Marking 25 years in New Prague

As of this month, I have been in New Prague working for The New Prague Times for 25 years.

In the last few months, I’ve had a few people mention they remembered when I started. One person said they remembered how black my hair was then. At the time I started, I was 31. Someone recently asked how old I was now and when I told them, they were surprised.

In those 25 years, I’ve seen more than one business come and go along Main Street. One example is how many businesses have been in 105 Main St. E. While it is now The Local 105, it’s been a clothing store. It was a wine bar, a pet store, and when I moved to town, it was a Maytag shop. I bought my first air-conditioner from there, a small one. The Maytag store moved to the east side of town into the building next to Ace Hardware. At one time, there were three shops in that building. Besides the Maytag store, there was a hair salon and a dance studio. Now, the entire building is owned by Giesenbrau Bier Co.

The paper has also changed, First was a move from blackand-white photos and ads to colored ones. One job I take care of now is writing up the Times Capsules, so I see how there were more pages, about 14 or more. The Times also had two sections at one time, but in those earlier editions, The Times had more advertising to support having more pages.

The coverage area for stories I do for the area has expanded from when I first started. I covered the New Prague City Council. In 1999, New Prague City Hall had the council meetings on the south side of the first floor of that building. All the office staff was on the north side of the building. The police department was still in the same place. The back half of city hall was a garage for the storing of the fire department’s trucks, firefighting suits and gear. It was a cramped space even at that time. Other events I went to were high school sports, plus area festivals. An addition to what I cover was the New Market City Council, obviously before its merger with Elko.

I’ve seen additions to buildings, an example is the library. It was a fairly rectangular structure and then came the addition of the meeting room, plus study rooms and expansion of the library itself. I always find it interesting the columns in the building were once outside and the construction crews just built the addition to the library around the columns. While the addition work was being done, the majority of the library was temporarily moved to an empty building on the west side of town. It was a bit warm in the summer as it had a temporary air-conditioning system.

One of the biggest changes is New Prague’s population. It had been between 3,000- 4,000 people in 1999. Today it has a population of 8,277. With that increase, there’s been more housing. A onceempty field on the south east side of town ended up growing houses. The west side of town also had houses spring up.

Through it all, New Prague has strived to keep its Czech heritage. The biggest one is Dozinky, the Czech harvest festival. The first one I covered was an eye-opening experience. Seeing that many people coming out to celebrate was different for me. I had covered festivals, but not anything as large as Dozinky. During my first Dozinky, I was still taking photos with a film camera and I think I was limited to four rolls of 25 photos on each roll. There were about the same number of activities as there are today, but I could only take a few photos at each event.

As for what happens next, I’d be surprised if I’m here for another 25 years as I’d be in my early-80s, but stranger things have happened.