Harry had owned the New Holland Chronicle for the last two and a half years. He'd bought the small town newspaper when the owner decided to retire, and he'd bought it to fulfill his dream of being a journalist. That's why he went to college.
He thought his job with "The Daily News" would let him do that. He'd be a no-nonsense reporter who told it like it was. His newspaper would give him his own column after a couple of years, and he'd go on to become famous for his incisive look into the news of the day.
What actually happened is he ended up writing articles about this year's garden show or describing the annual Christmas parade. When he'd begged his editor six times for something to cover with more meat, reality set in. He was going to keep covering shows at the Armory and parades for a lot of years. Joyce was still doing that after twenty years with the paper. She seemed to love it. To Harry, it was an insult to his education.
"The New Holland Chronicle" wasn't a major newspaper like "The Daily News" but it had a lot of subscribers in New Holland, enough that it made a small profit. It wasn't much, but since Harry wasn't married, it would be enough to let him live in relative comfort. It was also exciting because there were only two people on staff. Helen did the accounting, kept track of subscriptions, and in her spare time, put all the articles and ads in columns and picked out the filler pieces that completed each column. Maurice was the man who ran the ancient linotype and printing press and fixed both when they broke. Harry would be both editor and reporter so he'd determine what made the front page and what would be relegated to the last page of the six page, weekly newspaper.
He'd read the paper before he bought it and realized there was one section missing that nearly every successful newspaper had. It was missing an advice column. Once he'd bought the paper, he inquired about licensing rights to two of the most well-known and quickly decided he couldn't afford them.
For a month, he published the paper every week, but when Helen brought him the subscription list and said some people who'd subscribed for years hadn't renewed, he started to worry. She'd called a few and they told her they liked the national news, but they wanted more about the community and two had told her they were switching to a bigger paper because of the opinion pages and the advice column.
That set Harry to thinking. The opinion page wouldn't be hard at all. All he had to do was ask some of the town leaders to write something every week. He'd fill in any blanks with interviews of the town's business owners. That could probably cover both the request for more about the community as well as the request for an opinion page.
The advice column was harder. There was no way he could afford one of the nationally published people. When he thought about it though, all they did was give common sense answers to the questions they got. About anybody could do that. That night, he called Carol Williams, a woman he'd met in college and stayed friends with. She had a degree in social science and had done some counseling, but had decided that being a mother was more important than having a career.
Harry asked Carol if she had enough time to answer some questions from his readers, no more than two a week. He thought she'd bargain about his offer of fifty dollars per question, but she didn't. He set up an email account to receive the questions, and in the next issue, Harry announced that if people would send in their questions about love, life, and living, they'd see an answer in the paper within two weeks.
After that issue, he got emails from four people. He forwarded them to Carol and asked if she could answer two by the next Tuesday. On Monday afternoon, he got her reply. The paper went to print on Wednesday and was delivered to his subscribers in Friday's mail.
The next Monday when Helen picked up the mail, there were twenty more questions, this time in envelopes. Harry typed the questions and emailed them to Carol and asked if she could maybe do three a week. Carol said three was OK and she could probably do four, but that was it. Harry said he'd pay her a bonus of fifty dollars if she could do four.
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For the next two years, "Ask Carol" was one of the most popular columns in his paper. There was never a shortage of questions asking for advice, in fact, Harry had to apologize for the length of time it was taking to get the answers published. That didn't seem to matter. People kept sending in their questions. They also kept subscribing to the paper, and at the end of two years, Harry had gained back all the subscribers he'd lost as well as increased the number of subscribers by about ten percent. The increase in subscribers also increased the ads the local businesses placed. The New Holland Chronicle was operating with a very substantial profit margin.
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It was June of that year the bottom fell out. Carol emailed him and said she was pregnant again, with twins this time, and her doctor had told her to not work as hard as she had been. She was going to answer what questions she still had, but couldn't take any more.
