STARKVILLE — In the days when we were colleagues in the Mississippi Press Association, I learned quickly that Patsy Speights was a substantial, formidable woman and a truly great small town newspaper editor.
Just as quickly, I learned that Patsy was possessed of a sharp tongue, a dry wit, and the personal courage of a Pier Six brawler. She was a politician’s worst nightmare and her rural Mississippi sense of justice and fairness left little room for excuses or deviation.
Speights retired in 2012 after a remarkable 25-year career as editor and general manager of The Prentiss Headlight, the weekly newspaper that served Jefferson Davis County.
She died this week at 70 after a long illness. How I will miss her laughter and “no bull” sensibilities.
In Speights, the people of Prentiss and Jefferson Davis County were served by a feisty, fearless small-town editor who literally exhausted her health working to give them the best community newspaper possible. Not only was she a dedicated and no-nonsense reporter covering the beats of crime, government and politics, but she also worked tirelessly to improve the quality of life and the economic development of the newspaper’s territory.
Owned during Patsy’s career by Bill and Amy Jacobs of Brookhaven, The Prentiss Headlight was — despite its relative size in the pecking order of Mississippi newspapers — an innovative and high-quality newspaper. Brookhaven Newsmedia, LLC, an affiliate of Boone Newspapers, Inc. (BNI), purchased of The Headlight from the Jacobs family in 2012.
Speights didn’t grow up in the newspaper business and it wasn’t her first career. As Bill Jacobs wrote in 2012, Patsy sort of willed herself to master the skills necessary to be one of the best small-town newspaper editors in Mississippi through hard work and perseverance.
Frustrated by the sheer bureaucracy and arbitrary nature of it, Speights became a self-taught master of the Byzantine rules and regulations of the U.S. Postal Service as it related to community newspapers, and she was regularly called upon by her colleagues as a mentor and guide.
Patsy earned the respect of her newspaper peers across Mississippi. She was a past president of MPA and a past chairman of the MPA Education Foundation. She was also a former state chair for the National Newspaper Association and, in 2007, was awarded NNA’s McKinley Memorial Award for her efforts on behalf of newspaper postal issues in Mississippi and nationwide.
But she is best known as the gravel-voiced, tough lady with the shock of white hair and the laughing eyes that charmed even those politicians whose toes she mashed in the newspaper when it was necessary. And let me tell you, no Mississippi journalist of her generation was any more adept at taking politicians to the woodshed when she believed they deserved it than was Speights.
At her retirement in 2012, Bill Jacobs wrote of Speights: “She was the epitome of the Norman Rockwell painting of a small town newspaper editor. She did it all: covered meetings, wrote news stories, sold advertising, laid out the pages and made sure the papers got to the post office on time each week.
“In political circles, she also gained the respect of governors as well as congressman and senators. To each of them — peers and politicians — she is known simply as Patsy. No need for her last name, for speaking about Patsy can mean only one person — Patsy Speights, editor of The Prentiss Headlight.” There have been so many women of substance in Mississippi journalism — Hazel Brannon Smith, Norma Fields, Mildred Dearman, Rubye Del Harden, and Alyne Arrington — to name a precious few. Patsy Speights joined those remarkable women in the MPA Hall of Fame in 2012, the year she retired — a status Patsy earned many, many times over.
Sid Salter is syndicated columnist based in Starkville. His email address is [email protected].
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