Her nickname was “Pug” and I never found out why? She was 82 and was the editor, publisher, layout and design specialist, photographer, typesetter and sometimes janitor of the Sheridan County Star in Rushville, Nebraska.

I was working as a reporter for the Rapid City Journal when my former schoolmate, Melvin “Dickie” Brewer, from the Holy Rosary Indian Mission Boarding School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and his wife Alma approached me about starting a newspaper on the reservation.

What did I know about running a newspaper? Absolutely nothing. And that’s when Pug came into the scenario. What did I need in the way of equipment and how long would it take to learn how to operate it? Those are the first of many questions that came to mind as Dickie, Doris Brewer Giago, Alma, and Mary Irving and I cleaned up and remodeled an abandoned beauty shop right on Main Street in Pine Ridge Village.

Mary, Doris and I went across the border to Rushville and met Pug for the first time. She looked us over and told us she would lend us her expertise. She made a list of the equipment we would need including a Compugraphic Typesetter that would be used to type film strips to be waxed and pasted to the grid sheets we would be using to layout and design the pages.

With extreme patience she took Doris and Mary under her wing and walked them through the process of preparing the type that would go on to the pages. Coincidentally a brother in Marist Order of the Catholic Church who was working at the Marist compound at Oglala heard about us trying to start a newspaper. He stopped by our office that still smelled of wet paint and looked the place over. He said, “That clothes closet would make a great dark room.” And with that he set about with hammer and nails converting it.

We called him “Brother Scottie” and he was an ex-paratrooper from Scotland who had been incarcerated in a German prisoner of war camp in 1944 where he made a great escape and made his way back to England. He joined the Marist Brothers after the war and found himself on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He had been a trained photographer and film developer and so he was kind enough to volunteer his services. And with a startup business, the more volunteers you can get the better.

After getting a small loan from a bank in Rushville, I am sure with a strong word from Pug, and a 1946, restored Plymouth that Dickie put up for collateral, we ordered the Compugraphic Typesetter, turned the sinks in the beauty shop into our layout light tables and started to gather the news stories that would go into our first edition. Brother Scottie got busy taking photos we thought would go with our first news stories. I started to write the entire newspaper.

In the meantime Pug told us we could use her newspaper office to get our first edition off of the ground and we could use it until our equipment arrived. Mary and Doris, under the watchful eyes of Pug, started to typeset the copy while I waxed it and rolled it on to the grid sheets. It was June of 1981 and we had started to put this entire idea into operation in April of that year. Brother Scottie rushed in with the photos and I waxed them and applied them on the pages with the appropriate stories.

Dickie and I had covered the reservation and the border towns of Rushville and Gordon, Nebraska and even traveled as far as Rapid City looking for advertisers. Trying to sell advertising for a newspaper that has never been published can be very trying. We had also visited all of the stores on the reservation and in the border towns to set up drops for the paper. And so we had a delivery route all set up by July 1, 1981 when the first edition of the Lakota Times rolled off of the presses in Chadron, Nebraska.

I have that first edition on microfiche and I’m almost afraid to look at it. We knew nothing about the art of assembling a newspaper and we could never have done it without the invaluable assistance and advice from Pug. And this was puzzling because we would end up becoming a rival of Pug by going after advertising in the town where she published her newspaper.

Dickie and I took off on the morning of July 1, 1981 with our cars loaded with newspapers. We printed 4,000 copies that first day and we put them on the newsstands for 25 cents a copy. We delivered them to every store and gas station on the reservation and in the border towns.

It was in the very late afternoon on July 1 when I pulled into the village of Pine Ridge on my way back to the newly minted Lakota Times newspaper office. As I slowed down to cruise down Main Street, sitting on a park bench across the street from the Sioux Nation Shopping Center, were two elderly Lakota men each holding a copy of the Lakota Times and reading them in the fading daylight.

My heart soared with joy. Yes, we had done it: We had published our first newspaper.

– Tim Giago was winner of the H.L. Mencken Award for Editorial Writing in 1985. His Lakota Times became Indian Country Today in 1989 and grew to be the largest Native American newspaper in America. It has published continuously for 35 years and is now online as Indian Country Today Media Network under the ownership of the Oneida Nation of New York.