MORE TO JOAN FLOR THAN BANNER-PRESS

Joan and Lee Flor owned the Banner-Press for nearly 20 years. They are standing outside their home in Marble Hill.

Flor also enjoys gardening and has several beautiful gardens in her back yard. Joan and Lee spend many evenings relaxing among the various flowers.

Joan Flor is a name that should be familiar to many of the residents of Bollinger County. She and her husband, Lee, were owners of the Marble Hill Banner-Press, which serves all of Bollinger County, for nearly 20 years, and she still writes the column "Just My Type" every week.

Flor and her husband bought the newspaper in 1976.

"It's a very old newspaper," Flor said. "It goes back to 1881 so just about everybody knows the Banner-Press."

Flor said her husband, a long-time reporter, found out the paper he was working for, the Washington Star in Washington, D.C., was "in deep trouble" so they started looking for a weekly newspaper to buy.

"We just started driving west, looking for one in the country," Flor said. "When we got to Marble Hill on Valentine's Day in 1976, we liked the newspaper and the community, so we decided to go for that."

Flor said she and her husband were co-editors of the Banner-Press with an average staff of about 10 and they ran it side by side for nearly 20 years.

But Joan Flor's life did not begin with the Marble Hill Banner-Press.

She was born in Indianapolis, Ind., where Flor said she had a very happy childhood as an "amateur naturalist, with an accent on amateur."

Flor said in those days parents could turn their children loose to go out and explore. She enjoyed doing just that on her grandparents' farm in southern Indiana.

Flor said her mother must have "had the patience of a saint" because her family had every kind of pet imaginable.

The exception to her happy childhood was that Flor was a very "puny, sickly, scrawny, asthmatic little girl." But she said that wasn't so bad because that gave her time to read, draw, think and invent stories.

After Flor's happy childhood, she said she somehow ended up going to New York City because she felt the need to get away from home.

"I was so naive," Flor said. "The cops would come by and say 'Miss, you really shouldn't be walking along this park, it's full of muggers and purse snatchers.'"

Flor said she didn't really know what she wanted to do and she had no plans.

"They say life is what happens to you while you're making other plans," Flor said. "And I didn't really have any other plans and girls didn't go to college in those days."

So she worked for a law firm during the day and attended art classes at night because she always loved to draw.

"I did this for a year," Flor said, "and it finally occurred to me that in the city it was OK for girls to go to college."

So she did. She enrolled in the Columbia University School of General Studies that was close to where she lived.

"But I still didn't have any plans," she said. "Other people told me I was either going to be a writer or a teacher, but I just didn't know."

Finally, Flor got "fed up" with city life and she began to long for home, so she went back to Indianapolis, little realizing another big change was about to occur.

"I was working during the day and taking classes at night," Flor said, "and that's when I met Lee."

Flor said she was taking a composition class at Indianapolis University, and it so happened that her teacher was a very popular columnist for the Indianapolis Times.

She told him her research topic was on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and its subsequent downfall in Indiana during the '40s. So he recommended she go to the Times and use their library.

Of course Lee Flor was a reporter for the Indianapolis Star.

"So I was down there researching," Flor said, "and Lee knows a lot about history, so he started talking to me.

"And we wound up getting married."

Their son was born just a few years later, in 1961, just before they moved to Washington, D.C., where Lee Flor had gotten a job at the Washington Star, a big competitor with the Washington Post.

Flor said Washington, D.C., in the '60s and '70s was a very exciting place.

"That was when the Vietnam War was going on," Flor said, "and there were a lot of anti-war demonstrations and riots were going on."

She said there were always fires accompanying the riots and many evenings her husband would come home smelling like smoke, having covered the riots for the newspaper.

At the mention of Watergate, Flor just smiles and says it was "no big deal."

But it does remind her that she knew Carl Bernstein very well. Bernstein was one half of the reporter team that uncovered President Nixon's involvement in the scandal that rocked the country.

"Carl worked at the Star," Flor said, which is the same paper her husband worked for. "He's a character, but he didn't get a big head from all that."

Flor said this was a good time for her, because this was when she first got interested in free-lance writing.

Flor started out doing travel and entertainment features for newspaper weekend editions.

"I remember the first thing I ever sold for money," she said. "This is when you think of yourself as a writer, when you get paid for something.

"It was a story about the Barrier Islands off the coast of Virginia and some wild ponies that lived there. They had a roundup every summer that was very exciting."

The first interview Flor did was with a "very nice" Chinese-American gentleman who was coordinating the Chinese New Year festivities in Washington.

Then she got into magazine pieces, writing both fiction and nonfiction and an occasional column for magazines that "no one had ever heard of."

Flor also wrote a couple of "industry newsletters."

She said they were for people who couldn't be in Washington but needed to know what Congress and the regulatory agencies were doing.

"I did them for publishers elsewhere," Flor said. "I wrote the whole bloody thing and then it was sent out under their name."

At the same time, Flor also became a book editor for Acropolis Books, which is still in Washington, D.C. She said they published nonfiction books, which she said could be fun.

"We did one on the Loch Ness monster that was by a guy that was an expert on that sort of thing," Flor said.

It was also fun in that she could get in on any stage of the project and follow the book through. She did everything from copy editing the original manuscript to the final writing of the jacket copy.

"It was all good preparation for running a weekly newspaper," Flor said.

Flor said that you know what someone's like by knowing what's fun for them.

What she and her husband like to do is all outdoor-related whether it's "low budget" travel to Lake Michigan or visiting historic places.

Her most fun day was spent at a bird banding station in upper Illinois watching the workers there catch birds in their nets, gather data about them, band them, and send them on their way.

"There aren't as many birds now as there used to be," she said, "so it's nice that people are keeping track and trying to learn all they can about them."

The Flors weren't just responsible for the Banner-Press, though. They also opened a movie rental store in 1984 that is still open.

"In those days," Flor said, "most weekly newspapers would have some kind of a sideline.

"A lot of time they did job training or opened an office supply store. So we opened a movie rental store, right on the same premises."

The store worked out very well and offered a good time in the process.

"We always prided ourselves in having a family store," Flor said. "So people could bring in their kids and we really enjoyed that."

In early 1993, Lee Flor was involved in an automobile accident that left him paralyzed. After two years, he has almost fully recovered.

But the accident, along with other factors, is what prompted the Flor's to sell the Banner-Press to Rust Communications of Cape Girardeau last year.

"What I enjoyed most about working at the newspaper," Flor said, "was all the people I got to meet.

"And it was really exciting."