Wayne County, NC - Homer Brock

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Jones Journal Newspaper Article by Jack Rider
(Found in the Wednesday June 1, 1949 edition)

Over in Mount Olive a close friend died. He was Homer Brock, publisher 
of the Mount Olive Tribune and father of the fellows who have been 
largely responsible for the success of the Rider ventures in the 
publishing field. I had known Brock just over a year, but in that tie 
we had become warm and sincere friends.

His health had caused him to withdraw from a too active part in the 
Tribune before I came in contact with the family, but he was nearly 
always around when I spent Tuesday over in his shop helping to get the 
Lenoir County News and Jones Journal into the mails.

Aside from being country editors, Brock and I had little in common. He 
was past 60, father of a good sized family of grown children, a life 
deacon in his church, an ardent dry. Obviously there are few of these 
characteristics that I shared with Brock. Nevertheless, he respected 
me, an ardent "wet", a young upstart in the newspaper business, and I 
most assuredly respected each of his characteristics.

The point I’m reaching for is: For more than 30 years Brock had edited 
and published the Mount Olive Tribune. He had accumulated no money; he 
had set no worlds afire; he had been no William Allen White. But he had 
lived an extremely useful life and had contributed greatly to the 
richness of his community and the nation as a whole.

Brock is gone but he has left behind a monument that will long outlive 
the memory of many of the Rita Hayworths and their Persian Princes. He 
left five boys and two girls behind. I don’t know all of these but I do 
know relatively well five of the seven. Brock, by worldly standards, 
didn’t accomplish much in this world. He edited a country weekly and 
raised a family of seven children. He was not a big man, but he was an 
extremely successful man and the evidence of his success lives on in 
the spirit of his boys and girls.


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This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by
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