Posted by Jim Fitzgerald
Homer Price was a newspaper man first and foremost.  He began his newspaper career as an apprentice printer in Marysville, Tennessee. He moved to Marshal and bought the Marshall Messenger in 1877 for $500 and sold it a few months later to W. A. Adair, after a brief and very stressful period of newspaper ownership.
 
 
About ten years later he became a mail clerk on the Texas & Pacific railway where he was in charge of guarding the registered mail in the mail-car. He survived five wrecks and three train robberies.  Homer lost only $4.20, out of potentially thousands of dollars aboard the train at the time,  a testament of his ability to “read” people and think fast on his feet.
 
In most instances he was able to hide the registered mail carrying all the money, while the robbers were in the car ahead, or by talking them out of it.  “A Sunday robbery in Dallas turned out quite a fluke for the bandits when Price convinced them that no registered mail was carried on Sunday.”  He served 16 years as superintendent of mails at the Dallas post office before he returned to Marshall to reenter the newspaper business.
 
In 1919, he and Bryan Blalock founded the “Morning News”, and at various earlier times he was connected with this “Sunday Sentinel”, The “Noonday Sun”, and finally the “Marshall News Messenger”.
 
Homer M Price was one of the ‘deans of Texas journalism’ whose column ‘Heard on the Street Corners’ was carried by over half dozen other newspapers in Texas.
 
There was hardly a paper in the state that did not quote Homer Price from time to time.  During the 22 years that he wrote his column, he turned out in a conservatively estimated 4,550,000 words. This is equivalent to 90 average novels, or a shelf of them 12 feet long.  Price wrote his column with a pen, never having changed to a typewriter.”
 
He was a charter member of the Marshall Rotary Club but though he never became president of the club or, for that matter, secretary, but Charles Heartsill, Staff Writer for the ‘News Messenger’, described him in a November 25, 1942, tribute on his 82nd birthday, as: “The most widely known man in Marshall”
 
His proudest achievements had nothing to do with journalism, however. His passion was for the youth and underprivileged children, including the Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Crippled Children. He was chairman of the Marshall Rotary Crippled Children’s committee from 1932, until his death in 1944, as epitomized by this poem by his friend Earnest Powell, in1942:
 
.. How many little children’s feet
Have followed you along the street---
And sometimes under sidewalk-trees,
I pictured you with Socrates.
 
On Marshall corners year by year,
You’ve talked to men and women here;
And through your writings I can find
A heart that’s always warm and kind.
 
Along the road across the years,
You’ve given hope instead of fears;
Along my journey through the night,
You’ve given me an inner light.
 
We will fondly remember Homer and celebrate his wonderful part in “Changing Lives In Marshall--- And Beyond”, August 24, 2019.