By Randy Capps
It’s weird for the same person to have two columns in the same magazine, but 10-year anniversaries don’t come around every day, do they?
It’s hard to know where to start. I could start with the day Shanna handed me a key to a post office box in the fall of 2014, which would have to be the first money we spent on what would become Shandy Communications LLC.
I could talk about New Year’s Eve of that year when, just after the calendar flipped to 2015 at 12:01 a.m., we filed that company name with the Secretary of State’s office.
We could discuss the original plan, which was for Shanna to leave her job in Fayetteville to get the Four Oaks Journal off the ground, with me working for it in my off hours from my own job at the Observer.
But then we’d have to explain how I got laid off, and she went back to work at the paper to help us make ends meet while I, possibly the worst salesperson ever to stand in shoe leather, tried to get folks to advertise in our little magazine.
We made it work, mainly because Shanna is an amazing salesperson that Fayetteville Publishing Company was all too happy to hire back.
When that company was sold to Gatehouse in 2016, we saw our chance. The new bosses did what new bosses often do in corporate media takeovers, which is offer everyone buyouts in an effort to trim the payroll.
Shanna took one, much to their surprise, and that money — plus the rest of our 401K funds — funded the countywide project now known as Johnston Now Magazine.
We had two of the pieces of Shandy in the same office, over in the Hatch Building, sharing one room and a large, L-shaped desk in the fall of 2016, and we were excited.
In the next few years we started learning all the things we didn’t know about running a business. Things like hiring, payroll, insurance, accounting and distribution, just to name a few. We’d ask a grown up for advice every now and then, like our accountant, Tim Grady, but mostly we learned by trial and error.
Through it all, we started growing. There were more pages, more staff and bigger office spaces for the good ship JNOW, and we were riding the wave.
Then, 2020 happened. We were “essential” as media employees, which meant that at least Shanna and I got to drive to work everyday. We didn’t see our staff for months at a time, but we pressed on.
The May 2020 issue is one I remember. “Stronger Together” was on the cover, along with some street art and a shot of some Four Oaks firefighters. COVID was a tough time for some of our clients, and a few of them asked us how they could reach customers who weren’t allowed to walk through their doors.
Shanna had done plenty of digital marketing in her career, and I spent a few years running the Observer’s website while I was there. So, JNOW Digital was born.
The digital side of our company continues to flourish, so I spend most of my time tending that garden these days. But in my heart, I’m still a story teller.
I remember our first holiday issue in December 2015. I wrote a story about Karen Barbour Gardner’s Christmas tree, in honor of her late husband, Ted Barbour Jr. It had been 25 years since his passing then, and she took the time to show me the tree and share its story.
“It’s a happy time, she told me then, when I asked about the work behind putting up the tree. “But it’s a good time to reflect. On the past, the future and all the things you’ve been blessed with.”
One of the best opportunities for storytelling has come from Johnston Now Honors. Our son Ethan’s big idea has led us to honor 82 different individuals and organizations who make a positive impact in our community.
The 2019 version was one of my favorites. As a writing exercise — and a nod toward saving space — we try to limit the stories to 1,000 words. Well, imagine how hard it is to tell Carl Lamm or Bruce Woodard’s story in that span. I may have fudged a little on those two.
Of course, Mr. Lamm was a quote machine, and I enjoyed this one:
“It’s just so many memories,” he told me. “They just flood my soul day after day after day. … I could not have planned my life. It had to be planned, and you know who the planner is.”
I’ve met some of the most amazing people through Honors. Col. Rudy Baker (2021) comes to mind. He shared the story of how he decided to quit farming and join the military.
“I was looking for anything except a tobacco patch,” he told me. “I had been cropping lugs all week on Devil’s Racetrack. … About three o’clock, I said, ‘there’s got to be a better way to make a living.’ So, I threw my hat on the ground, put my foot in it and said, ‘I quit.’ My Dad said, ‘you can’t quit. You own three acres of this. I said, ‘you can have the three acres and whatever it gets.”
The irony that I now live off the Racetrack and once walked off my father’s car lot in search of my own better way to make a living isn’t lost on me.
That same issue has Donovan Spellman’s story in it, a young man with a smile that Shanna still talks about and a mother so proud of her son that she cried in our office while we were talking to him.
Proud is what I am. I’m proud of the fact that we now have all of Shandy (Ethan designed all of these pages) working here. I’m proud that we came out with an idea of telling only positive stories about only Johnston County, and 10 years on, we’re still doing just that.
I’m proud that I can sit at a BNI meeting and hear somebody say, “you just can’t trust the media these days. Well, except Randy.”
As a kid growing up in South Carolina, I thought what I wanted to do was write sports for a newspaper. And while I’ve done a bunch of that, it turns out that I just wanted to tell stories. To be a part of a community and a publication that tries to thread parts of it together.
I couldn’t have found this place on a map when I cashed my first newspaper check in 1993, but as we celebrate 10 years of publishing a magazine in Johnston County, I’m humbled to have found a place that has allowed me to follow my dreams.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to share some of your stories for this past decade. I guess it isn’t really about where you start, but where you end up.
