Special Edition (May 06, 2018)

Looking At The Numbers

Looking back over the history of The Rotary Club of Marshall, Texas, USA, during the first 98 years, three months, and almost two weeks, has revealed a fascinating history of the Marshall Rotary club. Using the data-search feature of Newspapers.com, to search the archives of The Marshall News Messenger, from August 1st, 1919 through November 12, 2017, has also revealed some fascinating numbers:

Searching for the word "Marshall" which includes every time the word, Marshall is found in any of the newspapers published in Marshall from August 1st, 1919, through November 12th, 2017, resulted in 522,994 occurrences.

There were three newspapers published in Marshall during this time frame, "The Marshall Morning News", "The Marshall Evening News", and the "The Marshall News Messenger".

Searching for the phrase "Marshall News Messenger, resulted in 318,446 occurrences. Searching for the phrase, "Marshall Morning News", resulted in 28,526 occurrences. Searching for the phrase, "Marshall Evening News, resulted in 21,839 occurrences.

To be able compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, we had to remove all of the newspaper's own self-descriptive occurrences, we had to subtract all of those from 522,994, which leaves 154,183 occurrences of the word, "Marshall", to describe all the other entities not connected to the newspaper.

Because of the way the search engine works, and because we now have two Rotary clubs in Marshall, we had to make a couple of separate searches to come up with the number of times the phrase "Marshall Rotary Club" was used during that time frame, so we had to search for the phrase "Rotary Club" first, and found that there were 9,567 occurrences describing all Rotary Club's activities and such. Then we had to subtract 1,120 occurrences of the phrase, "Marshall-Metro Rotary Club", which is our companion club. That left us with 8,447 occurrences of the phrase, "Rotary Club", which we could ascribe to the original Marshall Rotary Club.

That number divided by 154,183, revealed that approximately five percent of the time you see a phrase that starts with "Marshall" in our newspaper, it will be followed by "Rotary Club".

As fascinating as these number are, we promise you they are not nearly as fascinating as the stories behind the phrase, "Marshall Rotary Club". Keep watching for the next 15 months, as we publish 66 more of those stories (one each week from now till then) in the "Centennial Back-Flash". Please plan to join us for the big Centennial Celebration gala, August 24th, 2019, at the Marshall Convention Center Complex.