Ray Mosby, who until Tuesday was editor and publisher of The Deer Creek Pilot in the little Delta town of Rolling Fork, often began his columns with a verse of poetry, song lyrics or a familiar quotation.

Mosby, 70, died Tuesday after 28 years at his little Delta weekly newspaper, so it seems fitting that any tribute to the best newspaper man you may never heard of begin with song lyrics:

In a town this size/

There is no place to hide.

Everywhere you go/

You meet someone you know.

What you do and what you think/

What you eat and what you drink.

If you smoke a cigarette/

They’ll be talkin’ about your breath.

You can’t steal a kiss/

In a place like this.

How the rumors do fly/

In a town this size.

-John Prine

One of the best things you can say about people — and, come to think of it, one of the worst things you can say about them — is that their egos don’t match their abilities.

That was true of Ray Mosby, in the very best sense.

Every summer, when the Mississippi Press Association held its banquet to recognize the best work of the state’s journalists, his name kept being announced. For a while there I thought his full name was First Place Ray Mosby.

Three times Ray was honored with the J. Oliver Emmerich Award for Editorial Excellence, the highest honor MPA bestows. If you ever read Ray’s columns or editorials, you know why. He was a wise, witty, forceful writer.

He was good enough to work in a large market for an audience the size it deserved.

But in 1993, Ray, a Delta native, left his job as managing editor of the Clarksdale Press Register, to purchase the Deer Creek Pilot. He and his wife, Phyllis, brought serious journalism to the little community weekly (circulation, 1,451), working hand in hand for 20 years until Phyllis’ death in 2013.

As a business proposition, Ray’s decision to buy the paper seemed questionable. By the time of his arrival, the communities the newspaper served — those in Sharkey and Issaquena counties — were already in a precipitous, uninterrupted decline. They are, and have long been, two of the smallest, poorest counties in the state.

At today’s visitation and tomorrow’s funeral services, Ray will be remembered and honored for his work as an unapologetic advocate for a community that is easy to ignore, neglect, forget.

But I hope there’s someone at those gatherings who is irreverent enough to point out that half the population left after Ray took over the Pilot. That would have been amusing to Ray, who took his work seriously, but rarely himself.

That he would apply his oversized talent to a perpetually down-on-its-luck portion of the state speaks to something unique to the profession, I think. No one, as far as I know, has ever had the burning ambition to make the world a better place through accounting or insurance sales.

In his later years, Ray enjoyed taking on the persona of the irascible, cynical, cranky old editor. But we knew him to be a fraud in that role. No one could do what Ray did for 28 years in a place like Rolling Fork without an unconquerable optimism. Ray stubbornly believed that the words he wrote and the work he did mattered, that they would achieve something, that some wrong would be made right, that something good would be elevated and celebrated.

His hopes were the hopes of a community of  “stayers” — those not so much bound to the place as rooted in it.

His audience may have been small, but his work was important: The smaller the community, the more important is the work of a community newspaper, especially one that is serious about its mission.

Ray understood this. He once wrote:

“In a small town, every newspaper subscriber thinks he or she is a stockholder, because there exists a real relationship, an implied contract, if you will, between that paper and its readers.

They buy your newspaper, advertise in your newspaper, sometimes even when they don’t have to, based on a simple precept: They trust you to do your very best to find the truth and to tell it to them.

In a small town, readers expect their newspaper to separate the wheat from the chaff and then to “tell it like it is.”

That’s what Ray did expertly, with great insight and yes, love.

According to census data, since Ray’s arrival in Rolling Fork in 1993, Sharkey and Issaquena counties have lost 3,831 residents.

On Tuesday, they lost another, one whose impact — and now his absence — looms large.

Especially in a town this size.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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