Oldest found edition dates back to 1918

Hanging on to the past has yielded a few treasures for two Fort Scott residents.

Sister Concetta Cardinale, the director of the Mercy Health Center Compassionate Care program, recently discovered an old edition of The Fort Scott Tribune while searching through the archives of the old Sisters of Mercy convent located at 810 S. Burke St., a building now owned by Fort Scott Community College.

In response to an ad that was published last week in The Tribune celebrating National Newspaper Week, Sister Concetta notified Tribune staff that she had in her possession a copy of The Fort Scott Tribune that is dated Dec. 17, 1918. The newspaper has yellowed with age, but it is still in relatively good condition and has been laminated.

The newspaper features on its front page an article about John Ross Newman and Claud Franklin Young, two physicians who would later go on to found the Newman Young Clinic in 1922 that still operates at 710 W. 8th St. The article describes how Newman and Young purchased $13,200 worth of radium that year that was delivered to Fort Scott for the purpose of conducting experiments.

Another article on the newspaper’s front page mentions four Tribune staff members who had enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces to fight in World War I. At that time, it was common for Tribune staff to print letters in the newspaper that had been mailed overseas from soldiers who fought in the war, Sister Concetta said. Tribune staff also often responded to those letters, she said.

Sister Concetta said after she found the old newspaper, she contacted The Tribune because she thought the newspaper might find a better home there, rather than locked away in a file in the old Mercy convent archives.

“I thought ‘What a shame’ because what a neat piece of history this is,” she said. “But of course I love history and I’m just fascinated by it.”

Sister Concetta said she had thought of having the newspaper framed for display on the wall of her office at the Mercy Health Center Medical Plaza at the corner of 8th and Horton streets.

Other than serving on several local groups and committees, Sister Concetta is also a member of the Mercy Health Center Foundation Board of Trustees. She has been part of Mercy Health Center since 1987. Sister Concetta attended the Mercy School of Nursing in Fort Scott during the mid-1940s before joining the Sisters of Mercy Convent in St. Louis, Mo.

The old convent building, built in 1958 by the Sisters of Mercy, formerly housed a convent chapel and provided a home for the sisters. The building also housed the Mercy nursing school until 1974, when FSCC took over the program. The sisters moved out of the building in early 2004, when FSCC purchased it for $75,000 and spent about $50,000 to remodel it for the FSCC Nursing Program.

Sister Concetta later returned to Fort Scott to work as a nurse supervisor at the old Mercy Hospital and continued her ministry in Mercy health care facilities in Kansas.

Another local resident who responded to the Tribune’s search for old newspapers was Redfield resident Donna Matkin, who also called The Tribune and brought in a box that contained several old editions of the newspaper from the 1940s through the 1960s.

The oldest newspaper that Matkin said she possesses was the May 30, 1942 edition, which provided information on local soldiers’ duties and activities overseas during World War II. Another newspaper, dated May 7, 1945, highlighted the end of World War II and the Allied victory in the war by displaying “Victory” in large letters on the edition’s front page.

Matkin said her mother-in-law collected many of the newspapers that Matkin’s father had obtained from working for several years as a pressman at The Tribune before retiring. Matkin said some of her other relatives worked at The Tribune in the past as well.