FNP 51 Page 12 help, and then, I worked at it. Sleep is something, to this day, I've never been fond of. Sleep is an absolute, I guess, necessity. I resent lying down to go to sleep. It's a total waste of life, in my opinion. The only difference between sleep and death is a heartbeat, and that's always been too close for me. But we just did everything, and then, of course, we started hiring some folks. We just did not [accept failure], like those four tombstones out there, [I buried Impossible, Can't, If, and But]. The first thing, in 1957, when I was going to go off [to] school, my mother and daddy gave me school supplies, and I opened up that, well, it's a little old dictionary, and I still got it, carried all through service. It's a little old pocket dictionary, and the first thing I did was mark out those four words: Impossible, Can't, If, and But. My mother [said], what are you doing marking up a brand new dictionary? And I [said], I don't want those four words in my book. P: How long did it take you to become established as a newspaper? I know in the beginning, you gave away the papers. Did that help? G: Yes, sir. I mailed them out to every box holder in the county for a year and a half. I refused to accept any advertising other than Madison County advertising for that first year and a half. I've always been a heavy promoter of Madison County, but it just wasn't enough business here to survive, and I finally started taking in some outside advertising. P: But that was successful from the beginning--in other words, consistently, you would get enough advertising to carry the paper? G: I still got my first deposit books and records, and they're up there in this museum that I told you we've founded. You can see half of those checks [are] stamped insufficient funds. So the bank president would call me up and tell me how much I was overdrawn, and I'd just laugh about it. I said, well, you must know that I'm not going to leave because if I'm overdrawn, then apparently I don't have enough money to leave town. The banks worked with me real well because, of course, I grew up here, and they knew my folks. Then my wife's folks were all here, and, of course, my wife's folks and my folks were friends before we were born. So I guess it was a pre-planned marriage and life. P: How about the office supply store business--was that successful? G: I bought $240 worth of discounted office supplies out of the back of a man's truck, that I bought from him and he delivered to me. So we started from there, and the office-supply store went real well in the beginning. We kept it for thirty years. So it was just another source [of income]. Back then, I was working weddings. I was not a photographer, but I learned right quick I'd better learn to be one. I started off with, Mr. Larry Pinson had a Polaroid camera that he sold to me for thirty-five dollars, and that was right after Polaroids had gotten started. This was one of those fancy ones. So I started off with a borrowed Polaroid camera from a fellow by the name of Buddy Lundy, he loaned me his for the first week or so. Then I bought this one for thirty-five dollars, and I thought that was the most outrageous price I'd ever heard of in my life. I guess that's when I worked