.

Cushing is a city larger than ours. The newspaper there has gone from a daily to a weekly publication.

I could go on and on with other examples to explain as to why it makes much more sense to change from a twice-a-week publication to weekly. But, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to keep doing what we do.

We already made changes with the office supply store over a year ago by locking the front door and focusing solely on our business customers.

With COVID-19 folks began isolating themselves and ordering much more over the internet. The walk-in customers never came back. So much so that we found ourselves with a clerk employed to wait on customers that never came. So we had to change our way of doing business.

We don’t like it that our front door is closed now, but by focusing solely on our business customers, which provided over 90 percent of our income anyway, we were able to cut our overhead and stay in business.

A FULL FAMILY AGENDA FOR 2025 Kingfisher is a wonderful community to live in. We’ve been here over 42 years. All three of our sons graduated from Kingfisher High School, and we think it’s very important that they have a hometown to come home to for visits and holidays.

For the first time we had all three sons, with their significant others, home for the Christmas holiday, and it was wonderful.

There’s just something magical about grown children returning home for Christmas.

Mary and I were worried that we may never have a son closer than 1,300 miles away.

Our oldest son Conner and his wife Kristina reside in Edgewater, Maryland, which is a suburb of Annapolis.

They are expecting our first grandchild, a girl, in April.

Our middle son Ben is currently a captain in the Marine Corps. His wife Julia, who was raised in northern Virginia, is a lieutenant in the Navy. They have lived in the San Diego area since they graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and were married in 2020.

But, this June they will leave those jobs and return to Oklahoma, as Ben will begin classes at the University of Oklahoma School of Law in August.

Julia wants eventually to be a stay-at-home mom, and Ben wants to practice small town law.

Of course as he gets closer to graduation that all may change. But for now we’re hoping we may eventually have them even closer than Norman. Finally, a son only 90 minutes away.

The other big news for our family is that our youngest son Ross, who travels the southeast as a pipeline inspector, became engaged to his fiancée Marina over their Christmas vacation with us.

Marina resides in North Carolina and they plan to marry in that state in June.

Mary’s already making plans to travel to North Carolina to help make arrangements for the wedding site and meet with Marina’s mother.

2025 does indeed looks to be a very busy year.