I turned 58 on Saturday, and I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday.
In the morning, I said my prayers and knocked out a couple of projects around the house I’d been putting off for some time in the morning. Then I spent the rest of the day with my wife, kids, grandkids (after they had their naps of course)and dogs.
Pretty much heaven on earth in my neck of the woods.
And very different from how I spent my birthday a year ago.
At that time, I was hunkered down at our cabin with my family a state away working day and night on a different kind of birthday: the very first edition of The Sand Mountain Leader.
That first edition had been months in the making. The paper’s only employee at that time, Jonathan Bottomlee, and I had been meeting with members of the community to determine if there was an appetite for an alternative to the existing newspaper on Sand Mountain. What we found through those many conversations was that our suspicions were correct. The good people of Sand Mountain wanted something different, the kind of newspaper they had received locally in the past, and moreover they were prepared to support it.
Like the old Nike commercials used to say, just do it.
On a side note, that makes “Jonathan Bottomlee” the answer to the trivia question “Who was the first-ever employee of The Sand Mountain Leader?” I’ll always be grateful to Jonathan for being the first to take that leap of faith with me.
A leap of faith it surely was. I mean, who is crazy enough to start a newspaper in this day and time? And not in a news desert where there was no competition. In a county that already had three papers?
Like Waylon Jennings used to sing, I’ve always been crazy, but it’s kept me from going insane.
A week out from that first edition, Jonathan wasn’t just the first employee of The Sand Mountain Leader, he was still the only employee of The Sand Mountain Leader.
Gulp.
The team would fill out in the days to come. Eventually Donna Thornton was able to come on board as the editor. Taylor Beck would sign up to do sports. David Clemons said he wanted to help with page design and coverage, and I was glad to have him. Same with Daniel Taylor who offered to do some writing for us.
Fortunately my daughter, Tabitha, was able to jump on ad building for The Leader while still being a jack-of-all trades at the other four papers in two states I owned at the time, two of which I had just bought earlier in the month. Couldn’t have done it without her. Still can’t.
As all these pieces began to fall into place, a bona fide miracle in my opinion, a little doubt also started to creep into my head. There were just so many moving parts, honestly trying to describe it won’t do it justice, and so few of us to manage all of them. There were attempts to sabotage us before we even got off the ground because, well, that was the caliber of the competition.
Are we going to be able to pull this off?
Failure was not an option. We had too many people counting on us to let even one down.
Not only did we pull it off, man, it almost looked like we knew what we were doing. Lol. Again, a bona fide miracle.
I’d like to think we’ve even gotten a little better along the way. A year later, we’ve collected some hardware from the Alabama Press Association indicating we are on the right track anyway.
When we started The Leader, we promised our readers and the community we would give them the kind of newspaper they wanted and deserved.
I’d like to think that was a promise made and a promise kept, and I’d like to think you feel the same way due to the tremendous support you have shown us over the course of this first year.
I’d like to wish a very happy first birthday to The Leader, and a very hardy thank you to the staff for all of its tireless efforts and the Sand Mountain community for welcoming us into 10,000 of your homes every week.
Onward and upward in year two.
Patrick Graham is the publisher of The Sand Mountain Leader and other newspapers in Alabama and Georgia. His email address is [email protected].
Patrick Graham, publisher of The Sand Mountain Leader, shows off one of the three first-place Alabama Press Association Media Awards the newspaper won for work in 2025.
