HONORING ALL MILITARY VETERANS & SERVICE PERSONNEL
Veterans Day, November 11, originated as Armistice Day, an occasion to commemorate the end of World War I and the signing of the armistice between the Allied nations and Germany on Nov. 11, 1918.
The Texas Spur, which in the early days published on Fridays, had reported in its issue of Friday, Nov. 8, 1918 that peace talks were progressing well and that an end to the World War might come soon.
By 8 a.m. Monday morning word came to Spur—via Mayor Clifford B. Jones, who had it from Col. Worsham of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who had received the news over the Associated Press wire—that bells had been rung in Paris at 11 o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month (or, 5 a.m. in Texas) to signal the acceptance of peace terms.
Within a few short hours the local newspaper—the only official source of news in the days before television or even radio—printed published a four-page special issue of Nov. 11 with a full-width headline and ads trumpeting peace (“THE WAR IS OVER” from Spur Hardware, and “WE WELCOME PEACE” from S. M. Swenson & Sons among them).
The newspaper also reported that two Dickens County enlistees, William A. Conaster and Donnie Merriman, had left on a troop train just the previous day—there hadn’t been time to cancel their orders before the armistice was declared.
These and other local details of our military history are preserved for all to consult and read for free, thanks to the Texas Tech University Southwest Collection's digitization project. Read more at http:// collections2.swco.ttu.edu/ handle/20.500.12255/187565 By the way—the singed edges of the scanned newsprint page aren't just due to deterioration over time; this historic issue was among the years of printed copies rescued from a burning barn in Spur decades ago and that survived to become the first localnews microfilm collection at Tech, due to Clifford Jones’s ties to Spur.
