A few days ago, I spent some time at the county Records Office reviewing history and seeking information for a story on a former resident who died in 1945 about three months after the Germans surrendered.

One of the pleasures I find in my job is the opportunity to go back through back issues of The Vicksburg Post and its forerunners looking for information about events and people as I research different topics, like the origin of the city’s commission form of government.

Sometimes, I drift from my research and just look at the events and features in those older paper you no longer see in any paper, like personal or community columns — the special features that highlighted tidbits of information not significant enough to make the headlines, like the Jones family visiting relatives in Biloxi, or Mrs. Smith being a patient at the local hospital, or someone’s parents coming to Vicksburg from someplace out of town to visit.

In a way, examining old papers led me toward becoming a reporter, and I guess I have one of my history professors at LSU to thank (or blame) for that.

The course was U.S. diplomatic history, and we were studying the Spanish-American War. We were assigned to do a report on how newspapers during the period covered the war during a one-month period. I chose William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. As I read through the 30 papers on microfilm, I was amazed at the stories and decided about that time I would rather record history as it happened than write about it after the fact.

Going through the August/September 1945 issues of The Vicksburg Herald, I enjoyed looking at the war news and the personals while I pursued my quest to find information about a man named Jack B. Hunter, who died in Germany in August 1945. At that time, the war with Japan was still going on, and the front pages were filled with information about battles and the Japanese surrender after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

My visit through those reminded me sometimes reviewing the actual documents and newspapers is more fun than reading them on the Internet. I’ve always preferred a physical newspaper to trying to read it on the ‘net.

And by the way, I’m still looking for Mr. Hunter. If anyone knew Jack B. Hunter or his family, please give me a call. He lived in Vicksburg and enlisted in the Army in 1944 at Camp Shelby. He served as a crane operator for the 138th Engineer Combat Battalion and died in Saxony in Germany, Aug. 20, 1945, at 19, and is buried at Margaten Cemetery in Holland.