R.I.P TAC
Elizabeth Coblentz, aka The Amish Cook died this week. Coblentz, a deeply religious Amish woman’s cooking column was featured in newspapers nationwide and written by hand and the light of lantern. Oasis Newsfeatures came into being when it began syndicating the column in 1991. At it’s height, the Amish cook appeared in over 100 newspapers nationwide.
We tend to forget in this wind tunnel of information called 2002 that newspapers, particularly small-town ones, were once the bastion of little useful pieces of information like the school lunch calendar, the price of the soy beans and pets for sale. I remember fondly grabbing section E from the Ann Arbor News as a kid and praying that pizza would be the featured hot lunch at Burns Park Elementary School.
We can all go the web for that stuff now. It’s quick, convenient, sexy. I’d like to think that even online, there’s room for a little homespunness like the Amish Cook. It helps me to take a break and breathe.