Newspaper starting 124th year of service with today's edition
By CHRIS BARBEE cbarbee@leader-news.com

Volume 124, No. 1 is found in the page one dateline under the flag of today's El Campo Leader-News. What that means is today is the 124th birthday of this newspaper, dating back to the Czech-language newspaper Svoboda, founded in La Grange in 1885.

El Campo can trace most of its recorded history through the printed pages of its newspapers.

The method of printing has changed from handset type and hand-fed presses to computerized composition and high-speed offset presses and digital photography, but the end result is still basically the same - a written history to remind us of our rich heritage.

Today's El Campo Leader- News represents a newspaper bloodline held together by the merger of several newspapers over the years.

Next month, April 1, marks the 40th anniversary of the 1968 organizational meeting in Lamesa of El Campo Newspaper Inc. stockholders Fred V. Barbee Jr. of Seminole, A. Richard Elam Jr. of Austin and C.C. Woodson of Brownwood. They had entered into a contract March 8, 1968 with Culp Krueger of El Campo to purchase Svoboda Publishing Co., which owned the El Campo Leader-News.

They also entered into a contract at that time for Bar-B Broadcasting Inc. to purchase Wharton County Broadcasting Inc., owner of Radio Station KULP, from Krueger.

Barbee officially took over as publisher of the Leader-News and manager of KULP on July 1, 1968.

Culp Krueger, then a Texas state senator, in 1957 combined the 70-year-old Czech-language newspaper Svoboda with a new English-language newspaper he started in 1955, the El Campo Leader.

A story in the April 3, 1957 edition of the El Campo Leader announced the El Campo Leader as an "expansion" of the Svoboda, which Krueger had purchased. The first edition of the El Campo Leader and Svoboda, which actually included stories and ads written in the Czech language, was printed May 22, 1957. Svoboda was printed as Section 4 of the newspaper.

The El Campo Leader and Svoboda went into competition with the 33-year-old El Campo News (established in 1925) and the 52-year-old El Campo Citizen.

A year later, 1958, Krueger bought the News, merged it into the El Campo Leader- News and Svoboda, and by putting Svoboda into the publication as a section, boasted a volume number (years of publication) of 73, reflecting the age of Svoboda dating back to 1885.

The Svoboda name remained part of the newspaper flag in El Campo until July 11, 1984, even though the Svoboda, which had dwindled to about one-fourth of a page in the Leader-News, had been discontinued with the July 31, 1974 edition.

The final editor of the Svoboda at the time it ceased to be printed was Sophie Hradecky Drozd, who wrote her column from her room at the Czech Catholic Home for the Aged. Her son, Jimmy Hradecky, set his mother's copy on a Linotype machine until falling out of a deer stand and breaking both wrists (the main reason Svoboda was discontinued).

Svoboda, which means liberty in Czech, was first published Dec. 10, 1885 by its founding publisher, Augustine Haidusek, one of the most prominent Czechoslovakian immigrants in Texas at the turn of the century.

He founded the first Czechlanguage newspaper, Svornost, before starting the Svoboda.

Haidusek reportedly published Svoboda 42 years in La Grange until it was purchased by L.J. Sulak, a Texas senator, in 1927.

In March 1931 Sulak moved Svoboda to El Campo in order to keep up with his readers … mainly farmers who migrated from La Grange to till the fertile soils around El Campo in Wharton County. Svoboda was a semi-weekly newspaper then, just as the El Campo Leader- News is today.

Joining Fred Barbee in the newsroom as Society Editor and co-owner was his wife, Eleanor, who died of cancer in Oct. 1980.

Their oldest son, Chris, joined the newspaper full-time on Labor Day 1974 and became an owner in December 1977. He was named publisher shortly after his father's death Oct. 2, 2007.

El Campo Newspapers Inc. purchased the El Campo Citizen, which was founded in 1905, on Aug. 1, 1973. On the purchase date the publication became a semi-weekly, with the Leader-News and Svoboda published each Wednesday afternoon and the Citizen on Saturday mornings.

With the Saturday, April 2, 1978 edition of the paper, the Citizen ceased to exist and its banner, or flag, was replaced with that of the El Campo Leader-News.

The move to the Citizen building at 203 E. Jackson in December 1974 also marked the end of the "hot type" phase of newspaper publication in El Campo, and the beginning of "offset" printing. The first offset paper came out on Dec. 24, 1974. In June 1999 the Leader-News staff stopped "pasting up" pages and started "paginating" them.

The El Campo Leader-News, with a full-time staff of 13 and five part-timers, has been one of the largest paid circulation semi-weekly newspapers in the state since the 1970s, and has been the recipient of many regional and state awards for excellence in journalism.

TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE

The El Campo Leader-News, with a full-time staff of 13 and five part-timers, has been one of the largest paid circulation semi-weekly newspapers in the state since the 1970s, and has been the recipient of many regional and state awards for excellence in journalism.