Harry figured he had about a month to find another Carol or he'd start losing subscribers again. In the last two surveys he'd taken, a lot of subscribers wrote they only subscribed because of "Ask Carol".
For two weeks, he published the answers Carol emailed him, but had only two for the next week's edition. He'd been trying to find someone to take over the column, but that was more difficult than he'd imagined.
He thought about asking Helen if she'd consider it because over the years he'd learned she had a very practical mind. She always read the questions and answers as she fit them into the columns before they were printed, and would often tell him what she'd tell the person. That sometimes wasn't what Carol answered, but it was usually common sense. Helen was about his age too, so she was young enough to understand what both the older women and younger women were asking.
He had to reconsider that idea though. Helen had told him the one thing that kept people writing to Carol was she didn't live in the community. If Helen started doing the column, someone would eventually find out it was her. They'd be afraid she'd recognize them and tell everyone else about how Betty Jackson couldn't excite her husband like she used to or that Shirley Jones thought another woman might be really interesting and how could she find one.
By that third week, Harry was out of ideas, and it seemed like it wouldn't be long before his paper went bankrupt.
He was reading the last set of emailed and hand written questions when he realized a lot of them were the same as questions he'd already seen. He'd saved all Carol's questions and responses in one long file in his word processor, so he picked out what seemed to be the key word on the first question -- kissing -- and then searched for "kissing" in the file of Carol's responses. A couple seconds later, his word processor had highlighted that word.
Harry read through the question about kissing and discovered it was nearly identical to the latest one he'd received. He read Carol's answer, and realized it would probably work for this question too.
Harry was all grins then. All he'd have to do to keep "Ask Carol" going was search her previous advice columns for key words, change the wording a little to make the old advice seem new, and publish it. Since he had a little over a thousand questions and Carol's resulting advice to choose from, he should be able to just keep going until he could find another woman for the column.
It dawned on him then that there might be questions Carol hadn't answered before, but he thought he could manage by asking Helen what she thought, and then writing the answer like Carol would have.
Harry went to press that week with the last two actual answers from Carol and two more he'd re-worded from before. When the questions didn't stop coming in after another month, Harry patted himself on the back for having such a great idea.
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The first snag in his plan arrived in the mail two months later, and would have been his first chance to ask Helen what she thought, but when he read the questions, he knew he couldn't do that. Helen wasn't a prude but she was a very conservative woman, and this question was pretty explicit.
"Dear Carol, I'm about at the end of my rope because all I can think about is this guy from work. Every time I see him, my panties get wet and I've had to start wearing panty liners every day. I want him to have sex with me so bad I'm going crazy, but he doesn't seem to even know I'm there. What can I do to tell him how I feel?
Thank you,
Hot and Horny."
Harry had smiled after reading that. There were only two industries in New Holland, a bakery and a trucking company. He couldn't imagine a woman working in the bakery being that way, but he could imagine a woman working in at the trucking company might. He'd been to both places to write articles for his "Community" page.
The women in the bakery all seemed to be quiet women, more like normal housewives really. They joked with each other while they worked, but when he was there, he hadn't heard a single word about sex or any off-color jokes.
The women at the trucking company were a lot different. Most of them walked around with hand-held scanners and read the bar-coded box labels so they could sort the boxes into the right truck. The others drove forklifts, and they all fit right in with the truck drivers.
He'd asked a little blonde about what she did and how she liked it when she grinned at him.
"You mean here at work, or what I do with my boyfriend?"
"Well...uh...at work."
She'd grinned again.
"You sure? It's not as fun as what I do with my boyfriend."
The older brunette on the forklift had smiled at him when he asked her the same questions.
"Well, I load skids into the trailers using my forklift and then give the paperwork to the driver. You ever seen the inside of one of those truck cabs? They have beds and refrigerators and TV's and DVD players. I worked over one night and after I loaded his truck, the driver asked me if I'd like to take a little ride."
