High Adventure: Porter Harvey and the Advertiser-Gleam

High Adventure: Porter Harvey and the Advertiser-Gleam. By Sam Harvey. Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt Press, 1997. 264 pp. $17.95 (paper). ISBN 1-1881320-98-7.

American journalism has its great metropolitan dailies, but the common person has traditionally turned to the hometown weekly newspaper for enlightenment and entertainment. High Adventure tells the story of a free-spirited journalist named Porter Harvey and of the remarkable newspaper he founded. The Advertiser-Gleam of Guntersville breaks every journalistic rule, but it still boasts the highest circulation of any weekly newspaper in Alabama. The paper once printed an ode to itself that concluded, "And when the end of earth shall come and time shall cease to be ... [t]hey'll believe it when they read it in the Advertiser-Gleam" (p. 256).

At the time of his death in 1995, at age ninety-one, Porter Harvey was the oldest newspaper editor in Alabama and one of the oldest newspaper executives in the nation. Sam Harvey, who succeeded his father as editor, relates that Porter, the founder of the Advertiser-Gleam, continued to write on an old manual typewriter until three weeks before his death. Upon Harvey's passing one newspaper columnist lamented that "Newspapering the way God intended it lost an icon when Porter Harvey died" (p. 14).

The Advertiser-Gleam's gray trout page and long vertical columns resemble newspapers of the 1800s. In a high-tech era, when most newspapers have adopted USA Today-like design with splashy color and catchy headlines, the Advertiser-Gleam offers proof that its twelve thousand subscribers value substance over fancy packaging. The newspaper's letterfrom-home writing style, exemplified in unusual feature stories and obituaries, likewise harkens back to the old days of journalism. And then there is the humor. Porter Harvey once ran a picture of a dead dog in the center of Highway 431; instead of moving the carcass, a state crew had painted the center stripe right over the dog's body.

Though listed on the masthead as publisher and editor, Porter Harvey was from first to last a reporter. Auburn University journalism Department head Jerry E. Brown writes in the book's foreword: "He published what readers need and want-not only what the cops, courts and councils of government were doing, but also how much rain was falling in different hamlets of Marshall County, where a column of ants in a bank parking lot was going, and which hymn and stanza a man was singing when he dropped dead at a church service" (p. 10).

A native Georgian, Porter Harvey earned an electrical engineering degree in 1925 from Emory University in Atlanta and spent a year at Harvard, where he studied literature and writing. He then worked as a reporter for dailies in New York, Nashville, and Indianapolis, and he toiled for nine years at the Dodge City Globe in Kansas, where he met his wife, Alice. After a stint at the old Birmingham Post (now Post-Herald), Harvey finally came to Guntersville in 1941 to start a weekly newspaper.

High Adventure is dedicated to Porter Harvey's wife of sixty-five years, Alice Wells Harvey, " [w] ho allowed it all to happen-sometimes in spite of her better judgment," Sam Harvey writes in the dedication. Harvey recalls that his mother, a schoolteacher, played a vital role as the family breadwinner in the first years, when the paper was not making enough money for the family to live on.

When Porter Harvey and members of his family, representing four generations, bungee-jumped at Raccoon Mountain High Adventure Sports in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1993, the event made national news. Harvey made the 176-foot jump to celebrate his ninetieth birthday; it was only one among his many great adventures.

ED WILLIAMS Auburn University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jan 2000
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